Dead Before the Truth Revealed novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Table Nineteen
At the Kensington Foundation gala Anthony proposes to Camille for saving his life, and Ciara stands and says it was her. Two matching scars, a laughing room and two security men later, a lawyer tells her nobody believes a living twin.
Camille walked onto the stage of a hotel ballroom in a gold dress, and four hundred people stood up for her.
I stood too, at table nineteen, beside the kitchen door.
Every time a server pushed through it, the door bumped the back of my chair.
An hour earlier, in the ladies' room, Camille had zipped me into my one good black dress.
"Whatever happens tonight, I'm going to look after you," she said. "I always do."
Then she slid my phone out of my hand and into her clutch.
"It'll buzz through the speeches. I'll keep it safe."
I let her. I always did.
Anthony Kensington took the microphone.
He was thirty-four and chairman of the foundation, and I had loved him for six years from the far side of every room he stood in.
"Six years ago I went through a guardrail into Cutler Lake," he said. "The doors wouldn't open and the water was coming in."
"A woman I had never met cut my belt and dragged me out. She burned her arm on the engine door doing it."
"She never asked me for one thing."
The screen behind him lit up with a photo of my sister's arm.
The scar ran across her right forearm, the length of her palm, shiny and pink.
Mine ran across the same arm, and mine was nine days older.
I knew that, because I had been home from the hospital for a week when I watched her dress the blister in the bathroom.
"Camille Ellingwood saved my life," Anthony said. "Tonight she has agreed to be my wife."
The room roared.
Camille pressed both hands to her mouth and cried exactly when the music swelled.
A woman at my table wiped her eyes and said, "That's the most beautiful thing I've ever seen."
I put my napkin on the table.
I stood up.
"It was me," I said.
Nobody heard it. The band was still playing.
So I said it again, loud enough that a violin stopped.
"I pulled him out of that lake. It was me, not her."
Four hundred heads turned.
Camille lowered her hands. She looked at me across the ballroom, soft-eyed and sorry, and shook her head very slightly.
"Nor, honey," she said into the microphone. "Not here. Not tonight."
I walked into the aisle with my right sleeve already pushed up.
I held my arm out under the chandelier so the scar caught the light.
"Look at it. Look at mine."
Camille pushed up her own sleeve and held out the matching scar beside it.
A man near the front laughed.
Then more of them did, kindly.
"They're twins," someone whispered. "Oh, poor thing. The other one."
Constance Kensington rose from the front table with her pearls and her silver hair perfectly in place.
"She has done this before," she said to the room, calmly. "She hasn't been well."
Phones were up everywhere.
I looked at Anthony, because he was the only one who mattered.
He stood very still with the microphone at his chest, and he looked at my face and then at my hands.
"Ciara," he said. "Sit down. Please."
"I'm telling you the truth."
"Sit down."
Two security men came down the aisle and took me by the elbows.
"Not that one," Anthony said quietly. "Her right arm. Take her by the left."
The man holding my right arm let go, and his partner took my left arm in both hands.
I thought it was for the cameras.
They walked me through the lobby while the music started up again behind the doors.
Anthony came out after us. He did not meet my eyes.
"My mother's doctor will call you tomorrow," he said. "Don't come back in."
"Anthony, I carried you out of the water."
"Go home, Ciara."
He turned and went back inside to my sister.
The doormen watched me stand on the marble in my one good dress.
I took out my keys and found that my phone was still in Camille's clutch.
So I stopped asking them to believe me.
I was crossing the parking garage when a voice said my name, and I turned with my keys between my fingers.
An old man in a tweed jacket stood beside a pillar with his hands out where I could see them.
Edmund Arrington, the Kensingtons' lawyer, with the grey beard I had seen at every foundation party for six years.
"I was at the lake that night, Miss Ellingwood," he said. "I watched them take you away on a stretcher."
"Then you know."
"I know a great deal. And I know this." He pulled a folded paper from his jacket. "The county hospital log is stamped four minutes before your sister's call. Constance has seen it. Nobody in that ballroom will ever believe it."
He held it a moment longer than he needed to.
"Nobody believes a living twin," he said. "They would believe a dead one."
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