The Heiress by Rachel Hawkins
CHAPTER ONE
Jules
There should be some kind of warning when your life is about to change forever.
I don’t need a siren or bloodred skies or anything, but I still think there should be just the littlest bit of … I don’t know, a frisson. A feeling under your skin and inside your bones when something fundamental shifts, when the ground underneath your feet grows suddenly unstable.
And you should definitely not be wearing a fucking bonnet when it happens.
But that’s exactly what I’m wearing the September evening I come home and Camden drops the bomb that’s the beginning and the ending of everything.
Not just a bonnet, I should add, but also a black dress and white apron that are supposed to say “pioneer woman,” but instead just make me look Amish, plus a pair of stiff leather boots that rub my ankles raw and pinch my toes. It’s all part of my costume at the living history museum where I work in Golden, Colorado.
You know the place.
I mean, even if you don’t specifically know Homestead Park, you know the kind of place. Beautifully constructed re-creations of old farmhouses, barns, general stores. Docile farm animals in pastures, the mountains rising around us, with only the whooshing of cars on the nearby highway and the black rectangles of cell phones lifted to capture anything even vaguely Instagrammable as signs that you haven’t somehow time-traveled to the nineteenth century.
Manifest Destiny Disneyland.
That’s where I work Tuesday through Saturday, playing the part of “Mrs. Hiram Burch,” a farmer’s wife who tells school groups and tourists about the hardships on the Western Frontier, how people lived Back Then, all of that.
All in all, it’s not the worst job, and it’s certainly one of the few that actually lets me use the few semesters of theater classes I took nearly a decade ago, but it isn’t without its drawbacks.
“Do you have any idea,” I call to my husband as I enter the front door of our little house, a house we’ll leave in just a few days and never see again, “how hard it is to talk about churning butter without saying the words ‘cream’ or ‘pole’?”
There’s no response, but I know he’s here. I saw his car in the driveway, and this house is so small it would be impossible for him not to hear me. “Three entire junior highs at the park today. Like, nine thousand prepubescent boys, and there I am, trying to figure out how to do my job as an ‘interpreter of the past’ without getting sexually harassed. Real banner day for Mrs. Burch!”
Still no answer.
Frowning, I hang up my keys on the little hook by the door and move farther down the hallway.
There’s nowhere to hide in this house. It’s more or less a box. Front door opens onto long hallway. Directly to the left? Living room. Across from that? A small closet where we’ve managed to store most of our winter gear. Just past the closet is the kitchen, and if you keep going down the hall, you’ll find a tiny bathroom and, finally, our bedroom.
I’m beginning to wonder if Cam is sick and laid up in bed, but as I pass the kitchen, I spot him sitting at the small wooden table we picked up from a flea market last year.
His back is to the door, but even without seeing his face, I know something has happened. Cam never hangs out in the kitchen, and never like this, sitting stiff in his seat, his elbows on the table, his hands clenched in front of him.
That’s when I realize it’s Wednesday, the day Camden usually tutors at the junior college until seven. It’s only just past five thirty now, and there’s real worry in my voice when I lay my hand on his shoulder and say, “Cam?”
Camden turns, his hand automatically coming up to cover mine, and while there’s still a trio of wrinkles over the bridge of his nose, and the knuckles on the hand still on the table are white, he smiles. It’s quick and distracted, but it’s something.
His gaze moves over me.
“If I’d known Goody Proctor was haunting this house, I would’ve tried to rent something else,” he says, and I tweak his earlobe.
“I didn’t feel like changing at the park,” I reply, moving past him to the refrigerator where I take a can of Diet Coke. “And I assumed I would be free from mockery in my own home. I take enough shit from the eighth graders, you know.”
Another half-assed smile, then his eyes drift to his phone. It’s nearly on the other side of the table, far enough away that he’d have to get out of his seat and really reach to retrieve it.
I sit across from him, the phone just inches from my soda when I set it down, and I study the man I married in a California courtroom nearly a decade ago.
You need to know that I’m not one of those people who constantly puts up gushing Facebook posts about my husband. You’ve seen those, I know you have. Probably talked shit about them to your friends.
Molly from high school, her arm around some dude named Rushton, lips smushed against his cheek, a long caption about how happy she is to be “doing life” with “this guy.”
That’s never been me.
For one, Cam doesn’t even have social media, and for another, there’s always been something about him––about us––that feels private.
Special, even.
It’s been that way from the moment we met.
You don’t expect to meet the love of your life at 25 Cent Wing Night at a college bar. Or hell, maybe you’re more optimistic than I am, and so you go to every “BOGO Beer Wednesday” and “No Cover Charge For 36C and Up This Weekend!” special that’s advertised assuming you’re going to meet the One.
Me, I just really wanted some cheap wings. I’d moved to California from Florida after three semesters of community college for the usual reason pretty girls leave small towns and head west—to be a star. Thing was, the only person I knew out there was an acquaintance from high school, Emma, and since she’d lived in San Bernardino, I’d landed there first.
Bloom where you’re planted, people like to say, but they ignore the fact that planted is sometimes just a nice way of saying stuck, and I’d definitely fallen into that category.
So I was juggling two jobs back then, waiting tables at one of those nightmare chain places that makes you wear a lot of buttons on your black apron while also spending a few afternoons every week watching a couple of kids who lived in my apartment complex. I didn’t charge their mom much, given that she was working just as hard as I was. Sometimes when I watched her come in with greasy sacks of fast food, already cold from her long drive over from the next town, I wished I were able to say, “Hey, it’s fine, you don’t need to pay me.”
But that wasn’t my life.
So I took her twenty bucks and tried to make it last, and that was why I was at Senor Pollo’s on a Thursday night when I was just twenty-one, the same night that Camden was tending bar.
I’d ordered a water—couldn’t afford wings and a beer, even when the wings were cheap—but from the way my gaze had followed a couple of pints of Stella he pulled for another table, he must’ve known what I really wanted.
A few seconds later, a frosty and perfectly poured glass was sitting in front of me, and he’d flashed me that little smile I would come to know so well, the one that could almost be a smirk on another guy. “On the house,” he’d said quietly. I’d noticed then, as he’d looked over at me, that his eyes were two different colors.
One was gray-blue, the other a clear golden brown that made me think of high-end bourbon. It’s a genetic thing, heterochromia, and because Camden was adopted, he has no idea if he got it from his mother or his father. Sometimes I wonder if any children we might have will inherit it, too, will look at me with that same patchwork gaze that always seems to see everything.