Drowned by the Fake Heiress, I Came Back for Everything

The second time Camille tried to kill me, she wore our mother's pearls. We stood at the edge of the lake where she'd drowned me the first time. Same black water. Same white dress. She always did have a sense of occasion. "You should have stayed dead," she whispered. I felt the cold flat of her hand settle between my shoulder blades, exactly the way I'd felt it three years ago, the night everyone agreed my drowning was an accident. This time I wasn't afraid. This time I slid my hand into my pocket and pressed record. "You first," I said. Three years earlier. I woke up choking on the smell of lilies. They'd covered my coffin with them. Dying had left me one impossible memory: Camille standing over the white flowers, crying beautifully for the cameras while everyone around her called my drowning an accident. There was no coffin now. No lake either. I was sitting upright in the back of a car with cream leather seats, a folder in my lap, and the Ashford estate rising outside the window like a house from one of the magazines I used to find in my employers' living rooms. The date on my phone read three years before I died. The day they brought me home. I didn't scream. I want you to understand that. In the life before this one, the girl in this seat had been shaking with hope: twenty-two years old, raised on food stamps and the laundry my foster mother took in, just told by a stranger in an expensive suit that the DNA was a match. That she was the real Ashford daughter. Switched at birth in a hospital that didn't exist anymore. That girl cried with gratitude the whole drive. I looked at my own hands until they stopped shaking. Then I opened the folder. There was the paternity report. A photo of me at six in a coat two sizes too small. And clipped behind it, the page I'd been too dazzled to read the first time: a second DNA test, dated two years earlier. Camille's name was printed at the top. Her signature sat under the consent form. Probability of biological relationship to the Ashford family: 0.00%. It proved she had known. Two years before anyone came looking for me, Camille had learned she was the fake, and she'd spent those two years making herself the perfect daughter, so that no one would ever choose the real one over her. Last time, I found this page the night before I died. Too late to matter. This time I had it before the car reached the gate. "Miss Ashford?" The driver was watching me in the mirror. "They're all waiting in the east drawing room. Are you, if I may say, all right? You look different than they described you." "Do I?" "They said you'd be nervous." "I was nervous," I said. "I got over it." The east drawing room was exactly as I remembered it: too much gold, a fire nobody needed, and eleven Ashfords arranged like a portrait that had already decided I wasn't in it. Vivienne Ashford sat at the center, my grandmother, spine like a fireplace poker. She looked at me the way you look at a stain you're deciding whether to mention. Beside her, on the arm of the sofa, in a dress the color of butter, sat Camille. She'd cried the first time I did this. Rushed across the room, taken my hands, called me sister in front of everyone, so that when she destroyed me later they'd all remember how generous she'd been. She started to rise now, eyes already glistening on cue. "Oh, you must be so overwhelmed, you poor..." "Camille, isn't it?" I said, and she stopped. It was a small stop, barely a stumble in the choreography, and nobody else in the room caught it. I did. I'd been watching for it this time. "The daughter who held this family together while they searched for me." I crossed to the empty chair no one had offered and sat down in it like it was mine, because it was. "You must be very good at becoming whatever people need." The family heard a compliment. Camille heard the truth. Her smile held, perfect as ever. Her knuckles went white around my mother's pearls. "You must be exhausted," Vivienne said from the center of it all, her voice cool. "Camille, show her to a guest room. The blue one. It's... simplest." A guest room. Two minutes through the front door, and I was already a guest in my own house. Last time, I'd thanked her for it. This time I stood, smoothed my cheap coat like it was couture, and looked my grandmother in the eye. "I'd like my mother's room instead," I said. Silence dropped over the drawing room like a dust sheet. "That room is not..." Vivienne started. "Mine?" I smiled. "You ran a DNA test to prove it is. Twice, I hear." I let my eyes drift to Camille, just once, and held them there a beat too long. "I do love certainty. Don't you?" Camille's glass paused halfway to her lips. She didn't know about the second report yet, or that I had it. She only knew the meek, grateful girl she'd drowned once had walked back through the front door and looked her straight in the eye without flinching. Then a floorboard creaked on the stairs. A man's voice came down ahead of him. "Camille?" My body knew Adrian Vale before I let my mind catch up. The man who had chosen Camille. Who had believed every lie she told. Who had stood beside my coffin and called my murder an accident. He reached the bottom step and saw me. And I looked back at him the way no stranger should be able to look at a man: like I already knew exactly what he had done. The color drained out of his face. "Elena?" Camille's glass slipped in her hand. I smiled. "Hello, Adrian."