Watching My Fake Sister Dig Her Own Grave novel · Chapter 1 of 32
Chapter 1: Welcome Home
On her first night home, Annabelle bares her legs and her scars in front of two hundred guests, then lets the sister who threatened her push her down the stairs, because she knows who has been paying the ring.
When I was four, they broke both my legs.
When I was six, they burst my left eardrum.
When I was seven, they took my right eye, because a blind girl gets more coins.
When I was twenty-four, my parents finally brought me home.
The house in Lake Forest had a marble foyer and a staircase that curled up.
Mom sat me on a velvet bench by the door so I could rest.
She went back out to tell the driver where to put my hospital bag.
A girl in a white dress knelt in front of me.
"Let me help with your shoes," she said, loud enough for the porch.
Then she took my wrist.
Her nails went in until I felt the skin give.
"Try to take what's mine," she whispered, "and I'll break whatever's left of your legs."
Verity Devlin.
My parents had adopted her two years after I disappeared.
She'd had my room, my last name and my birthday cakes for nineteen years.
I looked down at her nails.
They were pink and perfect.
All that effort, and nothing to break.
I pushed up my jeans, pressed the release on my left leg, then my right, and pulled them both off.
I held them out to her.
"Here," I said. "Saves you the trouble."
The legs were carbon and steel, the price of a car each.
My empty jeans folded flat below the knees.
Behind her, Mom stopped in the doorway with my bag in her arms.
Dad stopped behind her.
Neither of them said anything.
Their faces went the color of the marble.
Verity let go of my wrist and burst into tears.
My brother Brendan came across the foyer in four long strides.
He was thirty-one now, broad as a door, and he bent down to my ear.
"Don't you upset her again," he said. "I mean it."
He'd picked my left ear.
I tapped it and smiled.
"SORRY!" I shouted, loud enough to ring the chandelier. "THAT'S MY DEAF ONE! YOU'LL HAVE TO TRY THE OTHER SIDE!"
He stepped back so fast he bumped the hall table.
He stared at me.
I clipped my legs back on.
That evening my parents threw a welcome dinner.
Two hundred guests came to see the miracle.
Mom chose my dress, pale blue silk with long sleeves and a high collar.
It covered every scar I had.
Verity wore white.
Of course she did.
They seated me between my parents under a banner that said WELCOME HOME, ANNABELLE.
Nobody had called me Annabelle in twenty-one years.
In the place I came from, I was "girl," or "you," or nothing.
Halfway through the fish, Verity stood with her glass.
Her voice shook in all the right places.
"Tonight is about Annabelle," she said. "I've always known I was only keeping her place warm."
A woman at the next table pressed a napkin to her eyes.
"Now she's home where she belongs. All I want is to be the best sister I can be."
The room stood and clapped.
Somebody near the back was sobbing.
Verity came down the length of the table with her arms open.
I stood up on my new legs and met her halfway.
She hugged me hard.
Then she stumbled.
She grabbed my sleeve to catch herself.
The silk tore from my shoulder to my wrist.
The room went quiet.
My whole arm was out under the chandelier.
Burns. Knife lines. The round pink dots a cigarette leaves.
Old white scars under newer pink ones.
There wasn't a clean inch from my elbow to my fingers.
Brendan was already on his way over, with Mom and Dad right behind him, ready to apologize for me.
They saw my arm and stopped.
Mom made a sound I'd never heard a person make.
Then she had me, and Dad had both of us, and they were shaking.
"Who did this?" Dad said into my hair. "Give me a name. I'll bury them."
Verity backed up a step.
"Don't look at me," she said. "I never touched her. Don't you dare try to put this on me."
"She's right," I said. "It wasn't Verity."
Every face in the room turned to me.
"It was the man who kept me," I said. "The kids called him Uncle."
Brendan's jaw worked.
"And you just let him?"
"Fighting cost more," I said. "I learned that when I was five."
Nobody said anything after that.
The guests went home early.
Dad shut himself in the study to call the police.
Mom sat in the empty dining room with her face in her hands.
Brendan stood at the window with his back to all of us.
I sat at the bottom of the staircase and waited for my stumps to stop throbbing.
Verity appeared at the top.
"Let me help you up," she said.
"I'm fine."
"I insist."
She came down and hooked her arm through mine.
At the foot of the stairs she put her lips by my good ear.
"Crying about scars won't get you anything," she said. "They love me. Not you."
I didn't answer.
We started up anyway, one step at a time.
The phone Sergeant Dez Coughlin had given me sat heavy in my pocket.
Halfway up, Verity let go of my arm.
"Goodnight," she said.
Something hooked my ankle.
I pitched forward and grabbed for the railing.
I caught it.
I held it for half a second.
Then I opened my hand.
I went down the curve of the stairs, ribs and elbows and chin.
Two sharp clicks.
One leg hit the wall.
The other spun across the marble like a bottle in a game.
I stopped at the bottom on my back.
The liners had torn loose. Blood soaked through the bandages on both stumps.
It hurt.
I'd had worse.
At the top of the stairs Verity screamed.
"Mom! Brendan! She fell! I told her to wait for me!"
Doors banged open all over the house.
I lay on the cold marble and looked up at her, in her white dress, with one hand on her heart.
I knew that dress.
For four years, Uncle had pinned a new picture of her on the wall above the money table.
Galas. Ribbon cuttings. A charity lunch.
Always in white.
On the first of every month, while I sat on the floor counting coins with Nessa and the little ones, he'd tap the newest picture.
"Your sister," he'd say. "She pays us fifteen thousand a month to keep you."
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