True Heiress Never Lies! novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Ask Me
Sonia refuses a plea in court, asks her father to ask her if she did it, and he says no; she is sentenced as Peter cries out.
The judge asked me one more time if I wanted to take the deal.
Six months.
If I said I did it, I would be home before the snow melted.
I was fifteen, and I had never told a lie in my life.
I wasn't going to start in a courtroom.
"Your Honor, I didn't take it," I said.
My voice came out thin, but it carried.
The room was small and the wood was dark, and everybody I had ever trusted sat on the benches behind me.
The judge looked at the folder in front of her.
"Miss Hartley, a sapphire necklace and forty thousand dollars were taken from your father's safe."
"I know."
"A pawn ticket for the necklace was in your backpack."
"I know that too."
"And a camera shows a person in your gray hoodie at the study door at two in the morning."
"That wasn't me."
"Then who was it?"
I didn't answer.
I turned my head and looked at the back row.
Kendra sat there in a pink cardigan with her blond ponytail pulled tight.
She was my stepsister, and she was the exact same height as me.
She smiled at me with her braces showing, and then she looked down at her hands.
My stepmother, Estelle, sat beside my father in the front row.
She had her hand on his arm.
She had held it there since we sat down.
"I can't prove who it was," I said. "But it wasn't me."
The judge sighed.
"Miss Hartley, if you will not show remorse, I cannot treat this as a child's mistake."
"I'm not sorry for something I didn't do."
A man by the door coughed.
The judge took off her glasses.
"Mr. Hartley, you are the complainant. Do you wish to speak?"
My father stood.
He wore the gray suit he had worn to my mother's funeral.
His hands were shaking, and he put them in his pockets.
Everyone in the room waited for him to say it.
"This is my daughter. She doesn't lie."
I had heard him say that a hundred times.
He said it to teachers and to neighbors, and once to a police officer who stopped me for riding my bike at night.
"Sonia doesn't lie," he would say, and he would put his arm around me.
I turned all the way around on the bench.
"Dad," I said.
He looked at me for the first time all morning.
His eyes were red.
"Ask me," I said.
He didn't move.
"Just ask me if I did it. Ask me, and I'll tell you."
His mouth opened.
Estelle's hand tightened on his sleeve.
"Gordon," she said softly. "Don't."
He swallowed.
"Don't make this harder, Sonia," he whispered.
It was the worst thing anyone had ever said to me.
I would remember it for two years.
My father turned to the judge.
"Your Honor, I only ask that wherever she goes, it's a good place. I'll pay for anything she needs. A better wing, a tutor, anything."
"That is generous, Mr. Hartley."
"I just want her somewhere comfortable."
Behind him, Estelle dabbed her eye with a tissue.
I stared at the back of my father's head.
He had a patch of gray hair I had never noticed before.
The judge picked up a pen.
"Sonia Hartley, I sentence you to twenty-four months at the Cedar Hollow Youth Center."
The sound the room made was a held breath coming out.
A bailiff stepped toward me.
The cold of the cuffs surprised me.
I hadn't known they would be so heavy on a girl's wrists.
I didn't cry.
I looked at Kendra one more time.
She wiggled her fingers at me.
Then somebody shouted from the aisle.
"Sonia! Sonia, no!"
My little brother, Peter, was seven years old, and he had slipped out of his seat.
He ran down the aisle in his clip-on tie with his arms stretched out.
"She didn't do it! She didn't!"
Estelle caught him by the collar before he reached me.
She lifted him against her hip, and he kicked her.
"Peter, hush," she said sweetly.
"Let go of me!"
The bailiff turned me toward the side door.
The last thing I saw was my father's face.
He was still standing, and he was looking at the floor, and he did not follow me.
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