The Substitute Daughter They Chose Over Me Chapter 02

The Substitute Daughter They Chose Over Me Chapter 02 The Ceremony
I didn’t react. I read the message three times, my face completely still, my eyes doing the thing I had learned to do at Harmon family dinners when someone said something cruel wrapped in a smile. Just receive it. Don’t let it land on your face. They have someone watching the door. I set the phone face-down on the blanket and looked at the ceiling and breathed. Then, slowly, like a woman doing nothing more interesting than reaching for a glass of water, I turned my head toward the small window in the door. A man in a grey suit stood just outside. He wasn’t a nurse. He wasn’t a doctor. He had the particular stillness of someone paid to stand in one place and notice things, and he was looking directly at me. I looked away first. Picked up the TV remote instead. Turn it on. The screen flickered and the first thing that filled it was my father’s face. I almost dropped the remote. The Harmon Industries logo was behind him, gold on black, the same logo I had grown up drawing in the margins of my school notebooks. Gerald Harmon stood at a podium in the grand hall, the one with the marble floors and the chandelier my mother had spent six months sourcing from a supplier in Vienna. He was in his best suit. His silver hair was perfectly combed. He looked the way he always looked when something was going exactly the way he’d planned it, like the whole world was a meeting he was running on schedule. I turned the volume up slowly. Just a little. Enough. “It is with great pride,” my father said, “and with full confidence in the future of this company, that I announce the appointment of our next leader.” The camera panned. Vivian stood beside him in white. Of course she did. Vivian always knew what colour to wear. She had her hair down, soft waves, and her expression was perfectly composed, that particular look she had mastered over years, humble and luminous and just grateful enough. The cameras loved it. They always had. She was the kind of beauty that made people want to do things for her, and she had spent the better part of a decade making sure the Harmon family was at the front of that line. My father put his hand on her shoulder and smiled. I had been trying to earn that smile my entire life. “Vivian Cole Harmon,” he said, “will assume leadership of Harmon Industries, effective immediately.” The applause in the room was immediate and warm. I watched people I had known since childhood stand up from their seats for her. Business partners who had shaken my hand at a hundred events and never once remembered my name. Board members who had looked through me at meetings where I was supposed to be present. All of them, on their feet, for her. I turned the TV off. The room was very quiet. My phone buzzed. Face-up this time, I had turned it over without thinking, and Vivian’s name was on the screen. I stared at it for a second. Then I opened it. “Did you watch? Front row seat to your own funeral. How does it feel?” I didn’t type back. I just kept reading because the messages kept coming, one after another, fast, like she’d been composing them for days and was finally allowed to send them. “You want to know the best part? Your father cried when I told him how much this company means to me. CRIED, Claire. Has he ever cried for you?” Then: “The shaman was fake, by the way. I hired him myself. Found some old Harmon family legend about blood sacrifice and bloodline blessings and built the whole thing around it. Your father believed every word. Honestly it wasn’t even hard.” Then: “Daniel was easier. All I had to do was make him feel like you never really saw him. Men like that, you just have to reflect their loneliness back at them and they’ll walk through fire for you.” Then: “Your babies were never going to be the heirs anyway. I just made sure everyone believed they needed to go.” I read that last one twice. My hands were steady. I don’t know how. My hands were completely steady and my face was completely still and somewhere behind my sternum something was happening that I didn’t have a name for yet, something that was moving very slowly and had the particular weight of a door closing. Not grief. Not yet. Something older than grief. Another message came through. “I know you’re reading these. I know you’re doing that thing you do where you go completely quiet and everyone thinks you’re fine. You’re not fine. But it doesn’t matter anymore. You lost, Claire. You were always going to lose. Some people are just born for this and some people are born to clear the path for the ones who are.” I put the phone down on the blanket. Outside the window the sky had gone from grey to the flat white of mid-morning. A pigeon landed on the ledge and then left. The machines beeped. The IV dripped. The man in the grey suit was still outside my door. I thought about my babies. I let myself do that for exactly sixty seconds, just sixty, the way you hold something unbearably hot before you have to put it down. Two of them. Late enough that I had started thinking about names. Late enough that I had stood in the doorway of the room we had been converting and thought, this is real, this is actually real. Late enough that Daniel had put his hand on my stomach one evening and looked at me with something so close to genuine warmth that I had let myself believe, just for a moment, that we were going to be okay. That whatever distance had been growing between us, we were going to be okay because we were going to be parents and that would be enough to pull us back to each other. He had known even then. He must have. And he had still put his hand on my stomach and looked at me like that. I put that down too. Then I picked up my phone again and I scrolled past Vivian’s messages all the way back to the unknown number. I typed: Still reading. What do you know? Three dots appeared. Disappeared. Appeared again. Then: “Enough to get you out. But not from that room. There’s a secondary exit at the end of the east corridor, service stairwell, it’s not covered. Can you walk?” I looked at the IV in my arm. I looked at the door. The man in the grey suit had turned slightly, talking to someone I couldn’t see. I typed back “Give me ten minutes” And then, before I could think too hard about it, I pulled the IV from my arm, pressed the inside of my elbow hard against the blanket to stop the bleeding, and sat up for the first time since I had woken in this room. The floor was cold through the thin hospital socks. My legs shook. My body felt like it had been turned inside out and reassembled by someone who had never done it before. I stood up anyway.