My Mother Called Me Fake, So Six Brothers Came for Me novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Six Men on a Fire Escape

Six huge Gallivan brothers crowd into her roommate's flat with bakery boxes and their mother's photograph, until Genevieve's press statement calls her a fraud.

At six in the morning six men came up the stairs of a building that smelled like dryer sheets.

I knew it was six because my roommate counted them through the peephole and whispered it to me.

"Seven, if you count the one with the beard twice," she said.

"He's very big."

I hadn't slept.

At two a.m. I had written one message to the first name on the list: I think you have the wrong person.

He answered in under a minute.

We're coming. Please don't move.

Now I sat on the arm of a secondhand couch in the black dress I had worn to my own expulsion, and my roommate opened the door.

They didn't fit in the room.

They filled it one after another, each carrying a flat white box.

"We didn't know what you like," said the biggest one.

He had a red-brown beard and a soft, wrecked voice, and he was holding two of the boxes.

"So everybody picked one."

"Brendan, you can't just hand her pastry," said the shortest of them, who wore reading glasses on a cord.

"There are forty-three stairs in this building," he added to nobody.

"I counted."

"I'm Nuala," I said, because it was the first thing that came out of me.

Nobody had ever called me that.

It was the name on the screen.

"Nuala," Brendan said, and his face folded.

"Yeah."

"That's the name Mom picked."

A younger man with a sunburned neck crossed the room and hugged me before I could stand.

He smelled of diesel and cold air.

He lifted my feet off the floor, and he was already crying.

"That's the fifth brother," said a twin by the window.

"He cries first."

"It's a family policy."

The other twin said nothing at all.

He set a paper cup of coffee in my hand and stepped back.

It was how I take it, with one sugar and too much milk.

"How did you know?" I asked.

He lifted one eyebrow and shrugged.

Brendan crouched in front of me, which brought his face level with mine.

He took a worn photograph from his jacket and held it out.

A woman in a kitchen, laughing at whoever held the camera.

She had green eyes, a wide mouth and copper hair down past her shoulders.

I put my hand to my own head.

Under the brown dye my mother had insisted on since I was twelve, my roots were that exact shade.

"That's Mom," Brendan said.

"She died six years ago."

"She never believed you were dead."

I kept looking at the woman in the photograph.

"The hospital told her you died at four hours old," Brendan said.

"She was too sick to hold you."

"They buried a small box, and she kept saying the box was wrong."

I couldn't speak, so I held the photograph.

"We all gave DNA to that website after she passed," said the second brother, quietly, taking off his glasses.

"She made us promise."

"We got a thousand false hits, and then you."

"I made the video," said the youngest from the doorway.

He was a lanky redhead in a hoodie, and he looked ill.

"In September, on her birthday."

"I posted her pictures and said we were still looking for our sister," he said.

"It went everywhere."

His voice cracked on the last word.

"People in the comments said the girl looked like someone at the Radcliffe hotel."

"I think that's why she did it."

He wiped his face with his sleeve.

"I think I did this to you."

"Fergus," Brendan said.

"No," I said.

It surprised all of us, including me.

"She was always going to do something."

"Your video didn't make her cruel."

The twin who talked whistled low.

"Damn," he said.

"She's a Gallivan, all right."

"We have a house," Brendan said.

"There's a room."

"It's yours."

"I can't," I said.

"I can't take a room or a card or a dollar."

"Yesterday I was somebody's daughter."

I held the coffee with both hands.

"I have to find out who I am without someone handing it to me."

"Fine," Brendan said, and I watched him swallow it.

"Your door, your rules."

"Just let us feed you."

I opened the first box.

It was a lemon cake, with a candle on it.

I laughed so hard it turned into something else, and six grown men looked at their shoes.

Fergus's phone buzzed in his hand.

He read the screen, and the color left his face.

"Brendan," he said.

"The Radcliffes just put out a statement."

"Read it," Brendan said.

Fergus read it in a thin, careful voice.

"Lucy Radcliffe knew."

"She took a salary under false pretenses and used our family name to do it."

He stopped to breathe.

"We have asked her to stop using it."

The apartment was silent.

Then six men stood up at once.

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