The Heiress' Return: No More Pretending novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Fish Fork

Gill gives Maureen sixty dollars at the gate, survives a filmed lunch where Camille smothers her in kindness, and Gordon threatens the children's home's money unless she signs away her name by Friday.

"Camille's mother is asleep in that house," I said.

"The woman who raised her is," Maureen said. "I'm the one who's been outside."

She held the bars of the gate with both hands and didn't ask me to open it.

Up close I could see how tired she was.

Her hands were cracked from cleaning products and her jacket sleeves had been mended twice.

"I clean offices on Wilshire," she said. "Nights. I can't pay my rent this month. I wouldn't ask you, but Camille won't answer my calls and I don't have anyone else."

"Camille knows who you are?"

"She's known two years." Her voice stayed even. "She has my number. She has never once called it."

I had sixty-four dollars in my pocket, the last of my laundromat tips.

I pushed sixty of it through the bars.

She looked at the bills for a long moment before she took them.

"Thank you," she said. "You didn't have to."

"Did the hospital really make a mistake?" I asked. "Is that what happened to us?"

Her fingers closed around the money.

"Hospitals make mistakes all the time," she said, too quickly, and stepped back from the light.

"Tell her I said happy birthday," she said. "Please. Tell her it's from her mother."

Then she was gone along the fence line, small and fast, and I stood on the gravel with four dollars.

Behind me a car door shut.

The driver in the gray suit had been parked by the garage the whole time.

He looked at me, and then at his phone.

The next day there was a lunch on the terrace for six, and I understood by the second course that it was a test.

Camille had invited three friends from her old school, girls in silk and sunglasses who smiled with all their teeth.

Adele sat at the head of the table and let it happen.

The girl in the gold dress held up a fork. "Gill, which one of these do you use for the fish?"

"The one on the outside," I said.

"Wrong. It's the one on the inside."

"It's the small one on the outside," Camille said. "She's right, you're thinking of dessert."

"I'm literally filming this," the girl in gold said. "Country Girl Meets Fine Dining. It's for the group chat."

She held her phone over her plate and tilted it at me.

"Be nice," Camille said, laughing. "She's learning. I couldn't do a fish fork until I was ten."

She turned to me and squeezed my hand across the tablecloth.

"Don't mind them. They're teasing because they like you."

Everyone smiled at that, and the phone kept recording.

I had folded napkins into swans for three summers at a catering company in Bakersfield.

I could have told them that.

I picked up the fork on the outside and ate my fish.

Later Camille walked me back toward the cottage with her arm through mine.

Her hair smelled like oranges.

"Who were you talking to at the gate last night?" she asked, easy and light.

"Nobody. A woman asking for directions."

"Okay." She patted my arm. "Just don't talk to people at the gate, all right? Dad's strict about that. It's the paparazzi."

"Okay," I said.

"You're a sweetheart, you know that?"

She kissed my cheek and went back toward the house.

I watched the white shape of her dress cross the lawn, and I did not see her once look toward the garage.

I was halfway up the cottage stairs when the phone in my pocket buzzed. Adele had texted: Your father would like a word in his study.

Gordon Hollister's study had a view of the pool and a desk too big for the room.

He did not stand up.

"Sit, Gill. I've had my lawyers prepare something to make things easier."

He pushed a stapled document across the leather.

The first page said Family Release and Acknowledgment.

I read the part he had marked in yellow.

I would give up any claim to the Hollister estate, name or hotels.

I would never say in public that I was a Hollister by blood.

In return the family would give me an allowance of forty thousand dollars a year and an engagement to the Bellingham heir.

"Forty thousand," I said.

"Which is generous," Gordon said, "for a girl who was folding towels six weeks ago."

He smiled.

"I need it signed by Friday."

"And if I don't sign?"

He leaned back and the chair creaked.

"The Hollister Foundation reviews its grants every quarter. St. Brigid's is on the list."

He let that sit between us.

"A home like that has a lot of old pipes," he said. "It would be a shame."

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