The DNA Matched My Cousin, Not Me, So They Kept Me Anyway novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: My Sister's Hands

In her old room above the diner, Rhea is found by Constance on the back stairs, who knows her mother's hands, and then a smear story about two waitresses and a swab scam goes live.

We took the bus.

I wouldn't get in Garner Harrowgate's car, and Sabina wouldn't get in anyone's.

So we rode the Number 62 down Park Street, with my navy dress showing under my borrowed coat.

A man two seats back looked at us three times.

The fourth time, he held up his phone.

My own face was on it, holding a bouquet on a stage.

"That's the girl," he said to the woman beside him.

I looked out the window until our stop.

My room over the diner was exactly as I'd left it sixteen days earlier.

I had paid November's rent before the Harrowgates ever called.

My boss had told me to keep the key "in case rich people are boring."

The bed was made.

My father's old cast-iron pan hung on its nail over the hot plate.

I stood in the doorway and looked at it, and that was when my chest finally gave out.

I sat down on the floor, and Sabina sat down next to me.

We stayed there a long time without saying anything.

Then she made tea in a mug with a chip in it and put three sugars in mine without asking.

"I'm not going to that house," she said.

"You are," I said.

"I'm not going unless you're coming," she said.

"Sabina."

"I mean it, Rhea. I'm not going to be the one who got it while my best friend was out here eating soup."

"I'll eat soup in the Harrowgate dining room, then," I said. "I'm told it's very good soup."

She laughed, and then she cried.

Then she fell asleep sitting up, with her head on the arm of my couch and her boots still on.

I took the boots off.

At ten o'clock somebody knocked on the back door downstairs.

Nobody used the back door except the delivery men, and the delivery men were done by noon.

I went down the iron stairs in my socks.

Mrs. Harrowgate was sitting on the bottom step of the fire stairs in a camel coat with her handbag in her lap.

A black car idled at the end of the alley, its lights off.

"I'm sorry," she said at once. "I know it's late. I came to see her, and then I saw the light was out upstairs, and I couldn't make myself knock."

"She's asleep."

"Then I won't wake her."

She patted the step beside her.

I sat.

She smelled like rain and a soft powder, and her eyes were swollen almost shut.

"I owe you an apology," she said. "Two weeks of it. I called you our girl. I had a seamstress fit you for a dress."

"You didn't know," I said.

"I should have asked more questions."

"So should I."

She looked at her handbag.

Then she looked at my hands, folded in my lap in the yellow light over the kitchen door.

"May I?" she said.

I held them out.

She took my right hand in both of hers and turned it palm up.

She ran her thumb over the long square fingers, the nails cut short for work, and the old burn scar across the heel.

"I couldn't stop looking at these," she said. "I noticed it the first day, at lunch, and I thought, I'm only seeing what I want to see."

"What are you seeing?"

"My sister," she said. "You have my sister's hands."

I didn't breathe for a moment.

"My mother left when I was three," I said. "Dad never said anything else about her."

"She was my little sister."

Her voice was careful.

"She was three years younger than me. She was nineteen when she fell in love with a cook, and twenty-five when my parents stopped saying her name at the table. I was married by then. I was afraid of my father."

She pressed my hand between hers.

"I wrote to her once. It came back."

"What did she look like?" I asked.

"Like you. Exactly like you, when she laughed at something she shouldn't have."

I thought of my father at the stove, saying a woman who leaves doesn't get to be talked about.

I thought of the twenty-five percent.

"It was a number on a page," I said. "I thought it meant I was yours."

"It does," she said, fierce and quiet. "It does. Just not the way we wanted it to."

A car door opened at the end of the alley, and her driver stood beside it.

She stood too and wiped her face with the handkerchief she kept in her sleeve.

"Come on Wednesday," she said. "To dinner. Both of you."

"As what?"

"Not as anything. As mine."

She kissed my forehead, quickly.

Then she went down the alley, and the black car carried her out toward Avon.

I went back up the stairs and sat on the edge of my bed with my phone in my hand.

At two in the morning it lit the room.

It was a link from my boss, with no message, only the headline:

A WAITRESS, HER BEST FRIEND AND A LOST HEIRESS: WAS THE SWAB A SCAM?

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