Was the Heiress Switched at Birth? novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Two Wristbands
Told by her dying mother that she was swapped at birth, Billie walks into the Founders' Gala as Cordelia Kenworthy names Annalise sole heir and lays a cut hospital band on the podium; Cordelia answers by calling her mother a thief and ordering her removed.
My mother waited until the night nurse left the room to tell me she had stolen me.
She said it in the same voice she used to ask if I'd eaten.
"Baby, I need you to hear this before I lose my nerve."
The hospice bed made small electric noises under her.
Pancreatic cancer had taken most of her in four months.
It had left the green silk scarf on her bald head and the dry humor behind it.
"I'm listening," I said.
She pointed at the shelf, where her old Danish cookie tin sat between a water jug and a card from my court reporting firm.
I brought it over and opened it.
Inside lay two hospital ankle bands, each one cut clean through.
The first read BABY GIRL KENWORTHY, 03-09-02.
The second read BABY GIRL ODOM, 03-09-02.
"Cordelia Kenworthy had a daughter three hours before I did," Pris said.
"I worked for her."
"I loved her."
"I also watched her walk down a hall with everything, while my husband walked out of mine owing thirty-one thousand dollars."
My hands had gone cold around the tin.
"What did you do?"
"At three in the morning I cut off both bands and moved the babies."
She looked straight at me, and that was the worst of it.
"You're the Kenworthy baby, Billie."
"You are Cordelia's."
"The girl who sits at her right hand is mine."
I stood there holding a confession from a woman with weeks to live.
Annalise Kenworthy.
I knew her from the company page my mother kept bookmarked, the dark bob and the plum lipstick and the title Brand Director.
"Why tell me now?" I asked.
"Because tonight Cordelia names Annalise her sole heir at the Founders' Gala."
Her fingers closed around my wrist.
"Don't go."
"Let me die first."
"They'll bury me for this."
I looked at the white streak growing in at my left temple.
For eighteen years she had dyed it brown every six weeks at our kitchen sink.
I had stopped three weeks ago, when she got too weak to lift the bottle.
"Now I know why you never let me keep it," I said.
She turned her face to the wall, and I took the tin.
The Founders' Gala was at the Foundry Ballroom, uptown, under chandeliers the size of cars.
A guard at the door looked at my black blazer and my stenotype case.
I held up my mother's twenty-year staff pass with its plus-one line.
"Priscilla Odom's guest," I said.
He let me in because her name had opened that door for two decades.
Three hundred people sat at round tables with their phones angled toward the stage.
Cordelia Kenworthy stood at the podium in charcoal and pearls, her deep brown bob perfect, her voice like a closed door.
Annalise sat behind her in cream, smiling the smile of someone who had never been told no.
"Kenworthy Outfitters will always belong to the family that built it," Cordelia was saying.
"And tonight I name its future."
I started walking.
I was twenty feet down the center aisle when the heads began to turn.
Piers Stanwyck, the COO, was standing by the stage steps.
I recognized his shaved head from the same bookmarked page.
He saw me coming and shifted his weight to cut me off.
I went around him and climbed the steps before he could speak.
"Annalise Kenworthy, my daughter," Cordelia began.
I reached the podium and set the cut band on the wood, right under her hands.
BABY GIRL KENWORTHY, 03-09-02.
The room went quiet in sections.
"My name is Billie Odom," I said into the microphone.
"Twenty-four years ago at Rosewood Women's Hospital, my mother swapped her baby for yours."
"You've been naming the wrong girl."
Nobody breathed.
Annalise rose from her chair with her mouth open.
Cordelia looked at the band, then at my face, then at the white streak at my temple.
Her hand went up to her own left temple before she could stop it.
For one second she looked like a woman who had been waiting a very long time for a knock.
Then she leaned into the microphone, and her voice came back.
"Priscilla Odom has stolen from this company for twenty years, and now she sends her daughter to finish the job."
Phones lifted all over the room.
"Remove her."
A hand closed around my arm.
It was warm, and it was very big, and it did not let go.
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