They Chose the Daughter I Found, So I Called In Their Loans novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Empty Chair
At Clary's welcome-home dinner Jackie finds her chair taken and her bags packed in the hall, refuses their check and walks out in front of thirty guests while a billionaire watches in silence, then opens a lab envelope in the cab that names her real father.
The first thing my mother did at dinner was seat her real daughter in my chair.
I watched her do it from the doorway of our dining room.
Thirty people stood behind their place cards, and every card was written in my mother's calligraphy.
My card was at the far end of the table, next to the kitchen door.
For twenty-five years my chair had been on my father's right.
Clary sat down in it with her hands in her lap.
She was twenty-six, with auburn curls and a chipped front tooth.
She wore a borrowed blue dress with the tags still tucked inside the collar.
She had been taken from the hospital nursery when she was four days old.
She had been back in this house for nine days.
I knew exactly how long it had taken to find her, because I had paid for it.
Eleven months, four investigators and three states.
The invoices all went to a company with no face, and none of them had my name on them.
My mother stood at the head of the table with a glass in her hand and tears in her eyes.
"We never stopped praying," she told the room. "And God sent us a stranger with a file."
Winston, my father, raised his glass higher. "To Clarissa. Welcome home."
Everyone drank.
Across from him, Gabriel Maitland drank too.
He was the guest of honor, the man my father had been courting for a year.
He was also the only person at the table who looked at me instead of at Clary.
I looked away first.
I took my seat by the kitchen door.
The soup came, and the toasts came, and I said nothing through any of them.
Then my father tapped his spoon on his glass.
"Jacqueline," he said.
The room went quiet.
"This is difficult, and I want to say it in front of friends, because they've been family to us." He put one hand on the back of Clary's chair. "We took you in when we had nothing left of her. You were a comfort to us. You still are."
"Winston," my mother murmured.
"But Clary needs her room. Her whole room. She shouldn't be put in a guest suite in her own house." He looked at me with real regret, which was the worst part. "Your bags are in the hall. We thought tonight was kinder than a long goodbye."
I looked at Clary.
She had gone white under the freckles.
"I can take the guest room," she said. "Really. I don't mind. She doesn't have to..."
"Sit down, sweetheart," my father said.
She sat.
My mother came down the table with an envelope and put it beside my plate.
"A month's rent, dear," she said, soft as always. "And the name of a very good agent. We want you comfortable."
I did not touch it.
I was twenty-eight years old.
I was in my third year of an emergency medicine residency, which none of them had ever asked me about.
I had a house they didn't know about, and enough money to buy the one we were sitting in.
I could have said any of it.
But Clary's hands were shaking in her lap, and I knew what it was to be nine days in somebody else's house.
So I took the key to the front door off its ribbon around my neck.
I took off the pearl earrings my mother had given me on my eighteenth birthday.
I set them both on the bread plate in front of me, very gently.
"I don't want your check," I said. "Thank you for raising me."
My mother's mouth opened.
"Jacqueline, don't be dramatic."
"I'm not," I said. "I'm leaving."
I stood.
I walked the whole length of the table past thirty faces, every one of them turned toward me.
Gabriel Maitland sat with his wine in his hand.
He had watched all of it.
He did not say a word.
He lifted the glass, and he drank.
In the hall my two suitcases stood side by side under the coat rack, with a luggage tag on each handle.
My father's secretary had written the tags.
I left them there.
Our housekeeper, who had packed my school lunches for fifteen years, was holding my coat.
She helped me into it with her face turned away from the dining room.
As she settled the collar, she pressed something soft into the pocket.
"Go on, child," she whispered.
It was the stuffed rabbit from my old bed.
I walked out into the rain on Chestnut Street, and the door closed behind me with the sound of a very expensive lock.
A cab was idling at the corner, and I got in.
My bag held everything I had come with that morning: a stethoscope, a phone, a battery pack.
And a courier envelope from the lab that I had picked up on the way here and not yet opened.
It had come back with Clary's results, weeks late.
I had needed one extra swab for the lab's baseline, a person who was no relation to anyone, and I had used my own.
I tore the envelope open under the dome light.
Clary's page was on top, and it matched the Selwyns exactly, as I'd known it would.
The second page was clipped behind it, and it had not been supposed to exist.
At the top the lab had written, in a box, REGISTRY MATCH ON CONTROL SAMPLE.
Under that was a probability of 99.99 percent and a note that a standing sample had been on file with the lab for twenty-five years.
Parent: Ulysses Norcross.
I knew that name.
Everyone in Boston did.
His ships were on the harbor, and his name was on half the cranes.
I read the line again while the rain ran down the cab window.
The girl who had been found at a truck stop with one red shoe had a father, and he was alive.
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