Bloodline of Retribution: The Disowned Prodigy novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Two-Flat in Bridgeport

Lena meets the Donnellys, her real parents, while the Kincaids call in her father's loan and her contract.

The two-flat in Bridgeport had a porch light with a moth stuck in it and a dented mailbox that said DONNELLY in marker.

I stood on the step in my birthday dress with the report in my fist.

The black car idled at the curb behind me.

"Eleven-forty," the driver had said when I told him to stop here. "I'll come to the door then."

I knocked before I could talk myself out of it.

A big man in a grey undershirt opened up, with reading glasses hanging on a cord around his neck.

"We're not buying anything," he said.

"Are you Kenneth Donnelly?"

"Ken. Who's asking?"

"Lena," I said. "I was born at St. Brendan's twenty-five years ago tonight, an hour before your daughter."

He looked at me for a long time.

Then he turned his head and said over his shoulder, in a voice that wasn't quite steady, "Peg. Come out here."

A short woman with grey in her brown hair came down the hall, drying her hands on a dish towel.

She stopped three feet from me.

She looked at my face first. Then she looked at my hands.

"Ken," she said. "She has my mother's hands."

"Peg, we don't know that."

"She has my jaw, Ken."

My eyes burned, and I hadn't felt it coming.

"I'm sorry to turn up like this," I said. "I only found out today. They put the wrong wristbands on us in the dark."

I held out the pages. Ken took them, found his glasses, and read.

He read the first page twice.

Then he went to the stove, where a pot was ticking on the burner, and said to it quietly, "Well. Okay."

Peg crossed the last three feet and put both arms around me.

She smelled like onions and dish soap. She held on hard, and I stood stiff for a second before I let go and held her back.

Nobody had hugged me like that in all my life.

"Twenty-five years," she said into my shoulder. "I made you a birthday cake every year, and I kept thinking something was missing."

"You made Roxie a cake," I said.

"I made a cake for a girl I thought was mine." She leaned back and held my face. "I'm making yours now. Sit down."

Ken put a mug of tea in my hand without asking, and sat across from me with his elbows on the table.

"So who raised you?" he asked.

"Adelaide Ashgrove."

He took off his glasses. "The boat money?"

"Ashgrove Marine. Yes."

"Huh," Ken said. "I wired her yard for six years. She never once said hello."

Peg laughed, and then wiped her eyes with the dish towel, and then laughed again.

The front door banged.

"Ma, I brought the leftover pie from the diner, and nobody lets Dad near it," a young woman said, and stopped in the kitchen doorway in a green wool coat.

She had auburn curls pinned up in a clip and a smear of flour on her cheek.

She looked at me. She looked at her mother. Her face went white and then pink.

"Oh my God," she said. "Is it you?"

"Roxie," Peg said. "This is Lena."

"Hi," Roxie said, and then shook her head. "I mean, hi. Wow."

She crossed the kitchen and hugged me before I could stand all the way up.

She was warm and small and she squeezed hard.

"I always figured I didn't look like anybody in this house," she said into my hair, and I laughed, and so did Peg.

"You're freezing," Roxie said. She pulled back and took in my bare arms and my dress. "Wait here."

She came back with a grey Bridgeport High sweatshirt and put it over my head herself.

"Better?"

"Better."

Her phone buzzed on the counter.

She glanced at it and turned it screen-down.

"Telemarketer," she said, and picked up the pie. "Who wants pie? It's apple. It's mostly crust."

We ate pie at the kitchen table at ten thirty at night.

Ken told the story of how a raccoon had once taken the Christmas ham off this exact counter. Peg corrected the raccoon's weight. Roxie put whipped cream on my pie without asking, and it was exactly what I wanted.

For an hour, nobody asked me about Adelaide.

Then Ken turned the report face up on the table and put his finger on the bottom of the second page.

"This was in the mail today," he said. He went to the drawer and pulled out a white envelope.

I read the first lines. "Your note has been transferred. Kincaid Harbor Group. Full balance due in thirty days."

"We owe a hundred and ninety thousand on this house," Ken said. "We've paid on time for eleven years."

"They want it all," Peg said quietly. "All at once."

Somewhere outside, a car door shut.

I looked at the clock over the stove. It was eleven thirty-eight.

I didn't go to the window.

Someone knocked, twice, and Ken stood, and I put my hand on his arm.

"That's for me," I said.

The driver stood on the porch with his coat collar up.

"Miss Donnelly. Mr. Kincaid has the contract, and he has the note." He kept his eyes on mine. "The note is forgiven if the bride comes tonight. If she doesn't, it comes due."

"Lena," Peg said behind me. "Whatever it is, we'll find the money."

"You won't," I said, gently. "And I signed it."

Roxie came up beside me and put her coat over my shoulders anyway.

"Take it," she said. "It's cold in Hyde Park."

I hadn't told her where I was going.

I was too tired to ask how she knew. I put my arms into her sleeves.

"I'll be back Sunday," I told Ken and Peg. "I promise."

Then I walked down the porch steps to the black car, and the driver opened the door.

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