The Heiress Who Tells Everything

I was five years old the first time I understood that my family was different. Not different the way other families were different. Not the way my friend Maya's family was different, because her parents were divorced and she had two Christmases and two birthdays and two bedrooms in two houses on opposite sides of Bell Harbor. Not that kind of different. My family was the kind that made people lower their voices when they talked about us for reasons I did not fully understand yet. My grandfather, Charles Whitmore, had built an empire out of shipping and real estate and something called private equity that I could not explain to anyone until I was much older. He had four sons and those sons had produced, between them, nine grandchildren. Eight of them were boys. I was the ninth. I was the only girl. My name is Sophie Whitmore and I was the youngest of all of them. My father was the third son and he was not the favorite, but he had married late and had me last, so in the family hierarchy I was both the baby and the only princess, and, on paper, the only heiress. My grandfather doted on me in his stern, distant way. He called me his little sparrow. He said I had the Whitmore eyes. There were rules in our family that other people did not have. Some of them were about money and some of them were about loyalty and some of them were about the way we appeared to the outside world. But there was one rule that had been added specifically for me, two years before I was born, when my mother had almost lost me. The rule was this: No outsider was permitted to be alone with Sophie Whitmore. It was written into the family charter, which was a binder that lived in my grandfather's office and was updated every year at the family retreat. My uncles had argued about it. My father had insisted on it. My mother, who had almost died giving birth to me, had made my grandfather promise. So it was written and it was signed and it was witnessed by three lawyers and a notary, and from the moment I could walk, the entire household staff knew that if they turned their back on me while a guest was in the house they would be fired before they could pack their things. Until I was five, this rule had never been tested. I did not think about it the way I thought about other things. I did not think about it at all, really, because I had never known anything else. In the Whitmore house on Bell Harbor Point, with its long gravel driveway and its oak doors and its windows that looked out over the water, everything was always the same. The same breakfast at seven. The same tutors in the morning. The same lunch in the sunroom. The same garden walks with my grandmother before she got sick. The same warm milk before bed, and the same lullaby that my mother sang to me even when she was too tired to sing. I was very obedient, everyone said. I was very quiet and very sweet and very good at being the kind of child that adults liked to have around. My brothers were loud and rough and always breaking things. I was the one who sat still and listened and remembered everything. My mother used to say that I had ears like a tape recorder. She meant it as a compliment. I did not know, back then, that being a tape recorder was going to be the thing that saved me.