Revealing My Secret Identities! My Bros Are Speechless! novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Zero Percent
Lena is handed a DNA result and a check in the family drawing room, signs the gag order and is dumped in Queens, then sends one command from a closet that costs her old father ten million dollars, and sees the lab report was six weeks old.
The cream envelope was on my breakfast tray when the housekeeper called me down to the drawing room.
The gold crest on the flap was the lab our family doctor used.
My father stood by the fireplace with his hands behind his back.
My mother sat on the sofa with her eyes on the carpet.
Two lawyers waited by the window, and a girl I had never seen sat on the edge of an armchair with her knees pressed together.
"Open it, Lena," my father said.
I slid out one page and read the line at the bottom.
Probability of paternity: 0.00%.
I read it again, because I was seventeen and had been told my whole life that I was a Thornquist.
"There was a mix-up at the hospital," my father said, in the voice he used on investors. "We have just learned of it."
"Who is she?" I asked.
The girl stood up fast.
"I'm Lexi," she said. "I'm so sorry. I didn't know any of this until this morning."
She was shaking.
I believed her, and I noticed my mother crossing the room to her.
My mother, who had hosted a gala in my name every spring, put her hand on Lexi's arm and did not look at me once.
"You're safe now, sweetheart," she said. "You're home."
I waited for her to say my name.
She did not.
My father picked up a thin leather folder from the table and opened it for me.
There was a check on top for one million dollars, made out to me.
Under it was a nondisclosure agreement, already signed on the line for the Thornquist side.
I read the top of the first page the way I read every contract, from the corner down.
It listed the address where I would be living, in Queens, with a man named Louis Boyle.
The page was dated the day before.
The lab's report in my other hand was dated the same morning.
I put that down as a thing to think about later.
"Louis Boyle is your biological father," my father said. "He has been told. He is expecting you."
"And I'm supposed to just go?"
"You are supposed to go quietly," one of the lawyers said. "The terms are generous."
"The terms cover the company's name," my father said. "A story like this could cost us at the open on Monday. Nobody benefits."
I looked at the check.
It was a lot of money for a girl who had three thousand dollars on her school card.
It was also very little, for a man who could afford to hand it over before breakfast.
"Take the jacket off," my mother said.
I looked down at my cream jacket.
"It was bought on the family account," she said, still facing Lexi. "It belongs in this house now."
Lexi said, very softly, "I don't want it."
She looked at my father when she said it, and he gave her the smallest nod.
I took the jacket off in front of everyone and laid it over the arm of the sofa.
Nobody said thank you.
I picked up the pen.
The lawyer had already turned to the signature page.
I signed my name on the line, the one they had always told me was theirs.
Then I folded the check in half and put it in my back pocket.
"The trunks are in the car," my father said.
I had packed three of them myself that morning, before I knew why.
In the car I texted my chief of staff one line: find out everything about the lab that ran this test.
The driver left me at a curb in Queens at four o'clock with the engine running.
The street smelled of exhaust and fried onions.
A laundromat sat on the ground floor of the building, and a paper sign on the door said the buzzer was broken.
I carried the first trunk up four flights of stairs.
The apartment door was open.
A man's voice somewhere inside said, "She's here," and then nothing else.
I did not go in yet.
I put the trunk down on the landing and looked at the room they had left for me, a storage closet with a thin mattress and a bare bulb.
It was the first room in my life that nobody had decorated for me.
I shut the closet door and sat down on the mattress.
Then I opened my laptop and logged in to the account only I knew existed.
Three years ago I had started a company under the name Ember.
It ran an app that forty million people opened every morning, and nobody in my family had ever asked what I did on my laptop.
One of its biggest customers was Thornquist Holdings.
My father signed a forty million dollar ad deal with Lantern every January and never once wondered who owned it.
I typed a single order to my chief of staff.
Pull every Thornquist ad slot and cancel the data license, effective tonight.
I pressed send.
By breakfast it would cost my father ten million dollars.
The reply came back before I had finished closing my eyes.
Done, boss. One thing. I checked the lab you asked about.
The report's real date is six weeks ago.
They knew before your birthday dinner.
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