True Heiress vs. Fake Queen Bee novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Move-In Day
On her first day as Liv Mabry, Liv watches the housekeeper's daughter introduce herself as the Haldane heiress, gets accused of stealing her own mother's bracelet, and calls home for help, only to hear the housekeeper tell police the heiress's name is Brielle.
The girl on the sorority porch held up her phone and said, "Hi, I'm Brielle Haldane, and yes, that Haldane."
Two hundred people on the lawn cheered.
I laughed out loud.
I didn't mean to.
It came out of me, right in the quiet after the cheer.
Heads turned.
Trudy grabbed my arm and hissed, "What is wrong with you?"
I couldn't answer her, because I was still looking at the porch.
The last time I'd seen that face up close, it was missing two front teeth and covered in popsicle.
We were seven, and we were hiding under my mother's piano.
Brielle Tullis grew up in the cottage behind our garage.
Her mother has cleaned my father's house for twenty-two years.
And she was standing on the steps of Delta Phi Lambda telling a whole university she was me.
"Sorry," I said to the people staring. "Allergies."
I'd been at Ridgefield State for exactly six hours.
My student ID said Liv Mabry, which was my mother's maiden name.
My father's lawyers had set it up so that only the registrar knew the rest.
Nobody here knew I was the girl who would one day own forty hotels.
That was the whole point.
At my last school, my best friend sold a photo of me crying at my mother's grave to a gossip account for nine hundred dollars.
I wanted one place where people liked me for free.
Trudy had liked me for free since nine that morning.
She'd carried my mattress up our duplex steps and asked if I wanted half her frozen lasagna.
Then she'd dragged me here, because "you can't live in a college town and skip the free food."
On the porch, Brielle's smile hadn't moved.
But her eyes had found me.
They went from my face to my left wrist.
To the bracelet.
White gold, five sapphires, a clasp that opened if you knew where to press.
My mother wore it every day of her life, and I'd worn it every day since her funeral.
Brielle came down the steps.
The crowd parted for her.
"Oh my God," she said, loud enough for the back row. "Where did you get that?"
"It was my mother's."
"Your mother's." She laughed. "Your mother cleans toilets."
A girl near me actually gasped.
Brielle turned to the crowd and held up her phone.
On the screen was a photo of a woman in a garden, laughing, with the bracelet on her wrist.
My stomach turned over.
That photo had hung in our upstairs hallway since before I was born.
"This is my mom," Brielle said, and her voice cracked right on cue. "She died when I was thirteen. That bracelet was hers."
She pointed at me.
"This girl is our housekeeper's daughter. She grew up in our staff cottage. She took it from my mother's jewelry box."
The lawn went silent in a different way.
Phones came up.
All of them.
"Brielle, that isn't true," I said. "And you know it isn't."
"Then take it off and give it back, and I won't press charges."
"No."
"Excuse me?"
"You heard me."
Trudy stepped up beside me so fast she nearly knocked over a girl with a lemonade.
"She's my roommate," Trudy said. "She's been wearing that all day. She doesn't even own a hair dryer, she's not a jewel thief."
Somebody laughed.
Brielle didn't.
"Someone call campus police," she said, to nobody in particular.
Three girls in matching white shirts already had their phones to their ears.
I could have ended it right there.
My name is Olivia Haldane.
But my father's one condition had been simple.
If your name gets out, you come home.
And I looked at Trudy, in her flannel with lasagna sauce on the cuff, who had picked a side without asking a single question.
I wasn't going home after six hours.
I unhooked the bracelet from my wrist myself.
Brielle reached for it.
I closed my hand.
"Not to you," I said. "To the police."
I walked past her across the lawn, through two hundred phones, to the officer coming up the walk.
Trudy walked with me the whole way.
The campus police office smelled like burnt coffee and carpet glue.
The officer was a tired woman with reading glasses on a chain.
She set my bracelet in a plastic tray between us.
"So it's her word against yours," she said. "Can anyone vouch that this is your family's property?"
Not my father.
He'd be on his way to London by now, and he'd use it as the excuse he'd wanted to drag me home.
But there was someone.
The woman who had braided my hair every morning for three years after my mother died.
"Call the house," I said, and gave her the number of the Haldane house line, the one that rang in the kitchen.
She put it on speaker.
It rang twice.
"Haldane residence."
Lorna's voice.
Calm and soft, the same as when she used to read to me.
My chest went loose with relief.
The officer explained who she was, and that a student was claiming a sapphire bracelet belonged to the Haldane family.
"I'm trying to establish which young lady is Mr. Haldane's daughter," she said.
There was a pause on the line.
I leaned toward the phone.
"Lorna, it's me."
The pause got longer.
Then Lorna said, very clearly, "Miss Haldane is at Ridgefield State, officer. Her name is Brielle."
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