This Time, I'll Be the Villain's Favorite Daughter novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Being a Nobody
Reborn at five on an orphanage step, Mabel picks the plainest man on the street to be her dad and names herself Mabel Tully; that night he opens an envelope on the kitchen table and it's her photo, marked as a target.
The last text Mabel Ainsworth ever got was from her father.
"Don't ruin your sister's night."
She had sent him four messages that evening from the little bed in the staff wing.
"Dad, I'm really sick."
"I can't stop coughing."
"Can someone come home?"
"Please."
The whole family was in Aspen for the other girl's sixteenth birthday party.
There were fireworks on the photos people posted.
Mabel was sixteen too.
Nobody had thrown her a party.
She fell asleep with the phone on her chest, and she didn't wake up in that bed again.
She woke up on a cold stone step.
Wind was cutting down the street.
Mabel looked at her hands.
They were tiny and chapped red, with dirt under the nails.
Her legs stuck out in front of her in thin grey tights with a hole in one knee.
Behind her stood a brick building with a sign she knew by heart.
St. Brigid's Children's Home.
She had lived here until she was eight.
She was five again.
She sat on the step for a whole afternoon before she let herself believe it.
Then she started to think.
In three years, her father's people would come to this door with a DNA test.
They would drive her to the mansion in Lake Forest.
She would meet the girl who had taken her place, in a pink dress, sitting on her father's lap.
She would spend eight years being compared, corrected and left out.
Then she would die alone.
"No," Mabel said out loud.
Her breath made a little cloud.
She didn't want revenge. She didn't want money.
She wanted to be nobody.
She wanted a family so ordinary that no rich person would ever look at it twice.
The gates were open, and the street was almost empty.
A bus went by. A woman in a fur hat went by, talking on her phone.
Too rich.
A man with a gold watch went by.
Much too rich.
Mabel waited until her toes went numb.
Then a man came walking down the sidewalk with his hands in his pockets.
He wore a plain white shirt under a thin black jacket, and black trousers.
Wire glasses. Black hair going grey.
No logos. No watch. No expression at all.
His face was so ordinary that Mabel forgot it while she was still looking at it.
In her first life she had grown up around men with sharp jaws and sharp suits and sharper tempers.
This man looked like he'd been tired since 1998.
He was perfect.
Mabel jumped up, ran straight at him and grabbed his trouser leg with both hands.
"Hello, sir. Can you be my dad?"
The man stopped walking.
He had been thinking about a job the broker had called about that morning.
A job he didn't want, in an envelope he hadn't opened yet.
He looked down at her through his glasses.
His eyes were very dark and very still.
"What?"
"I'm very smart," Mabel said fast. "When I'm hungry, I eat. When I'm sleepy, I sleep. If I get sick, I'll take care of it myself. I won't cause you any trouble."
She let go of his leg and bowed from the waist.
"Please adopt me."
He crouched down until his face was level with hers.
He didn't touch her.
He just looked at her chapped cheeks and her flat hair for a long moment.
"Why me?"
Mabel decided to be honest.
"I like ordinary people," she said. "You look very ordinary."
She smiled at him with her whole face.
"We're the same kind of person."
The man was quiet for so long that she thought she'd lost him.
Then he let out a sigh.
He lifted one pale, cool hand and brushed her frozen cheek with his fingertips.
"I can adopt you," he said quietly. "As long as you behave."
"I'll be good. I promise." She crossed her heart. "I definitely won't cause you any trouble."
The director inside barely looked up from his desk.
He slid three forms across it and tapped where to sign.
He didn't ask what the man did for a living.
Mabel stood on her tiptoes to see the name.
Hank Tully.
It was a name nobody would remember.
She loved it immediately.
Outside, she trotted to keep up with his long strides.
"Sir, my name is Mabel Tully."
She had been born an Ainsworth.
She was never going to be one again.
Hank glanced down, slowed, then scooped her up and set her on his shoulder.
"Call me Dad now."
Mabel's face pressed into the cold back of his neck.
"Dad," she whispered.
It came out muffled.
Hank's step hitched for half a second.
Then he kept walking.
They took two buses to a red-brick building on the Northwest Side.
The woman who opened the door of the apartment was slim and lovely, with a cardigan and a low knot of dark blonde hair.
She saw the child on Hank's shoulder and screamed.
"Oh my God! Honey! You actually kidnapped one?"
Mabel froze.
"I told you forever ago to just grab one off the street!" The woman kissed Hank loudly on the mouth. "Thank you, thank you, thank you!"
Then she forgot her husband completely and pulled Mabel into a hug that smelled like clean laundry.
"Sweetheart, what's your name?"
Kidnapped?
She thinks that's okay?
But the apartment was warm, and there were building blocks all over the rug, and something with garlic was in the oven.
"Mabel Tully, ma'am."
"Mabel." The woman held her tighter. "I'm Fern. I'm your mom."
Hank had already collapsed onto the couch.
Mabel looked at him with shining eyes.
"Dad, you're amazing."
Hank stared at the ceiling.
A small boy came down the stairs in a grey hoodie.
He had black hair and a face as blank as a plate.
"Linus, this is your sister," Fern said. "You'll protect your little sister, right?"
The boy looked at Mabel for two whole seconds.
"Okay, Mom. I'll protect Mabel."
He sat across from her on the rug and introduced the family.
"Dad isn't home much. My oldest brother is a doctor. He works late on patients. My second brother is a police officer. My third brother has been sick for years, so he lives with Grandpa."
A doctor. A cop. A sick boy and his grandpa.
Mabel hugged her knees and wanted to cry.
What a wonderfully kind family.
At midnight, Hank sat alone at the kitchen table.
He took the broker's brown envelope out of his jacket and slit it open with a butter knife.
There was a photo of a little girl on the steps of St. Brigid's.
Chapped cheeks. A hole in one knee of her tights.
Under it, someone had typed: Female, age five. Fee: $400,000.
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