The Rejected Jinx Is A Billionaire Heiress novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Not Even Ours
At her sister's engagement party, Lorna throws Cora out in front of sixty phones to save the engagement, and in her rage says Cora was never even theirs.
The champagne flute slid off my tray and broke on the tiled floor of the entrance hall.
Sixty guests at my sister's engagement party turned to look.
Ten minutes earlier, my mother had put that tray in my hands.
"You're the only one I trust with the good glasses, sweetheart," she had said, and kissed my cheek.
Now champagne soaked the hem of a cream silk dress.
The woman in it was the mother of my sister's fiance.
"I'm so sorry," I said, and dropped to my knees with a stack of napkins.
"Is this the girl?" the groom's mother asked.
She didn't ask me. She asked my mother.
"The one people call the jinx?"
At home I had been the jinx since I was six, usually said with a laugh over dinner.
Nobody had ever said it to a stranger's face before.
Around us, phones came up. Little lights, one after another, all pointed at me on the floor.
"She's family," Lorna said, with her party smile still on. "She's just clumsy."
"My son told me you lost a baby the night she was born."
"Danny," Lorna said. "Her twin. He didn't make it."
"And the broken engagement ring last spring? And the fire at the caterer's?"
"Those were nothing."
"Lorna." Mrs. Hendricks lifted her chin. "I won't put my son in a house under a curse. I'm leaving, and the wedding goes with me."
My sister Bree stood at the foot of the stairs in her white dress. Her face had no color in it.
She didn't speak.
I stood up with the napkins in my fist and my knees wet.
"Mrs. Hendricks, it was a glass. I'll pay for the dress."
Lorna turned to look at me.
I had seen my mother angry a hundred times. This was something else. She had made up her mind.
"Get out of this house, Cora."
She pointed one manicured finger at the double doors.
"Mom, it was an accident."
"Out. Tonight. You have embarrassed this family for the last time."
I looked at the wall behind her, because I didn't want to look at her.
The family photos hung there in a long row under the brass chandelier. Bree on her first day of life, wrapped in a pink blanket. Bree at the beach, at her first recital, at her graduation.
My row started when I was two years old, in a yellow raincoat.
I had asked about that once. Lorna had said, "The jinx doesn't photograph."
I'd laughed, because I thought she was kidding.
I set the tray down on the hall table.
I worked my house key off my ring and put it on the tray, next to the broken glass.
"Fine," I said. "I'll go. I'll come back for my things when it's quiet."
"Your things?" Lorna's voice climbed. "Everything you own, we paid for. We fed you. We clothed you. We kept you under this roof for twenty-two years."
"I know, Mom."
"Stop calling me that! You were never even ours to be grateful to!"
The hall went dead silent.
My father, Dale, stood by the coat closet with a plastic cup of ginger ale. He hadn't said a word all night.
"Lorna," he said. It came out barely above a whisper.
She pressed her lips together, but it was too late.
"What did you say?" I asked.
"Nothing. Go."
"Mom. What did you just say?"
"Out!"
I turned to Bree.
Bree is three years older than me and has never once in her life been caught without a plan.
She was looking at the floor.
She wasn't surprised. She wasn't confused. She had not asked a single question.
My sister had known whatever it was that my mother had almost said.
I walked to the double doors, and nobody tried to stop me.
I looked back once, at the sixty phones, the broken glass and my father's wet eyes.
So I opened the door and walked out into the dark.
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