Her Billionaire Father Spoils Her Rotten novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Birthday Papers
Abby scrubs the floor of her own birthday party, refuses to sign her claim over to the family, and climbs out the laundry window; a stranger's email says he has looked for her for twenty-two years.
On my twenty-second birthday I was on my knees in the dining room, scrubbing red punch out of the carpet.
The punch was from Brooke's party.
It was Brooke's party because my birthday had never once been mine.
Forty people stood around me with plates of cake, stepping over my hands.
Nobody looked down.
"Careful, Abby," Brooke said sweetly, and tipped her cup an inch toward my head.
Her friends laughed.
I kept scrubbing.
I had learned at nine that the fastest way through a bad night was to be useful and quiet.
My wrist ached where the old iron scar pulled tight.
It always did when I wrung out the rag.
"Abigail."
Marla stood in the doorway in her church cardigan, with her pearl studs and her small tidy smile.
She was my adoptive mother, and she had never raised her voice at me in front of company.
She didn't need to.
"Come into the kitchen, honey," she said. "We have a birthday surprise."
The guests smiled at her.
I wiped my hands on my jeans and followed her.
My phone buzzed in my hoodie pocket on the way.
It was an email from the DNA site.
I had mailed in a spit kit eleven weeks ago, with tip money from a shift I wasn't supposed to have.
Then I had stopped letting myself think about it.
I turned the screen down against my leg.
In the kitchen Dwight sat at the table with his cap on and a pen in his hand.
A folder lay open in front of him.
"Sit," Marla said.
I sat.
She slid three pages toward me, and tapped the line at the bottom with a pink fingernail.
"You turn twenty-two today. There's a form you need to sign. It's just paperwork that lets Dwight and me handle some things for you."
The top of the page read ASSIGNMENT OF CLAIM.
Under it I saw a name I didn't know.
The Garrow Trust.
"What things?" I said.
"Grown-up things." Her smile did not move. "You've never been good with money."
I had never been allowed to touch money.
They kept my birth certificate, my social security card and my bank card in the hall closet "for safekeeping."
I was twenty-two and I had never once bought my own shampoo.
"What is the Garrow Trust?"
"Sign, Abby."
That was Dwight, and he said it.
I looked down at my phone under the table edge.
The email had opened on its own.
*You have a new close family match.*
*Relationship: Parent.*
*Dominic Garrow, 51, Chicago, Illinois.*
*Match confidence: 99.99 percent.*
I read it twice.
Garrow.
I looked up at the page, then at the phone, then at the page again.
Something very large and very quiet moved inside my chest.
Marla saw my face.
She reached across the table so fast she knocked her water glass over.
"Give me that."
I stood up and put the phone behind my back.
"Whose name is this?" I said. "Who is he, Marla?"
"Dwight."
Dwight came around the table.
He took my wrist, the scarred one, and squeezed until the bones ground, and pulled the phone out of my hand.
"Gave you everything," he muttered. "Roof, food. And this is how."
"Let go."
"Sign it."
"No."
The word was small.
It was the first time I had said it in that kitchen in thirteen years.
Marla's smile finally came off her face.
What was under it was flat and very tired.
"You don't understand what you're being offered," she said.
"That money is ours, Abigail. We earned it."
"Twenty-two years of feeding you, and you will not take it out of this family."
"What money?"
"Brooke," she said, without turning her head. "Lock her in the pantry until she stops being stupid."
Behind me, Brooke giggled, because she'd been standing there with her phone up the whole time.
I ran.
Not toward the door, because Dwight was between me and it.
I ran down the hall to the laundry room, where I had slept for thirteen years, and I shoved the window up over the dryer.
It had been painted shut for a decade.
I hit it with the heel of my hand until the paint cracked.
Somebody hammered on the door behind me.
"Abby!" Marla called. "You open this door!"
I put one leg out into the cold October dark.
I had sixty-three dollars in my sock, a bus pass I'd been hiding for a year, and a name I had memorised from a screen.
Dominic Garrow.
I dropped into the flowerbed, got up, and ran down Elm Street in my socks.
The bus out of Toledo left at 11:40.
I was in the back row when my phone lit up.
It was the cheap phone I'd bought off a coworker and hidden in my bra.
I had written to him from the bus station bathroom, three words, with shaking thumbs.
*I think you're my father.*
His answer had come in under four minutes.
*I did not know you existed. Do not move. I am coming.*
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