He Called My Inheritance a Forgery in Front of Three Hundred Guests, Then Took Every Blow Meant for Me novel · Chapter 2 of 40

Chapter 2: Black Shoes

Chloe admits she signed, Dad's lawyer has vanished, and Genevieve shows up on the loading dock at 5:58 to find her first table is Leonard Thorndike, who asked for her by name.

I watched Chloe's hand come down, slowly.

Three hundred people were watching me watch her.

I set my empty glass on the nearest table.

Then I walked out of my father's party.

Not fast.

I made myself not run.

I went through the kitchen doors because they were closest, past the dish pit and the steam and the line cooks, who all stopped talking.

The terrace was dark and cold.

October in the Berkshires smells like wet leaves and woodsmoke.

I'd forgotten that in New York.

The door banged behind me.

"Gen."

Chloe was still in her whites, with flour on her sleeves.

"Gen, please. Let me explain."

"You signed it."

"Your dad asked me to."

"When?"

"July. The ninth. In his study."

She wrapped her arms around herself.

"Rosemary was there. Kendrick was there. He asked me to come up after lunch service and witness something, and I did."

"And you didn't call me."

"He made me promise."

"I was at his funeral with you, Chloe. You held my hand at the grave."

She was crying now.

"He said you'd find out when it was time, and that it had to come from him."

"He's dead," I said. "When exactly did he think that was going to be?"

She opened her mouth and nothing came out.

We had grown up on this hill together.

Her father kept the grounds, and mine kept everything else.

We used to steal sugared almonds from the wedding tables and eat them in the hayloft until we felt sick.

"You stood up in there and let Kendrick Mercer call me a liar," I said.

"Gen, I didn't know about any other will. I swear. I just know what I saw."

"Then go back inside and keep seeing it."

I walked down the terrace steps and didn't turn around.

She didn't follow me.

That hurt more than if she had.

On Sunday I drove into Stockbridge to my father's lawyer.

He'd been Dad's lawyer for forty years.

He was the one who'd called me in September with the news.

In his slow old voice, he said Dad had changed his will after we made up on the phone in the spring.

I had cried on the phone with him.

The door to his office was locked.

The brass plate was gone from the wall, and there were four screw holes where it had been.

Through the window I could see empty shelves and a single cardboard box on the floor.

I called his number.

It rang once and went to a recording that said it was no longer in service.

I sat in my car on Main Street with my phone in my lap.

That was when I saw the video.

Someone had posted the toast.

All of it.

The microphone, the hospital, the black shoes, the champagne.

The account belonged to a Danielle Thorndike, and she had written across the top: "When the heiress gets demoted to waitress."

It had two hundred thousand views.

The top comment said: "The way she thought she was getting a mansion."

The second one said: "Her face when the best friend raised her hand."

I watched it once.

Then I made myself watch it again.

When I got back to Harrow Hill, there was a man waiting on the front steps of my father's house.

My father's house that wasn't mine.

He was Kendrick's assistant, neat and nervous, holding a key on a paper tag.

"Mr. Mercer asked me to give you this," he said. "Staff housing. Cottage three, behind the kitchen garden."

"He's putting me in a staff cottage."

"Your things can be moved tomorrow. He said you're welcome to stay in the main house tonight."

"How generous."

The man looked at his shoes.

"He also said the uniform will be in the cottage. Size six."

I hadn't told anyone my size.

I took the key.

That night I lay in my childhood bed and stared at the ceiling I'd stared at for twenty-two years.

I could leave.

I had a job in New York, sort of.

I had a little apartment and a little savings and a boss who would take me back.

I could let Kendrick Mercer have the house and the company and my father's chair, and never come back to this hill.

Or I could put on the black shoes.

I could walk through every door he'd just opened for me.

The kitchens, the files, the staff.

The study.

Somewhere on this hill was the proof that he'd forged my father's will.

He had just handed me a key.

On Monday morning I was on the loading dock at 5:58.

It was still dark.

My breath fogged in the floodlights.

I wore the black uniform from cottage three and a pair of black flats I'd bought at the pharmacy in Lee for nineteen dollars.

The delivery trucks were backing in.

The banquet captain, a heavy man with a clipboard, looked at me.

Then the side door opened and Kendrick stepped out with a coffee in his hand.

He wasn't wearing a suit.

Just a dark sweater and his father's steel watch.

He looked at my face for one second.

Then he looked down at my shoes.

He took his time about it.

"Those will hurt by noon," he said.

"I'll manage."

"You'll be on the floor for lunch, and you'll be on a double tonight."

"Fine."

He drank his coffee and watched the trucks.

"Tonight's a private dinner in the Orchard Room," he said. "Forty guests. A birthday."

"Whose?"

"Leonard Thorndike's. He owns Thorndike Hospitality in Boston. He was at table four on Saturday, laughing."

The silver-haired man.

The one who'd patted the blonde woman's arm.

Kendrick turned and looked at me, and something in his face was strange.

"You're on table one," he said. "Leonard asked for you by name."

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