They Raised the Wrong Girl, So Five Brothers Came for Me novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Her Mother's Kitchen

Hattie shows Eliana the kitchen and the recipe tin, then finds Torsten's March order in the lab portal. At dawn five men are standing in her garage lot.

Eliana didn't ask about the dates again.

She sat down at the kitchen table in the chair my mother never let anyone else use, and she didn't know it, and I let her.

"Is that her handwriting?" she asked.

She was pointing at the recipe tin on the windowsill, the green one with the dent in the lid.

"That's hers."

"Can I?"

I put the tin in her hands.

She opened it carefully and took out the top card.

The top one said Sunday Meatloaf, and under the title, in blue ink, Mom had written: Don't let Hattie put ketchup in it.

Eliana laughed once, a wet little breath, and then she was crying with both hands flat on the table.

"I'm sorry," she said. "I keep apologizing. I've been doing it since May."

"You didn't do anything."

"I'm the reason you found out like this."

"No," I said. "That was your uncle."

She looked up.

"He's my uncle too," I said. "Apparently. So I'm allowed."

That made her laugh again, and I put the kettle on.

We drank tea out of my mother's chipped mugs, and I told her what Mom was like.

She worked the line at the cell plant for twenty-eight years and never once missed a shift for her own bad back.

She sang off key in the car, and she knew every dog in Marrow Creek by name.

Eliana wrote none of it down.

She listened with her whole face, and when I stopped, she said, "She sounds like someone I would have liked."

"She would have loved you."

I didn't know that was true until it was out of my mouth.

Mom would have taken one look at those round glasses and that apology reflex and fed her until she stopped talking.

"What do you do?" I asked.

"Genomics. I study how inherited conditions travel through families." She winced. "That's embarrassing, isn't it? Considering."

"A little funny," I said.

"I ran my own sample for a carrier study in May. It didn't fit my parents." She turned the mug in a slow circle. "My dad's an Ashgrove through and through, and I'm not. I went to Torsten first, because he handles everything for the family."

"And he found me."

"In two weeks. He said a private investigator had a sample from you already."

I thought about it.

"A man came in for an oil change in June," I said. "He drank out of my water bottle and left it on the bench."

"Oh no," Eliana said.

"It's fine," I said. "I'd just like it back."

That made her laugh again, and it hurt to laugh with her.

Someone knocked on the doorframe of the open back door.

Lydia Ashgrove stood on the porch with her coat buttoned to the neck, and she did not come in.

"I won't stay," she said. "I only wanted you to know the door is open. Whenever you want it, or if you never do."

"I don't know you," I said.

"No." Her eyes were wet, but her voice stayed steady. "I know that. I'd like to fix it slowly, if you let me. Give me two days at the house. After that, you can tell me to leave you alone and I will."

"I have a garage," I said. "A funeral bill. Customers who need their trucks Monday."

"My sons can cover a truck."

That was such an odd thing to say that I almost laughed again.

"Two days," I said. "I'll tell you tomorrow."

Lydia nodded once and put a hand on Eliana's shoulder as she passed.

It stayed there a second longer than it needed to.

Torsten was waiting by the black car at the curb, holding the rear door open with a patient face.

I watched Eliana get in beside him, and I watched him pat her knee.

Then they were gone, and the street was just my street again.

I shut the kitchen door and stood in the quiet.

Then I went to the garage.

It's one bay and a lift, behind the house, with a space heater that ticks.

I pulled the laptop out from behind the oil drums and opened a window that does not belong to anyone.

I'm not proud of how I got into the lab's client portal, but it is a bad portal, and I got in fast.

There were two orders under the same case number.

The first had been placed on the third of March, with a note typed into the instructions field by the requester.

Hold all results until after subject A's twenty-fifth birthday. Do not contact family.

I stared at the note.

Subject A was Eliana, and her birthday was ninety days from now.

I didn't know why that date mattered.

A man doesn't pay a lab to sit on the truth for three months without a reason.

I copied the order, and then I sat with my hands in my lap until the space heater clicked off.

I must have slept in the chair.

The first thing I heard was a diesel engine idling in my yard, and then another, and then a third, and a fourth.

My neck hurt, and it was barely light outside.

I pulled the garage door up by its handle.

Five men were standing in my gravel lot with their coats open and their hands in their pockets.

They were all tall, and none of them were smiling, and the one in front was six foot three and looked at me with my own gray eyes.

"Morning," he said. "We're your brothers."

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