The Girl They Forgot to Love novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Slideshow
At Dad's funeral lunch her brothers show a family slideshow without her and call her the housekeeper's daughter; she walks out, and a stranger calls to say her father said she would.
At Dad's funeral lunch, my oldest brother clinked a fork against his glass and ninety people turned around.
Our house was full of them. Neighbors, men from the church, women holding casseroles.
I was standing in the kitchen doorway with a tray of coffee cups.
My brother had handed it to me twenty minutes earlier.
"You're the only one who knows where Mom's good cups are," he'd said, and squeezed my shoulder.
It was the first kind thing he had said to me in years, so I'd gone and found the cups.
"Dad would want us to see our family one more time," Rowan said now.
The lights dimmed. A screen came down over the fireplace.
The first photo was Dad on a sailboat with Rowan on his knee.
The next was Dad at my middle brother's graduation. Then Dad at the youngest's hospital bed, holding a stuffed bear.
I stood with the tray and waited for my own face.
The photos kept coming. Christmas mornings, ski trips, the three boys in matching blazers.
The last slide said: In loving memory of Gerard Brannigan, devoted father of three sons.
Nobody in the room looked at me, because nobody in the room knew to.
"Who is the girl in the doorway?" an older woman whispered to the man beside her.
"Gerard's housekeeper's daughter, I think," he whispered back. "He took her in out of kindness."
My middle brother, Pierce, had heard it. He was holding a plate of ham, and he laughed.
"That's Lizzie," he told the whole table, loud enough to carry. "Dad was very good to her. She gets emotional at these things."
A few people laughed with him.
A man by the window had his phone up. The red dot was on.
"I'm his daughter," I said.
My voice came out small, so I said it again.
"I'm Gerard Brannigan's daughter. I'm Lizzie."
Rowan crossed the room and took the tray out of my hands.
He was smiling for the guests. Up close, his jaw was tight.
"Lizzie, not today," he said softly. "You're upset. Everyone understands."
"Everyone understands that she's unwell," Pierce added, to nobody and to everybody.
I looked for my youngest brother, Tobias.
He was by the dessert table with his eyes on the carpet.
When I was five, Tobias told me to wait for him outside the mall. He went home with his friends and forgot me.
I waited in the rain until the sun came up, because I had promised.
He had the same face on now.
"Stay for the reading on Monday," Rowan said, still smiling. "It's only a formality. Dad left you something small."
Every Sunday for twelve years, Dad had called me at six o'clock.
He had never once asked me to come home. I had never once asked him why.
I thought about the cup of coffee in my hand, which I hadn't drunk.
I set it down on Dad's piano.
Rowan was still talking. Pierce was telling a story about me to a woman in pearls.
"Lizzie," Tobias said, so quietly that only I heard it.
I didn't turn around.
So I walked out.
I went through the front hall, past the coats and the flowers and the guest book with three names on the first page.
The man with the phone followed me as far as the porch.
The rain had started. It came down on the gravel and on the hood of my old Civic, parked at the end of the line of black cars.
I got in with my purse and my keys and nothing else.
My hands were shaking too hard to turn the key.
I sat there with the wipers off, watching the front door of the house I grew up in.
Nobody came out after me.
My phone buzzed against my knee. An unknown number.
I almost let it ring.
"Miss Brannigan?" a man said. His voice was low and very steady. "My name is Anthony Vanderveer."
"I don't know you."
"No. Your father left instructions about you, and I was told to call the minute you walked out of that house."
I looked at the porch.
"How did you know I would?" I asked.
"He said you would," Anthony Vanderveer said. "He said you'd wait until the very last second."
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