The Heiress They Found at Forty-Five

I was already fortyfive when they told me I was this family's real daughter. Married, with three children.

On the day they took me back, before I ever laid eyes on my elderly parents, I heard my biological brother talking with the daughter who had taken my place. "I honestly don't get why we're bringing her and those bastards back.

She's been out there for decades.

Who knows what she turned into, what kind of man she married, or what kind of runty little rejects she had with him?" "You're the only sister I have…" Bastards?

Runty little rejects? Meaning my twentyyearold son, the star the whole country knows?

Or my twin daughters, who tested into a top university's earlyentrance program for gifted students while they were still in their teens?

Chapter 1 The year I turned fortyfive, the police let me know that my birth parents had finally come looking. When I first heard it, I sat there blankly for a long while.

I'd found out I wasn't my parents' biological child when I was twenty. My adoptive parents said that when they found me I was an infant, a few days old at most.

At first they did want to help me find my family, so my information sat in the national missingpersons DNA database from then on.

But no word ever came, and eventually they adopted me through the courts. Now, all these years later, I was being told I'd been born into an oldmoney family.

Why would a family like that throw away a child? There had to be something behind it that I didn't know.

My husband was overseas on business, and my son was in the middle of his national tour.

It was my two daughters who took time off school to come with me to meet my blood relatives. "Mom!" "Mom, Mom, Mom, Mom, Mom—" Fifteenyearolds, chattering away.

We'd barely been together any time at all and already the only thing in my ears was Mom, Mom, Mom. Funny how things work out.

When our son was four, my husband and I talked about having another, ideally one of each, though two boys would have been fine too.

Then I got pregnant, went in to the doctor, and it was twins.

I spent the whole pregnancy in dread, terrified I'd end up the mother of three boys, which is no different from keeping three huskies in the house. Luckily, they were girls.

Still a handful. But cute. Three healthy, goodlooking children. Raising them took some doing, but they all turned out well.

When the oldest was little, my husband's sister, an actress, took him along to a set to play around, and a director picked him out for a kid's part.

After that the offers kept coming. He liked it, so my husband and I let him run with it. No harm in trying a lot of things.

Later he picked up other skills, and now he sings, dances, and acts. As for his two little sisters, they took after their father and me. Smart.

The kind of smart that's obviously ahead of everyone their age.

They skipped grades from early on, and now they're both in a top university's earlyentrance program for gifted students. "Ms.

Wilder, please get in." A driver sent by my birth parents. The car was a RollsRoyce. The girls, Nadia and Sabine, had ridden in cars in that price range often enough.

They still looked around, excited, and jabbered at each other about it. "Mom." Nadia poked me. "You're about to meet your birth parents. I hear they're loaded.

Aren't you excited?" "…" Kids. They'd been buried in schoolwork for ages, and this was a rare chance to get out and have some fun.

They were going to the Hargate house the way they'd go anywhere as guests. But from an adult's point of view, if this mattered to them, they wouldn't have sent only a driver.

Chapter 2 My husband, Donovan Merrick, texted to ask whether I'd reached the Hargates yet, and sent over some background on the family. He also sent several photos. Handbags.

He asked which ones I didn't like. The ones I didn't like wouldn't be in the gift he brought home. Clearly neither side was treating this reunion as much of an event.

Granted, if it had happened in my early twenties, it probably would have stirred something in me. But I was fortyfive.

My adoptive parents raised me from infancy, and right up until they died, one after the other, nobody ever came to claim me.

I belonged completely to another family by then, and I'd built a family of my own. Chasing down the family I came from had weighed less and less in my life as the years went by.

We arrived at the Hargate estate. My daughters and I got out, and the Hargates' butler came to meet us.

There was something startled in the way he looked at me, but he didn't say anything about it. "The other Miss Hargate. This way, please." An interesting way to put it.

Clearly this house already had a Miss Hargate, one who had been called that for over forty years. Which made me the other one.

More interesting still, the direction he was leading us wasn't the main drawing room. It looked like a side sitting room.

Before we got close, voices reached us. "I honestly don't get why the old man and the old lady had to bring her and those bastards back. She's been out there for decades.

Who knows what she turned into, what kind of man she married, or what kind of runty little rejects she had with him?" "Having you as my sister is enough for me.

And if this gets out, God knows what people will make up about the Hargates—" The butler cleared his throat. The talking stopped dead.

I was shown in to meet my blood relatives properly. There were three of them. My fortyyearold brother, Kyler Hargate.

I'd known what he looked like already, and in person he had exactly the look of a man raised with money.

Beside him was the daughter who had taken my place, Verena, elegant the way most wives in that circle are elegant.

The last one, the young woman sitting next to Verena, had to be her daughter, early twenties. Verena. That was the name I was supposed to have. It isn't a bad name.

I just don't have any attachment to it. The swap wasn't her doing, of course. It was her birth mother's doing.

The way I heard it, the woman had been a friend of my mother Estelle's, decades ago.

While Estelle was happily married and carrying her first daughter, the friend's family went bankrupt, her lover walked out on her, and she was pregnant.

Probably out of some furious determination that her own child would stay on top of the world, she had the baby. A girl, as it happened. How exactly she made the swap, I don't know.

But she took me, and she had no intention of raising me. She dumped me. Back then, leaving a baby girl somewhere and walking away was easy enough.

And even now, with the truth out, none of it helps. Fortyfive years. More than half a life, gone. Verena's birth mother emigrated years ago and died a few years back.

Their eyes moved over me and my two daughters, taking us in. I could see the shock in all three of them clearly.

They'd never looked into me, so naturally they'd expected an unremarkable middleaged woman.

The way they saw it, family or not, after decades out in the world I was bound to be ordinary and coarse, or else bitter and grasping. I wasn't.

Chapter 3 I'm quite satisfied with myself. "Excuse me. Are Mr. and Mrs. Hargate not here?" I asked calmly, in the middle of all that mutual appraisal.

I did want to see my birth parents more than I wanted to see my siblings. The two of them had dropped the subject, but they didn't seem to care much whether I'd heard it.

That bonedeep arrogance. I'd seen it in plenty of people before. When I was young, back when my business was just getting off the ground.

These days very few people look at me, or at my children, that way. "Our parents aren't well.

They're still at the assistedliving facility today, but they should be on their way back by now." It was my brother speaking.

He looked at me and finally introduced himself. "I'm Kyler Hargate.

Your brother, by blood." Then he introduced the others. "This is my sister Verena, and her only daughter, Odile." There was something indescribably strange about the whole scene.

After maybe two seconds of stalemate, Verena was the one who moved. She stood, came over, took my hands, and said with great feeling, "Amara.

You've had such a hard time all these years." My eyes went to her wellkept hands and the diamond on one of them, a stone the size of a robin's egg.

By comparison, the wedding band on my left ring finger didn't have so much as a diamond chip on it. Pitifully plain. A hard time, no.

But thinking about everything behind my own history did leave a bad taste. "Odile, this is your Aunt Amara and your cousins.

Say hello," the woman holding my hands told her daughter. And the young woman, dressed just as immaculately as her mother, said reluctantly, "Aunt Amara." She wasn't looking at me.

Her arrogance was, if anything, worse than her mother's. Simple enough. Her mother was the one who'd been swapped in. She wasn't.

The Hargates were rich by any measure in that city, and Verena's husband naturally came from a family of equal standing. Kyler counted as the one running the Hargates now.

He said, "We'll have a welcome dinner for you tonight. The butler will take you up to rest in a bit." Except he kept me on my own in the side room a few minutes longer.

My brother said, "Whatever happened, it's in the past. My sister is a victim too.

If our parents hadn't gotten it into their heads this year to buy a few of those home DNA kits and have the whole family do them, we'd never have known anything was wrong." He said that once they learned the daughter who'd been at their side all those years wasn't theirs, my birth parents went straight to the police and filed a report.

And because my information had been sitting in that database all along, it hadn't taken long to reach me. The search wasn't hard at all. It was easy, even.

Compared to other families who've lost a child. "My sister has been in this house since the day she was born. She's been a Hargate for decades, and she's Mrs.

Clayborne on top of that. The one who did wrong was her birth mother, not her." The two of them were close, clearly.

I smiled at him and asked one question. "If she's a victim, what did she lose in those fortyfive years?" Kyler opened his mouth and couldn't come up with anything. "I'm the one who got thrown away and nearly died." That was all I said.

It was far from all of it.

She'd enjoyed a life of luxury that belonged to someone else, taken someone else's family for her own, and gotten an elite education and an enviable marriage out of it.

Fortyfive years as a cuckoo in the nest. How long is a life, anyway? Chapter 4 And how many people don't make it to fortyfive?

If those years had left me drifting and destitute, a truth this late would have been torture twice over, in body and in mind. Does my good luck cancel out what was done to me?

I met my birth parents in the early evening. The moment I saw them, I understood the flicker of shock on that brother's and sister's faces earlier.

I look a great deal like my mother, Estelle. I could see my own face twentyodd years from now in hers. "Amara.

My daughter." Her hand trembled against my cheek as she and my father took me in. The resemblance alone was nearly enough to settle what we were to each other.

It was a sentimental scene. As little as I cared, something sour still rose up in me. They were curious about my past, Estelle especially.

There was some nameless hope on that finely lined face.

Hope that the friend who caused all of this had placed me with a good family. "My adoptive parents found me on a back road out past the edge of town," I said calmly. "I was almost gone." The faces around me changed.

Evidently Verena's birth mother had never planned on my surviving to come back and make trouble for her daughter. Verena and her daughter weren't in the room.

I gave a brief account of my life. Nothing much worth mentioning. Adopted, school, work, marriage, children, all in order.

To them it sounded like a fairly ordinary life. "Amara, I know you've suffered out there. But this isn't something we can let out.

There's no sense handing people a joke at this family's expense." Randall Hargate, my father, was speaking. "Verena may not be ours by blood, but she's been our daughter for decades, and she's Mrs.

Clayborne now. Her birth mother is dead. If this gets out, it hurts both families." He paused, then said, "Publicly, we'd say we took a liking to you and made you our goddaughter.

Bring your children back too. Your mother and I will make it up to you in other ways.

How does that sound?" Before I could respond, my older daughter spoke up beside me. "If you weren't planning to claim my mom, why go looking for her at all?" Her tone was not polite.

The two of them had been muttering to each other since the afternoon, plainly unimpressed with this family. Kyler's voice cut in. "Adults are talking. Nobody asked you.

What kind of manners is that?" He looked down on my daughter. Which is to say, he looked down on me. It wasn't often that anyone criticized the girls' manners.

Sabine spoke up for her sister. "You do something rotten and we're not allowed to say so?

My mom is the victim, and you're protecting the daughter of the person who did it." "Amara Wilder, is this how you raise your daughters?" Kyler couldn't take it.

He stood up and glared at me. I looked back at him evenly. "My daughters have excellent manners. They don't go mute while their mother is being insulted. And you?

In what capacity are you correcting my daughters?

Uncle Kyler?" "I was never raised by my birth parents," I said, turning to Estelle and Randall. "And my daughters have never had a moment of your care.

Even as guests who came to your door today, there's hardly any reason for us to be lectured by someone leaning on being an elder, is there?" A few words, and all three of them went white, then red.

Chapter 5 "Kyler. Apologize to your sister." Randall glared at his son. Past forty and being told by his father to apologize to someone.

The heir to the family didn't seem able to stomach it. "What did I say that was wrong? All of this is somebody else's fault.

Aren't we the victims here?" Kyler said coldly. "If she's this full of resentment, why come back at all?" Why come back. Good question. I didn't press the apology.

I turned to my socalled parents instead and asked, seriously, "What exactly did you mean by making it up to me?" Kyler's expression said there it is, and the contempt surfaced again.

The old couple, still elegant in their age, stayed calm enough. Estelle produced two cards. "Amara, there's two hundred fifty thousand on this one, to use however you like.

The other is an authorizeduser card on my account, for your everyday spending.

And if you'd like, you can move back into the house, or we'll arrange a place for you." Two hundred fifty thousand, a card on her account, a house.

For an ordinary working family, that might well have been a sincere offer. But you could tell from Kyler's face that it was nothing to him. Two hundred fifty thousand.

Less than the Rolls that had driven me here. Never mind next to what they'd spent on their other two children.

They found no trace of delight on my face, and none of the reaction they expected on my twins'.

I smiled. "When I hear you'll make it up to me, I assume it means something close to what your other children got.

Shares in the company, for instance." Kyler couldn't sit still for that. "Amara Wilder, don't get greedy.

You walk in the door and you're already asking for equity?" "Isn't it what should have been mine to begin with?" I asked. "I hear Verena has five percent.

Shouldn't I have at least as much?" "Dad, Mom, you see? I was right.

She came back for Hargate money." That amused me. "If you don't care about money, why are you in such a hurry?" "You—" From what I'd learned, the Hargate Group was still under Randall's control.

He hadn't signed over all his shares or his voting power to his son. Verena had never been the one the old couple had in mind to take over.

She held a title at the Hargate Group, but it was an empty one, and nearly everyone assumed the company would go mainly to Kyler.

My coming back meant one more person to divide things with. Verena had no standing to object. Kyler did.

When their own interests are involved, nobody sits still. "That's enough," Randall said at last. "Amara, take these for now. The rest can't be arranged overnight.

Let's have a welcome dinner for you and the children first." That was his way of closing the subject. He hadn't said yes and he hadn't said no.

He'd hung something just out of reach to keep me itching for it. The Hargates' welcome dinner was nothing more than a private family dinner.

Just as they'd said: they had no intention of making my identity public, which meant Verena's wouldn't be made public either.

People get old, and getting back a child of their own blood becomes something they cling to. Besides, their granddaughters and I didn't look like anything to be embarrassed about.

But wanting your real daughter and her children at your knee while keeping peace in the house? Nobody gets both. I looked around at who had come.

Chapter 6 Besides my birth parents, there were Kyler and his family of three, his wife and their son, who was in middle school, and Verena's family of three.

Her husband, Ives Clayborne, the man who ran the Clayborne Group, had come as well. The rest was me and my two girls.

Neither of them was shy, and even knowing they weren't welcome, they were perfectly at ease. Some of that was temperament, and some of it was how they'd grown up.

The Hargates had chosen to protect Verena's standing partly for appearances, and partly because they had to consider the Claybornes, family by marriage for twentyodd years.

Verena and her husband were both in their forties, their interests bound together deeply, with a daughter besides.

Whether or not there'd been feeling in the marriage, matched standing had certainly been considered.

Announcing now that the wife of all these years wasn't a Hargate by blood would humiliate both families.

So, weighing it all, they'd decided to shortchange the daughter they'd just gotten back and felt nothing for.

At fortyfive, however sentimental you are, it's hard to swallow talk about blood and family the way you would have young, and just as hard to feel anything deep for them.

Put simply, I was harder to fool. The table was interesting too. It was a lavish spread. Everyone kept up a ridiculous peace, on the pretext of a happy occasion.

Mostly a group of middleaged people humoring two old ones. Kyler and his wife obviously didn't want me there.

Their son and Verena's daughter were close and sat together, clearly allied. As for Verena's parentage, it really didn't matter much.

Even she seemed certain her position wouldn't get any worse for not being a Hargate by blood.

Which meant none of them cared much about me, the supposed real daughter. "Amara, I hear you have a husband and a son as well. Where are they?

The first time the whole family meets is no small thing. Why didn't they come with you?" That was Verena.

I stopped what I was doing and found everyone else looking at me too. "They're both busy with work.

Neither could get away," I said. "Work?" Kyler's wife, Portia, sounded surprised. "Amara, I heard your son is only twenty. Already working?

He doesn't even have a bachelor's degree, does he?" "He doesn't." That was the truth. The kid was a sophomore.

He was busy working, and the leave he'd taken from school was long enough that I half expected them to drop him.

I saw one of them smile in a way I couldn't read. "Still, there's no need for a boy that age to be out working.

Why not bring him into the family company, find him a position?" Verena's daughter, the Clayborne girl who'd been quiet all evening, spoke up. "Doesn't Uncle Kyler's company require a bachelor's degree at minimum these days?" "Not for everything.

Some positions don't look at degrees." Kyler played along with his niece, and they both glanced at me. "Though I don't know whether Amara would think those positions were good enough.

If not, we could find something for your husband too." I looked toward the Hargate parents at the head of the table.

They scolded him, a couple of words, and that was all it amounted to. "No need," I said, with a cool little smile. "They're doing just fine as they are." That subject ended, and another one started