The Rejected Jinx Is A Billionaire Heiress novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: The Tin of Washers

Dale confesses on the porch that he wrote the letter and gives Cora a baby bracelet; Levi at the curb says the DNA says she is a Hartwell.

I got as far as the end of the driveway before the front door opened behind me.

"Cora. Wait."

My father came down the porch steps in his work jacket, with his ginger ale still in his hand.

I kept walking.

"Please. Two minutes."

Dale is fifty-six years old and has never in my life asked for two minutes of anything.

I stopped under the streetlight and turned around.

He set the cup down on the curb. His hand was shaking so hard that the ice rattled.

"I didn't want it to happen like that," he said. "I was going to tell you after the party. I swear I was."

"Tell me what, Dad?"

"That you're not ours."

I had known it since the hall. It still took the air out of me.

"Then whose am I?"

"I don't know all of it." He dug into his jacket and pulled out a small sandwich bag. "I know where you came from. I know what it says here."

Inside the bag was a narrow plastic bracelet, yellowed, with a strip of white tape on it.

I held it up to the light.

The tape said, in faded black marker: HARTWELL, BABY GIRL.

Under that was a hospital number and the stamp of St. Brigid's.

"Your mother brought you home in a blanket from the hospital where she worked," my father said. "That was twenty-two years ago. She said you were a gift. I was a coward, and I asked nothing."

"Twenty-two years."

"I found out three weeks later, when I saw the Hartwell name in the paper. I kept this in a coffee tin full of washers in the garage."

"You knew. All this time."

"Yes."

"Every March she made me go to that cemetery and apologize to a stone."

His face folded in on itself.

"I know," he said.

I wanted to scream at him. I wanted to put him through the window of his own truck.

Instead I asked the only thing that was clear in my head.

"Why now?"

"Because last month I wrote to the people on that bracelet. I didn't sign it." His breath shook. "I couldn't let you spend your life believing you were a jinx. Not one more year."

Behind him, through the open door, I could hear the party starting up again. A laugh. Someone clinking a glass.

"Go with him," Dad said.

"Go with who?"

He pointed past me.

A black car sat at the curb two houses down with its lights off. A man stood beside it with his hands in the pockets of a charcoal coat.

He had been standing there a while, and he was looking straight at me.

I walked toward him with the bracelet in my fist.

"I'm not getting in," I said, when I was close enough. "Whatever you're selling."

"I'm not selling anything." His voice was low and level. "My name is Levi Rhodes. I run the Hartwell Group. Your father's letter came to my desk."

"Great. So you're the one who sent a car to my house."

"I came to see if you were all right. Your father said he would tell you tonight. I didn't expect that." He glanced at the house, and his jaw went tight. "I'm sorry."

He pulled out his phone and held it so I could see the screen.

A woman stood in a garden with her hand on the back of a white chair. Straight brown hair going gray, a gentle square jaw.

Her right hand was curled around the chair.

The little finger was bent at the top joint.

I looked at my own right hand.

It was bent the same way. It had been bent since I was born. Lorna had called it a family curse.

"That's Margaret Hartwell," Levi said. "She had a daughter named Cordelia. We were told the baby died the night she was born."

"That doesn't mean it's me."

"No. It doesn't."

His gaze didn't leave my face.

"That's why I tested it. Last Tuesday you left a coffee cup in the waiting room at the clinic. I took it to a lab."

I went very still.

"You took my cup."

"The result came back yesterday." "Ninety-nine point nine eight percent. You are Cordelia Hartwell."

I looked at him for a long moment.

Then I slapped my palm down on the roof of his car so hard that the alarm started.

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