Fake Daughter Is the Real Legend novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: The Lake House

The video of the fight goes viral, the lake house gets house rules, and Helen's too-sweet message is followed by a car outside at 3 a.m.

Helen Ashcroft stood in her own lit doorway at midnight and told me the house had rules now.

She held up a printed sheet.

'No guests after ten,' she said. 'No keys but mine. And you sleep in the boathouse.'

I looked past her into the hall. The stair rail was polished. The clock on the landing still ran four minutes fast.

So I wasn't being let inside my father's house at all.

'Any questions?' Helen said.

'One,' I said. 'Does my father know I'm sleeping in a shed?'

'Your father is resting.' She folded the sheet. 'Nobody steps past the hall table without turning out their pockets. Hand them over.'

She held out her palm.

Above her, on the stairs, Gregory stood in his dressing gown with one hand on the rail.

He was looking at me.

The only way to him was through her.

I turned my coat pockets out on the hall table.

Lint. A folded receipt. My car key.

Nothing else.

The brass key stayed closed inside my fist. My nails had left marks in my palm.

Helen looked at the empty pockets for a moment longer than she needed to.

'There now,' she said. 'That wasn't so hard.'

Gregory came down the stairs.

He stopped in front of me and his eyes went to my neck.

The cut had dried badly. The collar of my coat had blood on it.

'Who hurt my daughter?' he said.

Helen was there before I could answer.

She put a cup of tea into his hand.

'She cut herself falling at the party, darling. You remember the stairs.'

Gregory looked at the cup.

He set it down on the printed house-rules sheet, on top of the words, and forgot he had asked.

I stood there and watched my father lose the same minute twice.

'Who hurt my daughter?' he said again.

'She fell at the party,' Helen said, as if it were new. 'You were so worried.'

She smiled over the rim of her own cup.

Bethany came out onto the porch with her phone already up.

'You'll want to see this,' she said.

She turned the screen to the hall.

The road. The three men. Me.

I watched myself sweep the second man's legs and take my locket chain back off the third.

My own face, lit by headlights, doing what I was trained to do.

'Two hundred thousand views,' Bethany said. 'And climbing.'

She looked at me.

Helen's cup stopped halfway to her mouth.

For one second Helen's warm manner dropped and she looked cold.

Then she set the cup down.

'Marin,' she said. 'Come here, dear.'

Two estate men came out of the side hall.

They took my arms before I understood what she was doing.

Helen reached into my coat and drew out the cream envelope from an inside pocket.

The Ashcroft seal caught the light.

Still sealed. Still mine.

Now in her hand.

'Where did you get this?' she said.

'Ask the three men you sent,' I said.

Her face did not change. That was how I knew I had hit something.

'Walk her to the boathouse,' she said to the men. 'She's tired.'

They marched me out through the side door and across the wet lawn.

Behind me Helen turned back to the stairs with the envelope in her hand.

At the boathouse door the first man reached for my coat again.

I turned and put him down with a strike under the jaw.

He folded into the grass and did not get up.

The second man took a step back and stayed there.

I took the brass key out of my fist and fitted it to the boathouse lock.

It turned.

The key stamped 25 opened a door in my father's own house.

I pushed the door wide and went in first, because nobody else was going to.

Inside, the boathouse light went out, switched off from the house.

I looked up through the window. My father's window went dark too.

Helen's stayed lit.

I stood in the dark with a locked door and a father I could not reach.

At three in the morning headlights swept across the boathouse wall.

A car I did not know idled at the gate.

The engine ran low and steady.

Nobody got out.

The estate man posted at the boathouse door walked out to the idling car.

From the house above, Helen's voice came down across the lawn.

'Marin,' she called. 'You have a visitor.'

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