Chapter One
Savannah
April
When I getto the house, two men are out front, hitching my fifth stepmother’s third-favorite Porsche to a tow truck.
I’ve been rehearsing what I was going to say to my dad for an hour. Now every word flees my head as I stride up to the two men—I’m too tall to be unobtrusive—and clear my throat. “Hello,” I say and give them my brightestI’m in charge of this situationsmile as I wait for them to explain themselves.
No explanation comes.
The men—there’s an older one with a mustache and a younger one with curly hair, but they’re both in identical khaki coveralls—glance at each other. Curly shrugs. “You wanna tell her?”
“Tell me what?” I ask.
“You Mr. Burke’s daughter?” Mustache asks.
“Yes, I’m Savannah.” More smile, the kind I learned early on. There was a smile for your father’s friends at a dinner partyand a smile for contentious business negotiations. Each gets you something different—acceptance, deference. Neither man does any more than glance at the other incredulously as if to say,Can you believe this?—
“Maybe you should go have a conversation with your daddy,” Curly says. Then he mutters something under his breath, almost low enough that I miss the word. That word I’ve had thrown at me over the years. That word I hate.Princess.
I didn’t grow up in a castle, just a massive house in a gated community, surrounded by ten-foot fencing as effective as any moat, staffed by people instructed to cater to my every childhood whim, with a rotating cast of stepmothers like temporary queens. Five to be precise, and the fifth one’s weekday car is currently being attached to the back of a tow truck.
I’ve been so focused on that I haven’t really examined the rest of the house. Now that I’m looking…the curtains are drawn, like the house is in mourning. The garage door is open and…
Where are the rest of the cars?
Mustache turns away from me with an eyeroll to finish hitching the car to his truck. I get a flash of the logo on the back of his coveralls. Not a repair shop, like I was expecting.Mickey’s Repos.
My heart leaps to my throat. I won’t panic, not in front of these men who clearly think I’m a spoiled littleprincess. There must be some explanation for this. My father has money. That’s been the one thing I could bank on all my life, even as he went through wives the way some people went throughrent the runwayclothes: something to be paraded out then returned.
“Thank you for letting me know,” I say to the men. I smile, with my teeth and not with my eyes, then march myself into the house before they can see the slight wobble in my chin.I will not cry.I will not.
Inside, the house is empty of furniture. No high-backed couches. No art on the walls. Just unfaded patches on the carpet, dark squares in the paint where frames once hung. Movers circulate from room to room loading our belongings onto various carts. One of them wheels out the large living room rug I used to play on as a kid, the one that has a grape juice stain on the corner that no amount of steam cleaning could ever get out. I don’t know why that gets to me, but it does. I blink tears out from my eyes. “You can’t take that one,” I say.
The mover pauses, brow furrowed in confusion, then produces a thin yellow sheet of paper, on which is written an order in grease pencil.Everything out.
Why are they taking everything? What is going on?“Never mind.” I race down the hall—they’ve left a few family pictures so that we look like ghosts haunting our own house—and into my father’s study. His desk is there at least, a big solid chestnut piece that Stepmom Three, Cherri, got. I loved Cherri. She would take me to estate sales and let me try on all the glamorous clothing that smelled like old-lady cigarettes and if the auctioneers got mad that I was climbing on the furniture, she’d simply buy it.
But Cherri had left, and the desk had stayed. There’s a sign stuck to its side. Another sheet of that thin yellow paper. My tears threaten to come back.
“Daddy?” I call, and my father emerges from the short hallway connecting his office to the back entrance to the kitchen, then takes his customary place behind his desk. When I think about my father, that’s how I always envision him: as solid as the chestnut of its wood.
I get my height from him—we’re both close to six feet—but now my father looks somehow shorter and wearier than his fifty-something years. “Sav, honey, I didn’t want you to find out like this.”
“Find out about what?” Though I can already put the pieces together: something has gone very, very wrong.
“Well, it seems we’re in something of a financial pickle.” He says it lightly, but the circles under his eyes tell a different story.
“They’re taking the cars,” I say.
“Yes.”
“And the furniture.”
“Yes.”
“Who exactly?”
