She Took the Rags, I Took the Empire novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Rags and Empire
My twin ran to the poor couple and I took the rich one. Eighteen years later she walks into my engagement dinner, takes my fiance, and presses a key into my hand.
On the day we were adopted, my sister let go of my hand in front of forty people and ran to the other couple.
We were nine years old and identical, in the yellow cardigans the children's home had ironed for us.
Two couples had come at the same time, and each could take one of us.
The director said we could choose.
The first couple were the Ellinghams. Mrs. Ellingham wore pearls, and her husband had a driver waiting outside.
The second couple were a man in a church jacket with frayed cuffs and a woman holding a paper bag of oranges.
I started toward the pearls, because the pearls had a driver.
Dinah dropped my hand and ran to the woman with the oranges and hugged her around the waist.
"I pick them," she said, loud enough for the whole room.
Mrs. Ellingham's smile stayed exactly where it was.
Dinah had been quiet since breakfast. She had gone to the washroom and come back white in the face, and she wouldn't tell me why.
I called her name, and she didn't turn around.
That was the last day we lived in the same house.
Eighteen years later, on the night of my engagement dinner, she walked back into my life.
I was standing at the head of the Ellingham ballroom in a green silk dress, with sixty guests and a four-carat ring from Quentin Thorpe on my hand.
Adelaide, the woman I called Mom, had texted that afternoon: Wear the green, darling. Tonight is a lovely surprise.
Quentin had texted too: Whatever happens tonight, I'm yours.
The double doors opened, and a woman in a black dress came in with her chin up.
She had my face and my eyes, and her hair was cut short.
Sixty heads turned.
Nobody looked surprised, and that was the first thing I noticed.
I hadn't seen Dinah in nine years, and her last letter had said only, Stop writing.
I crossed the floor and hugged her anyway.
She held me for exactly as long as the room was watching.
Then she pushed something hard into my palm and said, loudly enough for the first four tables, "That's the front door key to the Fenner house. You'll need it. You're sleeping there tonight."
I looked down at a brass key on a bent wire ring.
Leopold Ellingham tapped a fork against his glass.
"Friends, I have two announcements," he said. "My daughter Dinah has come home, and on the fourteenth she will marry Quentin Thorpe."
I laughed, because it had to be a joke.
Quentin walked across the ballroom and stopped beside my sister.
He took her hand and didn't look at me.
"Cora, it's a family decision," he said. "Please don't make this harder than it has to be."
"Quentin, I'm wearing your ring."
"Dinah will wear it better," Adelaide said gently. "She has the backbone for the name, dear. You've always been soft."
"Your bags are already in the car," Leopold said.
Phones were up all over the room. Someone near the bar was filming.
Dinah smiled at me.
"Eighteen years in the good bed, Cora," she said. "I'd say it's my turn."
I looked at the four people who had taught me to trust them.
Quentin was studying the floor, and Leopold was waiting for me to cry.
I didn't give him that.
I took off the ring, walked to the champagne tower, and dropped it into the top glass.
It went down through the bubbles with a small clink.
"You can keep the ring," I said. "You've already got everything else."
Then I turned my back on all of them and walked out.
Two guards moved to stop me at the foyer.
"Leave her," said Elias Haddon, the head of security, who had never said more than good morning to me in three years.
He took an umbrella from the stand and opened the front door into the rain.
He walked me down the steps with one hand at my back, and his voice was low.
"Keep your phone on, Ms. Ellingham."
"Why do you care?" I said.
"Go straight to that house. Don't stop anywhere else."
He put me in a taxi and paid the driver before I could argue.
The ride took an hour, through mill towns I had never seen, to a narrow house with a light burning over the porch.
I stood on the step holding the key, shaking, with rain running into my silk dress.
The door opened before I could use it.
A woman in a faded robe looked at my face, then at the clock behind her in the hall.
"Eleven fifty-two," she said. "Dinah told us you'd be here by midnight."
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