Fake Daughter Is the Real Legend novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Envelope
At her own engagement party Marin is named a fake heiress, loses her ring and walks out, then finds her room already packed in boxes taped days before the test result.
My father tapped his glass and asked two hundred guests to stay for an announcement.
I stood under the ballroom chandelier in a white dress.
My fiancé's ring was on my finger and his hand was at my back.
Phones were already up.
Somebody always films an Ashcroft party.
"Tonight was meant to be about my daughter's engagement," my father said. "But there is a truth that can't wait."
My mother stood beside him, holding a cream envelope against her chest.
She had smiled at me all evening.
Twice she had straightened the locket at my throat.
An hour ago she had put a cup of tea in my hands and said, "Drink it, sweetheart, you're white as a sheet."
Now she said, "Marin, come up here with us."
I looked at the room before I looked at her.
A clear path to the main doors.
Two waiters at the side exit and one security man at the foot of the stairs.
Leander Ardley, my father's head of security, stood alone at the back by a pillar with his hands folded.
It is a habit I brought with me. I count the exits first.
Twenty-two days ago I woke up in this body, in this house.
Before that I was a commander, and I died on a battlefield four hundred years from now.
I went up the steps, because every way out was behind the people watching me.
"Four months ago," my father said, "a retired nurse wrote to us."
"She confessed that on the night our daughter was born, two babies were switched on the maternity ward."
The ballroom went quiet.
"Helen and I had the tests done," he said. "The results came back yesterday."
Helen opened the envelope. Her hands were steady.
"Marin is not our blood," she said. "She never was."
A gasp ran through the room, and somewhere a glass broke.
The side doors opened and a young woman in a blue dress walked in alone.
She had fair hair, pale eyes and my father's jaw.
She stopped at the foot of the stage and put a hand over her mouth.
"This is Bethany Rowe," Helen said. "She is our daughter."
Bethany began to cry, and people clapped.
My fiancé's hand left my back.
"Marin," Sheldon said, loud enough for every phone. "I can't marry someone who isn't an Ashcroft. You understand that."
He took my left hand and slid the ring off my finger himself.
He dropped it into his jacket pocket and patted it.
"I'll keep it safe," he said. "It's a Tisdale ring."
Somebody in the crowd laughed.
I looked at my father.
He was staring at the envelope and would not look at me.
"Dad," I said.
"It's the paper, Marin," he said, and his voice was thin. "It's what the paper says."
"May I see it?"
Helen put it in my hand at once, smiling.
I read it standing on the stage with two hundred phones pointed at my face.
Bethany Rowe: 99.9 percent match to Gregory Ashcroft. Marin Ashcroft: excluded.
At the bottom, in small print: Sample collected by H. Ashcroft.
"You took my sample yourself," I said.
"The day you were ill, darling," Helen said gently. "You were so tired. I didn't want to wake you for a nurse."
I folded the paper along its crease and gave it back.
"We love you, Marin," she said. "That doesn't change."
"But the Ashcroft name has to go to Bethany. You'll stay in the guest cottage tonight, and we'll talk in the morning."
Bethany wiped her eyes.
"I'm so sorry," she whispered to me. "I never wanted to take anything from you."
She was looking straight at my locket when she said it.
My grandmother gave it to me two years ago, the week before she died.
It was the only thing at that party that was entirely mine.
I took off my earrings and put them in Helen's palm.
I walked down the steps and stopped in front of Sheldon.
"Keep the ring," I said. "You'll want something to sell."
His smile slipped.
I walked past him.
So I stepped out.
I went through the front doors with two hundred phones behind me, and I did not run.
I did not go to the guest cottage.
I went up the back stairs to my room to take what was mine.
The door was open.
The closet was empty, the shelves were bare, and every dresser drawer stood open.
Eight cardboard boxes stood in a row along the wall, each one sealed and labeled in Helen's neat handwriting.
Marin's winter things. Marin's books. Marin's shoes.
I knelt and looked at the tape across the nearest lid.
Under the label Helen had written the date, the way she did on every jar of jam.
Tuesday.
The envelope was opened on Saturday, and my father said the results came back yesterday.
Someone had packed me up four days before the test was read.
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