I was the Sheridans' daughter for twenty-two years. The wrong one, it turned out.
I was also Pace Ashworth's girlfriend for three of them. Heir to Ashworth & Vail, Yale, Wharton, a Whitney board seat by twenty-six. Every magazine that wrote me up used the word charmed.
Then a girl named Cherry Vance showed up from a state-subsidized two-bedroom in Waterbury with the right blood, and the Sheridans cleared out my room before midnight.
Pace threw her a welcome party at the Whitney Art Party and walked me out of the gallery in front of three hundred people. He had his hand at the small of her back when he said it.
"The money you spent? Call it kibble for a stray. I always knew I was overfeeding."
The room laughed. Cherry tipped her chin down and let two tears fall in a perfectly aimed line down her cheek. On her left wrist she was wearing a Cartier Love bracelet I had sent her, anonymously, for her twenty-first birthday.
I laughed too.
Because the girl Pace was holding up like a rescued saint had been my scholarship recipient for ten years. Tuition, rent, her aortic-valve surgery at NewYork-Presbyterian, the SAT prep, the laptop, the winter coat. All of it me.
And I wasn't the wrong daughter of any family that mattered to Pace Ashworth.
I was the only living heir of an older family than his.
When Pace tipped his cabernet down the front of my gown, the gallery went quiet so fast you could hear the photographers shift their feet on the parquet.
The dress was a Carolina Herrera column, custom, ivory silk. It had arrived at my Carlyle suite that morning from the atelier with a card in his handwriting: For tonight.
He used to drink whatever I couldn't. He'd take a glass off a tray before I touched it because, he said, my stomach was bad and even a sip wrecked me. He'd watched me throw up cheap white wine in a Greenwich powder room once when I was twenty and told the hostess I had a migraine.
Now he handed his empty glass back to a passing server without looking at it. Like a thing he no longer needed touching his skin.
"Claire. I'm not going to ask twice."
I looked down at the wine soaking into the silk. Already brown at the edges where it had hit my hem.
Honor was on the third step of the gallery staircase in pearls and a Carolyne Roehm I had picked out for her in March. Her face was the color of the cocktail napkins.
"Claire, please. Cherry has had such a hard life. Be the bigger person."
She had stayed up with me at NewYork-Presbyterian when I was sixteen and went into anaphylactic shock at the Klepperts' clambake. She had cried into my hospital gown and called me her whole reason. That mother. Telling me now to be bigger.
Cherry stood at Pace's elbow in a white halter Galvan, eyes pre-reddened in a precise tear-readiness that you had to be a girl to recognize. She tugged once at his cuff, two fingers, gentle.
"Sister Claire. I didn't come to take anything. I just wanted to come home."
Pace's hand left her cuff and went to the small of her back. His voice softened around her, the way it used to soften around me.
"You don't owe her an explanation."
Then his face turned my way and the softness left it entirely.
"You impersonated a Sheridan for twenty-two years. Now you want to throw a tantrum in front of her family?"
A laugh broke from somewhere near the bar. The Klepperts. Then a Sheridan cousin, then a trustee's wife.
"I always said her bones were wrong."
"All those clothes and you can still see the help in her."
"Pace got there in the end. The real one's prettier anyway."
I held my clutch with both hands and didn't answer.
Inside it, my phone screen lit up against my palm. Signal. One line, white on black through the Bottega leather.
Mr. Thorne is at the Carlyle. One word and Sheridan Holdings is suspended by Tuesday open. — MD
I tapped the screen dark.
Pace mistook the silence. He took a half-step closer and dropped his voice to the register only I could hear.
"Don't look at me like that, Claire. I was kind to you because you were a Sheridan. That's all."
He laughed once, soft.
"You're nothing now."
I let myself smile.
"Pace. Are you sure about that?"
He frowned.
Cherry coughed at his shoulder, small and theatrical, and put her hand on the edge of the buffet for support. He spun and steadied her like she was made of stemware.
Over his shoulder she lifted her chin and looked at me. Across two thousand dollars of Cartier on her wrist, across the wine drying on my hem, across the laughter still going at the bar.
The look was naked. Triumph. Permission.
I felt, for the first time that evening, a small clean interest in how the next hour was going to go.
Whit Sheridan signaled to the museum's house security from the bar. He said the word escort and the two men in earpieces moved on me from either side, one to each elbow, with a grip that was not the grip of an escort.
I shook them both off.
"Don't touch me. I'll walk."
Pace made a small sound through his teeth. "There's still some pride in there."
Honor came down the staircase two steps. "Claire, take a minute outside. Tomorrow we can sit down at the house and talk about getting you settled."
Settled.
That word out of her mouth had the small weight of someone finding a new bed for a cat she had become tired of.
I looked at her.
"And how is Mrs. Sheridan planning to settle me, exactly?"
Her face stiffened. Cherry cut in fast and just loud enough for the buffet to hear.
"Sister Claire, Mom didn't mean it like that. The family will of course write you something. Please don't make this worse."
So I was the grasping fake who wouldn't leave for money. Done in a sentence.
Whit's voice was flat. "Twenty-two years, Claire. We've been more than generous. Don't take the last of your dignity with you."
I nodded.
"Fine."
I opened my clutch and took out a folded slip of paper. Brown Brothers Harriman cashier's check, payable to Sheridan Holdings, twelve million dollars, drawn that morning. I set it on the linen of the buffet beside the canapés.
"For the twenty-two years of room and board."
The gallery went still.
Whit blinked at it. Then he laughed.
"Where exactly would you get twelve million dollars, Claire? You can lie, but you should pick a believable one."
Pace's eyes were on the check. His jaw worked.
"You ran my Centurion again, didn't you."
He said it like he'd been waiting all night to land it.
"I told you. All you've ever been good for is spending other men's money."
Cherry bit her lip. "Sister Pace's money doesn't grow on trees either —"
I didn't let her finish.
I took the Centurion supplementary out of my clutch — matte black, my initials etched under his — and snapped it in two between my thumbs over the buffet table.
The sound was small and clean. A piece of plastic that costs nothing to make breaking like a wishbone.
I dropped both halves into the silver ice bucket where the champagne sat.
Pace's face did something I had never seen it do.
"Three years," I said. "Every dime you ever put on that card I never touched. Pull the statement. Now."
His EA was already standing two paces behind him in a black suit. He looked at Pace. Pace didn't look back. The EA pulled the account up on his phone anyway, swiped twice, and went a careful color.
"Mr. Ashworth. There's — no activity. On Ms. Sheridan's card. Three years."
The Klepperts stopped laughing.
A trustee somewhere near the Calder reached for his drink and missed.
Pace said, quietly, with effort, "What you're wearing tonight. The Carlyle suite. The handbag. The ring on your finger right now. All of it from us."
I didn't answer him.
Because past the open doors of the gallery, in the wood-paneled hall the museum used for receptions, there was movement.
A man in a dark suit stepped through, and behind him six other men in dark suits in two even rows of three. He stopped four feet in front of me, inclined his head once.
"Miss Thorne. Mr. Thorne sent me to bring you home."
Whit's mouth opened and didn't close.
Pace said, faintly, "Thorne?"
The man straightened. He didn't raise his voice.
"Thorne. Of Boston."
Two trustees within earshot turned their heads at the same time. The Sheridan attorney's pen stopped over his cocktail napkin. Somebody by the bar said, almost a whisper, Jesus.
Pace's hand finally, slowly, came off Cherry's back.