Of All the Fake Heiresses I've Met, You're the Stupidest novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Fake Stands Up
At the Kearney Compact dinner, Savannah calls Erin the impostor and Chester, who told her to come, backs Savannah. Erin stands. A red dot lands on her chest.
Savannah Kearney stood up at her own family's dinner and told two hundred people I was a fake.
She did it with a champagne glass in one hand and a smile on her face.
Minutes before that, she had hugged me at the door.
"Sister," she had said, and she fixed my collar herself.
I had come to the Kearney pier because a letter told me to.
It was on thick cream paper, signed by the head of the Kearney family.
It said he believed I was his daughter, lost off his yacht twenty-six years ago.
I had read it four times.
Two other families had claimed me before.
Both of them had a fake heiress ready, and I had dealt with both.
I told Chester about the letter at his kitchen table.
Chester taught me to shoot before I could read, and he is the only father I have ever had.
He read the letter over my shoulder and tapped the signature.
"Go," he said. "Smile, kid. I'll vouch for you."
So I went.
A water taxi took me across the harbor, and a tall man in a black suit was waiting on the Kearney dock.
"Ronan Kearney," he said. "I run security for my uncle. I'll drive you up."
He did not offer his hand.
He opened the car door instead, and his keys swung from his fingers.
A long brass rifle casing hung from the ring.
"That's a rifle round," I said.
"My father's."
He closed his hand over it and put the keys in his pocket.
I let it go.
The dinner was held at the end of the pier, under strings of lanterns, on long white tables.
The Benedetti envoy and the Orlov envoy sat at the next table over.
The Orlov man in gray saw my face and looked away fast.
He remembered me.
Ronan's uncle, Sean Kearney, sat at the head of the main table, a big gray man with dark circles under his eyes.
He stood when I came in.
For a moment, he could not seem to find his voice.
Chester was already there, in his good jacket, on Sean's left.
He winked at me.
Savannah sat on Sean's right, in white, glowing.
She had a folded index card beside her plate.
I took the empty chair across from her, and she raised her glass to me and mouthed the word welcome.
Then Sean tapped his glass and said, "Tonight we have a guest, Erin Calloran, who may be my daughter."
The pier went quiet.
That was when Savannah stood up.
"Papa, I love you too much to stay quiet," she said.
She picked up her card.
"This woman is a professional fraud. Two other families have already thrown her out."
She turned the card over.
She frowned and turned it back.
She had written on both sides and started on the wrong one.
"She has the mark," Savannah said, reading, "because she had it tattooed."
I almost laughed.
Nobody else did.
Every face on the pier turned toward me.
At the next table, the Orlov envoy leaned over and whispered to the Benedetti one.
I watched them put it together.
"Chester MacKellar trained this girl," Savannah said. "Ask him."
Chester got to his feet.
He took off his blue pilot's cap and held it against his chest.
"I raised her," he said, and his voice cracked. "I love her like my own. But she isn't a Kearney, Sean. I've known it since she was small."
My whole body went still.
He had read the letter with me.
He had told me to come.
I looked at his hands, and they were steady.
They were always steady.
"She is gifted," Chester said. "She was made for a gun. I let her think she was something else because I could not stand to break her heart."
Savannah put a hand over her mouth and made her eyes wet.
Sean looked at me.
He did not say a word.
He was waiting to see what I would do.
I knew exactly what the room expected.
Two families had thrown me out for less.
A girl alone on a pier, shamed in front of the whole harbor, is supposed to run for the water taxi.
I had seen two fake heiresses try this before.
One of them is in a federal prison for the rest of her life.
The other is at the bottom of the harbor with her money.
So I stood up.
I put both hands flat on the white tablecloth, and I looked at Savannah.
"Of all the fake heiresses I've met," I said, "you are the stupidest."
Savannah's smile slipped.
"You are reading your own lies off a card," I said. "And you started on the wrong side."
Somebody at the back made a sound.
Savannah's eyes went bright and hard.
"Say that again," she said.
I opened my mouth.
Then I saw it on the white cloth, right below my wrist.
A small red dot.
It slid up over the edge of my plate, across the front of my dress, and stopped.
It was steady, and it was on my chest.
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