They Raised the Wrong Girl, So Five Brothers Came for Me novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Clause Seven
At her mother's funeral lunch, Hattie refuses a form in front of forty neighbors and learns the test that proved she was switched was ordered by the uncle in March.
The man in the gray suit slid a pen across my mother's funeral lunch table before anyone had cut the ham.
"It's only a privacy form, Miss Drinkwater," he said. "It keeps the press away from you."
I looked up from the paper plate in my hands.
Forty people from Marrow Creek were sitting at the folding tables in the church basement.
They had brought casseroles and sheet cake, and every one of them had stopped chewing.
"Who are you?" I asked.
"Torsten Ashgrove." He put a hand on my elbow, gently. "I'm your uncle."
I had buried my mother two hours earlier, and I had not slept since Tuesday.
I thought he was a salesman from the funeral home.
Then two women came down the basement stairs, and the room went quiet in a different way.
The older one was tall, in a black wool coat, with silver in her brown hair.
She had my eyes.
I mean that exactly. Gray, with a dark ring around the edge, set a little too far apart.
She pressed her gloved hand over her mouth and said, "Oh, honey."
The younger woman stayed one step behind her, holding a gray folder against her chest.
She had round glasses and honey-colored hair coming out of a clip, and she was shaking.
"Hattie," she said. "I'm Eliana. I'm so sorry. This isn't how I wanted to do it."
"Do what?" I said.
"Tell you." Her voice cracked. "I think we were born in the same hospital on the same night. I think they gave us to the wrong mothers."
Somebody's fork hit a plate.
I knew the woman by the coffee urn was going to repeat this to the whole county before dark.
"That's Lydia Ashgrove," Torsten said, still gentle, still touching my elbow. "She's your mother. Sign the form, and the lawyers will take it from here, so you don't have to carry any of this."
"I'll read it first."
"It's standard."
"I'll read it first," I said again.
I fix diesel engines for a living, and I test other people's security systems after midnight for money.
Nobody has ever got me to sign something unread.
The first page said confidentiality. The second said press.
On the third page, in clause seven, it said that in exchange for one payment of two hundred thousand dollars, I gave up any claim to the Ashgrove family trust, now and forever, for myself and my children.
I read it twice and then I read it out loud.
I read it to the whole basement, in the voice I use for telling a customer what their transmission is going to cost.
"Clause seven," I said. "It says I sell my place in this family for two hundred thousand dollars, and I never get to ask what I sold."
Torsten's smile did not move.
"It's standard language, Miss Drinkwater."
"Then it's standard for someone who already knows what the trust is worth."
My second phone buzzed against my hip, the one I keep for the plant.
I took it out under the table and looked.
The Larch Capital bid for the Marrow Creek cell plant had gone up again.
That was the third raise this month, for the plant where my mother had worked twenty-eight years.
I turned the phone face down on my knee.
Not now.
Lydia Ashgrove had come halfway across the room.
She stopped an arm's length from me, her hands open and not touching me.
"I don't want your money," I said to Torsten. "And I'm not signing."
"Hattie," Lydia said. "Nobody here is trying to take anything from you."
"I know," I said. "Just him."
Torsten let go of my elbow.
For one second his face was nothing at all.
Then he sighed and gave the room a rueful little shrug.
"Grief makes people suspicious," he said. "I understand."
I put the pen down on the form, capped.
Then I looked at Eliana, who was staring at the paper plate in my other hand with tears running down her face.
She had come all this way to say the worst thing she had ever had to say, to a stranger, with a lawyer's car idling outside.
And she had a right to this room, because the woman we had buried that morning had been her mother, too.
"You haven't seen her kitchen," I said.
Eliana's mouth opened.
"Come on. It's two blocks. Nobody's going to sign anything on the way."
So I walked out of my mother's funeral lunch with her daughter, and left the ham uncut.
Mom's kitchen smelled like coffee and the lemon cleaner she used on everything.
Eliana stood in the doorway for a long time before she went in.
She touched the back of a chair, and then she opened the gray folder on the table.
"Hattie, before you hear the rest from anyone else," she said. "Look at the dates."
I looked.
The lab report that matched me to Lydia Ashgrove was stamped in May, with her name on the request.
Clipped behind it was an older order form from the same lab, dated the third of March.
It had the same case number.
The name on the request line was Torsten Ashgrove.
"He told us this morning that he only found out last week," Eliana said quietly.
"He had it for three months."
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