The Necklace They Gave Me Last novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Legacy Day
On Legacy Day every Sterrett gets a necklace in front of sixty guests except Susannah, and she walks out. The old butler presses a key and a card from her mother into her hand.
My father tapped his glass with a spoon, and sixty guests on the lawn turned to face the family table.
"Legacy Day is a hundred and forty years old," my father said. "This year, every one of us receives a necklace blessed by the ancestors."
People clapped.
A man from the company's media team stood on the terrace steps with his phone up, filming for the company's page.
I stood at the end of the family table in my black dress, with my hands folded.
I was twenty-seven, and I had driven down that morning because my father had called me himself.
It was the first time he had called in three years.
The staff came out with velvet trays.
My older brother went first.
Dad lifted a black obsidian pendant on a leather cord and hung it around my brother's neck.
Dorian held it up to the phones and grinned.
"Hundred and forty years of this family," he said. "And now me."
More clapping.
My stepmother Pauline got a rope of pearls, and she pressed her cheek against Dad's shoulder.
Dermot Gorman was next.
Dad had raised him in our house from the age of fifteen, and now Dermot ran the company's money.
He took a black stone on a cord, and he closed his fist around it and did not put it on.
I caught his eye across the table.
He looked away first.
The old butler came last, with his empty tray tucked under his arm.
He had served this house for twenty years.
Dad gave him a small brass charm and said it would keep his mind at peace.
The butler did not look down at it.
He looked at me.
He did not put it on either. He closed his hand around it and kept looking.
Then Dad lowered his hands.
The trays were empty.
The staff began to clear them away, and I understood that nothing was coming for me.
Pauline was beside me before I could speak.
"Sweetheart, it's only paperwork," she said softly. "Yours will come next week. I promise."
She took off her own shawl and wrapped it around my shoulders, because my hands were shaking.
Her fingers brushed the bare skin above my collar, and then she smoothed the wool flat.
I stepped out of the shawl.
"Dad," I said.
He was looking at the lawn.
"Dad. Where is mine?"
Sixty people had stopped talking.
"Sit down, Susannah."
"Is there one for me at all?"
"Sit down."
He had not said anything else, and I knew he was not going to.
Dorian lifted his glass.
"Maybe the ancestors couldn't find you," he said. "You haven't been around much."
Someone near the back laughed, and then a few more people did.
The phone on the steps swung toward my face.
My cheeks burned, and I let them.
I had left this house three years ago for good reasons, and I had come back for one afternoon because he asked me to.
I lifted the place card from my seat, my name in my stepmother's neat handwriting.
I laid it flat on the white tablecloth.
"Thank you for the dinner," I said.
So I walked out.
My heels sank into the gravel, sixty heads turned to follow me, and the phone on the steps tracked me down the whole length of the lawn.
"Susannah," Dermot said behind me.
I did not stop.
"If you walk out that gate, you walk out," my father called.
"I know," I said, and I kept going.
I reached the drive.
The gate stood open at the end of it, past the oak trees my mother had planted.
My phone buzzed in my bag.
It was a notice from my bank, saying my card had been declined.
I tried it again, and it was declined again.
Footsteps crunched on the gravel behind me, uneven and fast.
I turned.
It was the old butler, with his jacket flapping open and his breath coming hard.
He had not run in years.
He took my hand and pressed a second brass charm into it, an old one worn smooth, and folded my fingers over it.
"Miss Susannah," he said. "Your mother told me to give you this if they left you out."
"My mother has been dead fifteen years."
"Yes, miss. She told me what they would do."
He let go of my hand and walked back toward the house without another word.
The charm was warm from his palm.
I thumbed the base, and it unscrewed.
Inside was a small iron key, and a card folded into a tiny square.
I unfolded it with my thumbnails.
I knew the handwriting at once, the long slanted loops on every letter.
"Susannah. If you are reading this, they have left you out. Go to 14 Marlow Street, and don't let anyone take what you find."
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