They Sold Me in My Sister's Place, So I Took Their House novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Forty Guests
At Davis's birthday dinner the family orders Eden to marry Cormick Eberly in her sister's place, she remembers dying in that marriage and refuses in front of everyone, and Cormick follows her to the drive.
At his fifty-eighth birthday dinner, my adoptive father tapped his glass and told forty guests I would be married in two weeks.
"To Cormick Eberly," he said, and lifted his wine toward the head table. "Our family is proud to join his."
Everyone clapped.
Cormick Eberly sat at the far end in a charcoal suit, with a scar through his left eyebrow and both hands flat on the cloth.
He did not clap.
He was looking at my sister, the daughter he had been promised.
She had gone white. She stood up with her napkin pressed to her mouth and whispered, "Dad, I can't. I told you I can't."
She was crying so hard that the whole room leaned toward her.
Then my father turned and looked down the long table at me.
Everyone else followed his eyes.
I knew this dinner.
I had sat in this chair, with this exact fish on this exact plate, and I had died at twenty-four.
I had said yes.
I put my fork down.
"Eden," my father said gently, in his Rotary voice. "Sweetheart. You'd be doing this for Colette. For all of us."
"No," I said.
His smile stayed where it was for a moment, then dropped away.
"Excuse me?"
"I won't marry him. I'm not Colette."
My brother Russell pushed his chair back. He is twenty-nine, wears a heavy steel watch, and smiles when he is angry.
"Eden, we've raised you for eighteen years," he said, in front of the whole room. "Eighteen. Do you know what you were when Dad took you in?"
"I was six," I said. "My parents had just drowned."
"And we fed you. We paid for your school. We kept you out of a state home." Russell spread his hands to the guests. "One thing. We ask one thing."
My youngest brother Pierce muttered from his seat, "She's always been ungrateful."
My father picked up his teacup and set it down so hard that tea jumped over the rim.
"You will do this," he said, very quietly. "Or you will not sleep under my roof tonight."
Last time he had said it exactly like that.
Last time I had cried, and thanked him, and signed where he pointed.
Davis still counted out my allowance in cash on the first of every month. It was two hundred dollars, the same as when I was sixteen. He signed every paper with my name on it, to save me the trouble.
I had never once asked why.
My sister Colette came around the table with wet cheeks and took both my hands.
"Eden, please," she whispered. "You're the only one who's ever looked out for me."
She was wearing a moonstone ring.
It was my mother's ring.
She had worn it for six years and I had never asked for it back.
I took my hands out of hers.
"Colette, I love you," I said. "I'm still not going to do it."
"You ungrateful girl," my father said. "After everything."
"Then I'll go," I said.
Nobody moved. A waiter stopped with a tray of dessert plates in the middle of the room.
I stood up.
"Eden," Russell said. "Sit down."
"No."
"You don't have a car," he said. "You don't have a bank card that isn't ours. You have nothing."
"I have my coat."
I took it from the back of my chair.
I walked the length of the great room under forty pairs of eyes, past the piano my mother used to play, and out through the front doors.
The night was cold. The gravel drive was full of black cars.
I stopped on the top step and shook so hard that my teeth knocked together.
I was alive.
I was twenty-four, I was standing on my own feet, and nobody had signed anything.
Behind me the door opened and shut.
Footsteps came down the steps, slow and even.
I turned, ready for Russell.
It was Cormick Eberly.
Up close he was taller than I remembered. The scar through his eyebrow was pale against his skin.
Last time I had met him at the altar, with a ring already in his hand.
He stopped two steps above me, so we were level.
"Miss Lowry," he said. His voice was low and careful. "Your family just offered me the wrong daughter."
"They did."
"They'll be furious that I left the table."
"They will."
"Then you should know I haven't said yes to any of them."
He looked back at the lit windows, then at me.
"What would you say," he asked, "if I asked you?"
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