After the service, on the church steps, she’d boldly walked up to the family as they were speaking with the minister. Conrad’s eyes had cut Kylie to the quick. He’d turned scarlet, made a quick apology to the preacher and with a smile that looked like a grimace, he grabbed her elbow so hard it hurt. Propelling her away from his family, down the steps and into a private sanctuary where cherry blossoms littered the ground and the trees were beginning to leaf, he turned on her. A soft wind had tugged at the hem of Kylie’s hand-me-down dress and ruffled the graying strands of Conrad’s dark hair as the first drops of rain had begun to fall from the overcast sky.
“I think you’d better leave,” he’d whispered in an angry, don’t-even-think-about-arguing-with-me tone. His face had been flushed but his lips bloodless. “And never come back to this church again.”
“It’s a free country,” she’d shot back.
The hard finger dug deeper into her arm. “But some people are freer than others. That’s a lesson you’d better learn.”
“I just want—”
“You get nothing. I’ve paid for you and paid dearly. Now leave or I’ll make your life miserable, a living hell.”
“You’ve done that already,” she’d whispered.
“That’s where you’re wrong. If you think things are bad now, just you wait. You may as well know that if you cross me, you’ll regret it for the rest of your life. Now.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out his wallet. From within he extracted five one hundred dollar bills. “Take this and buy yourself something nice and never, do you hear me, never accost me, or my family again. I won’t be bullied or blackmailed or compromised.” He’d pushed the crisp bills into her fist and turned on his heel, plowing through the churchyard unaware that pink blossoms were falling on the shoulders of his crisp gray suit or that Kylie would never give up.
Throat tight at his rebuff, Kylie held fast to the money. She thought about going back and making a scene and tossing the bills at Conrad’s feet. But she stopped herself. That would accomplish nothing.
She couldn’t be so obvious.
To get what she wanted, she decided, she’d have to be sneaky.
And she had been.
Now, memory after memory washed over her, painful insights of her life coming into clear, sharp, and horrid focus. As an adolescent she’d felt cheated. And bitter. Hatred for Marla Cahill, her father’s little darling, had burned bright in her chest. After the confrontation at the church, Kylie had seen Marla from afar and sensed that the girl who looked so much like her was as curious as she was about her half sibling. Marla traveled around the world, learned to sail in San Francisco Bay, attended cotillions, shopped in New York and Paris, spent Christmas vacations in Acapulco or the Bahamas or Aspen. She drove her own BMW and attended a prestigious private college her father had endowed with a library.
Kylie had been given cast-offs and icy stares. But once she’d gotten a little of her own back by managing, as she looked so much like her half sister, to dress up in one of Marla’s cast-offs and charge an outrageously expensive dress at a small boutique to Conrad Amhurst. When she’d said breezily to the clerk, “Charge it to Daddy,” the eager salesgirl, her head filled with the commission she would earn on the floor length, beaded black sheath, had nodded rapidly, telling her that the dress was made for her as she’d rung up the sale.
Somehow Marla had found out, though, to Kylie’s knowledge, she’d never ratted on her half sister and had only brought it up again when they were adults, when she’d come to Kylie with her plan.
Now, as she sat on the edge of the worn couch and looked up at Nick holding her son, she felt as if the world had dropped from under her feet. Yes, she’d been a scrappy girl, a stubborn woman, a person who had clawed and fought for everything she’d ever earned. But it had come with a price.
She flopped back on the cushions and stared at the ceiling. “I don’t think I was a very good person,” she confessed to Nick. “In fact I know I wasn’t.” She let out a long, deep breath as she thought of all the years she’d been envious of her half sister, of all the nights she’d lain awake thinking Why me? Why doesn’t my father love me? Or the nights when a harder and uglier emotion had burned in her blood, pure, hot hatred for a privileged half sister who had grown up knowing a father’s love. Kylie had fed on that hatred, becoming competitive with a sibling who acted as if she didn’t know Kylie was alive.
“The truth is that I hated Marla, wanted to get back at her,” Kylie admitted, and remembered seeing Marla again here, in this very apartment.
“So what happened?” Nick asked. “How did you end up living as Alex’s wife and pretending to be her?”
“That was a fluke, I think. It only happened because I didn’t die in the wreck.” Her mind spun backward. “Marla couldn’t have children and she found out that our father had changed his will, that he was cutting her out unless she came up with an heir—a boy. Cissy wasn’t good enough.”
“That’s unheard of today.”
“Conrad Amhurst lived by his own rules, liked playing games with people,” she said. “You said so yourself but he must not have known that Marla had the hysterectomy. Anyway, Marla approached me about having the baby—her son. All I had to do was get pregnant, have the baby and give him up, to pretend that he was hers.” As she said the horrid words she cringed inside, thought she might throw up. “I know, I know, it’s godawful. I was . . . very self-involved.” Standing, she walked to Nick and pried James from his arms. Gazing on her baby’s precious face, his fuzzy hair and his tiny fingers, Kylie couldn’t believe she’d been so heartlessly cold and calculating.
“That was all you had to do?” Nick said coldly.
“Yes. And keep my mouth shut.” Holding James she couldn’t believe it of herself, but remembered all too clearly the day Marla had suggested the plan. “Marla had worked it all out, knew that she and I had the same blood type, had even talked a physician into falsifying the records.”
“Robertson.”
“Yeah, a family friend who wanted money funneled into his clinic and Bayview Hospital, as he owns a lot of stock in it.” Kylie’s stomach turned sour as she settled into her favorite recliner, the chair Marla had occupied that fateful evening. She remembered the encounter as vividly as if it had been yesterday.
“I have a proposition for you,” she’d said as Kylie, surprised to find Marla in the hallway, had opened the door and Marla, in raincoat, umbrella, sunglasses and wide-brimmed hat, had breezed inside. If she found Kylie’s habitat unappealing, she’d kept her opinion to herself.
“A proposition?”
“Yes.” Marla had set her umbrella near the door and pulled off her hat. Hair, cut similarly to Kylie’s, had billowed around her face. Marla had stared at her, sizing up her half sister. “You’ve always gotten the shaft from Dad and I think I know a way to even the score.” Her green eyes had narrowed thoughtfully, her finely arched brows knitting.
“Why would you even care?” Kylie hadn’t bought Marla’s latent concern. Not for a minute.