From Prison to Power: The Heiress Strikes Back

Three years after my family threw me out, my mother walked into the shop to have a pair of shoes made.

I was the one who knelt to take her old ones off.

I had the first buckle half undone before she caught my wrist.

Ellie. Her voice thinned out. What are you doing down there?

Like it had never once crossed her mind that the daughter she used to dress like a doll could kneel at a stranger's feet and make it look like nothing.

I let her pull me up.

She wanted to open a house account. Twenty-five thousand to start. No, whatever I thought was right, she said, already reaching for her card. Money was the one thing she still knew how to put in my hands.

I ran it. I thanked her.

At the door she stopped, and the bright thing in her face went small and careful.

"Ellie," she said. "Do you still hate me?"

I gave her my best customer smile and held the door.

Then I went and asked my manager to move me to another branch.

I stopped hating her a long time ago. I just never want to be an Ashford again.

Chapter 1

My mother's car was already at the curb when I came off shift, hazards blinking through the rain.

She rolled the window down. "Ellie. Let me take you home."

The app showed a surge and a wait with no end to it. So I got in.

Life had taught me one rule worth keeping. Never turn down a chance to be comfortable. Turn it down, and you pay for it the rest of your life.

Sal was still her driver. He grinned at me in the mirror. "Miss Eleanor looks different."

"Steadier," he said. "More like Mr. Ashford."

"Just drive, Sal."

This was the car Sal had driven my father in for years before he ever drove me. None of us said the name out loud. It still went in like a splinter, even sideways.

A slow piece of classical music came up through the speakers. My mother looked like she had something to say. Then she thought better of it and sank back against the seat, her face going dark.

I waited for a gap in the music. "Just Eleanor, Sal. I haven't been the young Miss of this house in a long time."

Sal kept grinning. Whatever my mother made of that, it didn't touch him.

"It's only a name," he said. "I'm too old to learn a new one."

His voice was warm enough that I almost smiled.

I was fourteen the year my mother brought home the girl she was sponsoring.

Her name was Crystal then. When Mom found out she'd lost both her parents, she gave the girl our last name, and a first name built to rhyme with mine.

I was Eleanor. She was made to match.

And everyone said the new girl was so poised, so careful with people. No wonder my mother loved her. Next to her I was spoiled, arrogant, raised worse than the charity case Mom had taken in.

I was a teenager with a teenager's pride. I wasn't about to let the new girl outshine me.

So I tore into the servants who whispered, one by one, until I was sick of my own voice. I dropped onto the sofa to catch my breath, and caught my mother instead, watching me from the corner with her mouth set in disgust.

The new girl stood tucked against her side in this season's clothes, bright-eyed, glowing.

I knew. I knew it was her.

After she came, everything I did got the same word stamped on it. Cruel. A bully.

I'd been kind to her at the start. But she always went quiet at the right moment, hedged, looked like she was swallowing something brave. Inside a week the whole house was saying the Ashford girl looked down on the poor one.

I swore to my mother. I argued. I broke down and held onto her and asked, "Mom, why won't you believe me?"

She only sighed.

"Ellie. When are you going to grow up?"

Chapter 2

She'd decided I was a waste of a girl. Somewhere along the way she forgot she used to say the opposite. Whatever Ellie does, she'd told me once, your mother will stand behind you.

I wanted to tear the sweet mask off her and show my mother what was underneath.

Instead what came out of me was, "What are you, that you get to wear that?"

It was a one-a-season piece. Nobody put it on without my mother's blessing. The favoritism was already sitting there in plain view, and I was too stupid to stop swinging at a fight I'd already lost.

After that day, the new girl got a new name.

Pearl.

The Ashfords' one and only Pearl.

And I was the family joke, beginning to end.

Two people stayed on my side. My father and Sal.

My father was always working, always guilty about my mother, and even when he knew I'd been wronged, all he knew how to do was hand me more money.

It only made her despise me harder. Proof I'd do anything for cash.

Sal had been my father's driver first. After word got around that poor Pearl was being mistreated, my mother put Sal on Pearl instead, so the whole house could see exactly who the Ashfords stood behind.

Pearl worked him for months. He never gave her a thing. Never said a word past what the job needed.

But he'd catch me on my way out. "Cold front coming, Miss. Wear something warmer."

He'd see my face and try, "You're the madam's own blood, Miss Eleanor. She still loves you, you know."

Did she.

I'd stopped believing it a long time before.

I held onto the kindness anyway.

There was a whole sky of contempt parked over my head, and Sal was the one man working a crack in it to let a little light through.

* * *

The car slowed. I knew the street. We were close to where I lived now.

"Stop here, Sal. The alley's a nightmare to get into and worse to get out of."

My mother came out of her daze and looked around like she'd just surfaced from somewhere deep.

"Ellie. You you live here?"

I smiled and kept it polite. "I've taken up enough of your evening, Mrs. Ashford. Thank you for the ride."

It landed somewhere it hurt. "Do you really have to talk to me like that?"

I dipped my head.

Then I opened my umbrella and walked into the rain on my own.

* * *

There was a new contact request waiting when I got in.

The name on it: Mom.

The manager had handed out my number. Mrs. Ashford liked my service, he said, and she'd put a quarter million on the account.

Keep a client like that happy, Ellie, and top seller is yours.

I sat with it a while. Then I thought about Tess in that hospital bed, and the bill nobody was paying, and I accepted.

Me: [Thank you so much for your support, Mrs. Ashford!]

The bright little nothing of a service rep. It was the most I had for her.

The dots came up. They stayed.

She was typing something long. I didn't have a speech in me tonight, so I put the phone face-down and went to shower.

When I came back, the bubbles were gone.

A whole column of messages, written and pulled back before I ever saw a word of them.

One line had survived.

Mom: [Your father's memorial is in two days. Will you come?]

That one line bought me a night of nightmares. The same scene on a loop.

Pearl, out of nowhere, dying of leukemia. She needed my marrow to live.

And I was pregnant.

I wouldn't give up the baby.

I'd give up the Ashfords, the name, every last cent of it, and vanish off the face of the earth before I gave up the baby.

Chapter 3

But the night before I was supposed to disappear, my mother sat me down to talk.

She talked about how I'd hated long hair as a girl, and how she'd wanted a little princess anyway. How I'd turned up at her birthday in a rainbow wig and gotten scolded for showing off, and woken her at midnight in tears, because all I'd wanted was to make her happy.

She talked about the year my grades went bad, and the afternoon I overheard someone say she didn't know how to raise a child, and how I stopped sleeping until I brought home a perfect score.

I'd gone thin doing it. I'd rested my sharp little chin on her shoulder, and she'd said, my shoulder hurts, and so does my heart.

She looked at me like something she'd lost a long time ago.

"Ellie. Do you still love me, the way you did when you were small?"

"Of course. But Mom. Do you still love me?"

"...Of course."

If I'd been able to read the thing that moved behind her eyes in that low light, I never would have taken the glass from her hand.

I went under in her arms. Her fingers stayed soft on my cheek, brushing the tears as they fell.

I woke up to the cold version of everything.

My baby was gone. Taken while I was under. I never saw how. But I knew whose hand had passed me the glass, and that was enough.

That baby had been so hard to make. Round after round of it, needles and waiting and hope, all so I'd be good enough for the Lockes. Gone in a night, and any chance of another gone with it.

From that day, she had one name in my head.

That woman.

* * *

In the empty hospital room I had exactly one thought. Someone was going to pay for my child.

I went back alone, in a thin gown, the first cold of autumn cutting through it.

They were throwing Pearl a birthday party.

I took a baseball bat to that enormous house and brought most of it down. If security hadn't pulled me off, I'd have gone for their heads.

I screamed until there was nothing left in me. Whatever was in my face made that woman stumble back a step, until Pearl caught her arm and held her up.

They talked it over and put me away. A private facility. A nice phrase for it.

If my father hadn't come home when he did, I'd have walked out of that place with nothing left in my head.

Or not walked out at all.

He came back with the truth.

The leukemia, the marrow, the whole dying act. Pearl had written every line of it herself. And she'd aimed the entire thing at my fianc.

Beckett Locke and I had been promised to each other since we were children. Then Locke clean energy went up like a rocket and left the Ashfords far behind, and there was nothing better left to marry into anywhere. No matter how hard that woman pushed Pearl into the right rooms, she'd never find her a better match than that.

So Pearl had gotten quietly close to Beckett a long time before.

And me, I'd done round after round of IVF to win over his mother. The key into the Locke family, finally cut.

Now the truth was out, and that woman just held Pearl and stroked her hair.

"Then let Pearl marry into the Lockes," she said. "What am I supposed to do, walk away from a connection like that?"

"As for Ellie."

She thought of something that seemed to cost her, glanced at me, looked away.

"The house across the city is yours. Move there today."

I'd grown up in this one. She was handing me a cold one on the other side of town.

I didn't want to stay in that family either.

But to let it all slide by, light as nothing? Not a chance in this life.

Chapter 4

My father blew up about it. That woman just whimpered.

"What am I supposed to do? I finally have a daughter as sweet as Pearl. You want me to lose her too?"

"You're never home. How am I supposed to manage her by myself?"

"If I only get to keep one daughter, it's going to be Pearl."

"You'd throw Pearl out? Then I go where she goes."

In the end, my father was the one who folded.

The day I left, he said, "Don't hold it against your mother. She'll come around."

He didn't know I held it against him too. So I didn't say goodbye.

After that I sat in the dark like something with scales, and watched.

I watched Pearl marry Beckett Locke. I watched that woman beam through the whole wedding.

I heard he gave the Ashford girl a yacht, and they threw a party loud enough to carry across the water. The Ashfords and the Lockes braided their businesses together. The press called Pearl their lucky girl.

And then my father died.

They called it an accident. I know what an accident is. That wasn't one.

I was across the city when it happened. By the time I understood anything, he was gone, and the story already had my name in it. The unstable one. The daughter who'd taken a bat to the house. It wasn't far from there to something worse, not with Locke lawyers writing it and Locke money behind it.

Seven years.

His last words were, Don't blame Ellie. I never worked out why he'd waste them on me.

And somewhere in the first of those years, in a place full of people Locke had paid for, I came closer to not walking out than anyone ever put on paper.

I remember every face, though. I keep the count.

* * *

I woke with my hair stuck to my neck with sweat.

I still hadn't answered the message.

I didn't know how to stand in front of him. For seven years they'd called me the girl who killed her own father, and I'd let them, because the truth was worse and I still couldn't prove it.

In prison I used to lie awake turning it over. Not guilt. Something closer to panic. The whole world had lined up behind Pearl, my father was dead, and I was the one left wearing it.

Funny, almost.

On my way out, the showy car was sitting at the mouth of the alley.

Sal leaned out the window. "Miss Eleanor. Here to take you to work."

I could never say no to Sal.

Then there was Mrs. Ashford in the back seat, eyes shut, and my feet stopped.

I opened the front passenger door instead.

Chapter 5

Rush hour had us crawling. Sal sighed at the windshield. "It's a long way, Miss Eleanor. Where you live to where you work."

I smiled and didn't tell him the rest.

When I first got out, I had nothing. Then Tess, the big soft-hearted idiot, took one look at me and gave me a place to land.

A place to land meant a damp basement on the wrong edge of the city. It took weeks to find a job that didn't flinch at my record. Back then the bus alone ate four hours of my day, there and back. This was the easy version.

Thinking about Tess, my chest went heavy. I hadn't been to see her in too long. After work, no excuses. The hospital.

The rain started up again, thin and steady.

"Ellie," my mother said, out of nowhere. "Why does this city get so much rain?"

Her knee was hurt once. Rain makes it ache.

What she didn't know was that in prison, the people Locke paid had come close to finishing me, and now the soft gray rain of this city went into me like a row of needles.

I let it pass like I hadn't heard.

"Blanket, ma'am?" Sal said.

The car went quiet. I could feel her looking at the back of my head, warm and steady, and for one ridiculous second I thought she was waiting for me to be the one to reach for the blanket.

As if. My concern wasn't worth a tenth of Pearl's. She'd told me so herself, in those exact words.

After a long while, she let out a long breath.

"No," she said.

At the red light Sal kept glancing at me, like he had something he couldn't get out.

I couldn't stand the air in that car. "Drop me at the next corner, Sal. I'll cut through."

"Ellie." My mother's voice came rough, like she'd been crying where no one could see.

"Your father's memorial. Will you come?"

I turned then. She was sitting up straight, not slouched back the way she used to ride. Her eyes were red around the rims.

"I have to work," I said.

I didn't have to work. I just still hadn't learned how to stand in a room with those people.

She wouldn't let it go. "Whatever a day off costs you, I'll make it up. Go, Ellie. Your father misses you."

"Stay with me. I don't want to be alone this year."

Sal had one ear turned back, waiting on my answer too. It took me a second to be sure of it.

"I'm not coming," I said. "Pearl will keep you company."

I pulled the door open. Cold wind and fine rain hit my face, and right as I stepped out, I heard it. The crying she was trying to hold down.

"She still won't forgive me."

"Sal. Did you hear. After all of it, she won't even call me Mom. Not once."

* * *

The manager was waiting for me at the shop.

"Ellie. What kind of dumb luck are you on? Everybody walking in lately is loaded."

I didn't know whether to laugh. I turned to go in and stopped cold.

Pearl.

Same soft, blameless face she always wore. "Sis. It's been so long."

The manager lit up. "Miss Ashford's a major account, and she asked for you by name. Your numbers are locked for the month. No. For the year."

Chapter 6

I thought about the money and pushed the rest of it down.

Money's the biggest thing in the world, Tess liked to say. And Tess was still in a hospital bed, with a bill that wasn't going to pay itself.

I bowed, the way the job wanted. "Hello, Miss Ashford. Happy to help you today."

A row of our newest pairs was already laid out in front of her.

"Would you like a model to try these, or try them yourself?"

After the greeting, Pearl said nothing more. Just a smile with nothing behind it.

I asked again.

Nothing. She lifted her chin, and there it was at her throat. Round, heavy pearls.

"Your necklace is beautiful," I said, and meant it.

Something switched on in her.

"Mom gave it to me at my birthday party. She had one for you too, you know. But my mother-in-law didn't want us in matching pieces, so I ended up with both."

"Although. When I got them home, I saw they only look alike. Yours, well." She tipped her head, hunting for the kind word. "Maybe not the real thing. But still pretty. Do you want it back, sis? I've been keeping it so safe for you."

I crouched to change her shoe.

I heard all of it, shook my head, and clicked the buckle home.

"This one's new, but it's built as a tribute to our house classic. Same lines. We only changed the leather."

"It wears easier. Take a few steps and feel it."

She stood. "Is it pretty, sis?"

I said it was. That was the job.

She waved a hand. "Then this pair is my gift to you. Someone raised in nice things can't help wanting them, can she. Even working a register."

I let my eyes move down the row and picked up a different pair.

"If you're buying me a gift, make it this one."

Better color for everything, easier to keep, and the part that mattered, a fatter margin.

The surprise crossed her face first. The contempt came right behind it. "Of course."

"Anyway, sis, Mom and I have a lunch booked. Come, if you're free? We haven't sat down to a meal together once since Dad."

I turned it down, polite.

She didn't push. "Probably for the best. We don't like the same food, and Mom always lets me have my way. I'd hate for you to sit there with nothing you can eat and no strength left for your other customers this afternoon."

I nodded, easy.

"Let's settle up here. We'll open an account while we're at it. For someone of your standing, Miss Ashford, shall I just put a hundred and fifty thousand on to start?"

I keyed it in before she could answer.

"Wait. Hold on."

I looked up like I didn't follow, and dropped my voice to spare her. "I think you've handed me the wrong card. This one won't cover it."

Color climbed her neck. "Just the shoes is fine. I didn't bring the big card with me."

"Of course."

I rang up the shoes. Then, like it had only just come back to me:

"Miss Ashford. Mrs. Ashford put a quarter million on the account here yesterday."

"I should have asked. Did you want to put this on her card?"

Chapter 7

"Oh?" Pearl said. "I thought Mom couldn't stand the shoes in here. I only came to bring my sister a gift."

"Then you don't know Mrs. Ashford at all," I said. "The same way you don't know that even if she stopped loving me tomorrow, she'd never hand me the cheaper necklace."

Pearl pulled a big, wounded, puzzled face. Then she nodded, like it had all just become clear.

"I had no idea you'd studied jewelry, sis."

"Then it must be me with no eye for it. Or maybe a few million in family jewels just wasn't enough to learn from. Not like seven years inside. That broadens a girl."

"Let me just call Mom."

She kept her eyes on me the whole time, and put the phone on speaker.

"Mom. You remember the necklaces from last year's party? Settle something for me. Mine or sis's, which one's worth more?"

The line crackled. My mother didn't catch it the first time, so Pearl said it again.

"Ellie's necklace?"

Her voice went soft, somewhere far back. "Ellie's was my mother's, from when I was a girl. It took the top price of the night at auction."

"After Ellie was born I stopped wearing it. I wanted to save it for her. She has the skin for pearls."

"And mine?" Pearl said, fast.

My mother didn't enjoy being pulled out of the memory. "An assistant bought yours. You'd have to ask her what it ran." A pause, and then, warm, still somewhere far away. "Why? Has Ellie finally said she'll wear hers?"

The speaker carried every word of it out into the shop. The manager had stopped pretending to file paperwork. The two clients by the window weren't looking at shoes anymore.

The phone kept playing my mother's voice into the quiet, every soft word landing like it had been aimed. Pearl's face drained. She thumbed the screen dark a half-second too late. The whole floor had already heard which daughter the real necklace was waiting on, and which one had worn a knockoff to a party to brag about it.

I didn't say a thing. I didn't have to. She'd dialed the number herself. I'd only stood there and let it ring.

Then she pushed out a laugh, a beat behind where it should have been. "What a shame. That one's mine too, you know. Want it back, sis? Oh, but you don't even qualify to set foot in the Ashford house anymore."

"Speaking of. Tomorrow's Dad's memorial. A murderer like you wouldn't want to go back to the scene, would she?"

My heart kicked once, hard.

It surprised me, that I could still feel it that strong. That I had to part my lips just to keep the rage from closing my throat.

She liked what she saw on my face.

She didn't count on my hand moving faster than my head.

The slap cracked across the shop.

She stared at me like it couldn't be real. I gave it back to her one word at a time.

"Almost forgot. You were always the one I came back for."

Then it came up out of me. The old thing. The one I thought I'd put in the ground.

That first year out, I dreamed it every night. Kill her. Kill her. It was Tess who used to hold me down and say, let the old stuff go, Ellie, let's just live the life we've got.

Turned out I hadn't let go of anything. I'd only understood that a basement girl with a record was never getting near the Ashfords again, so the wanting had nowhere to put itself.

Now it had somewhere to go. My hands were shaking. I could feel my own pulse behind my eyes.

Chapter 8

Pearl took a step back.

She'd been kept soft her whole life. I hadn't. To save on movers, I'd hauled every stick of furniture in my place up six flights on my own back. Years of that leave you with hands that can do real harm.

She knew it, watching me.

And I almost let her have it.

But I'd spent too long teaching myself to go still to waste it on one slap in a shoe shop. There were cleaner ways to take everything she had, and I already knew every one of them.

So I breathed. I let my hand drop.

That was when the arms came around me. Warm, and a perfume I'd know in the dark.

"Ellie. My poor Ellie."

My mother held on and couldn't stop crying.

"Mom, she tried to kill me," Pearl shouted.

"Be quiet. Would you frame her all over again?"

I stood there, gone stiff and empty, and let her run a thumb along my cheek.

She took my hand and held it tight in both of hers.

"Tell Mom. How did she hurt you?"

"This child. All she does anymore is cry."

Pearl stamped her foot. "What's the point of playing the good mother now?"

"Don't forget the Ashfords still need the Locke deal. You still think I'm some nobody you took in off the street? One word from me and Locke walks. Try me."

My mother looked at her, cold, and started steering me toward the door.

"It's my shift, Mrs. Ashford," I said. "I need to get back to work."

So she sat down in the client lounge to wait me out.

"Come home with me, Ellie. There's something I have to tell you."

I packed up my bag, hung there for a second, and turned her down again. "I've got somewhere to be tonight."

"I'll wait until you're done. Ellie. Please. I can wait."

* * *

I got back into Sal's car without a word and gave him the hospital address.

I took the front seat again. Sal passed me a hot cocoa, his face full of something old.

"Couldn't pick you up from school without one. You always did love something sweet, even tiny."

I drank a mouthful. It wasn't sweet enough.

Maybe too many years of cheap sugar had worn the taste out of me, and the real thing couldn't reach anymore.

So I just held it, both hands around the cup.

My mother watched the neon slide by and spoke like she wasn't sure if it was to me or to herself.

"What do I have to do," she said, "for Ellie to forgive me."

I thought about all the nights I'd cried into a blanket as a girl, never understanding why, whatever I did, she only ever loved Pearl.

What was I supposed to do, to make her love me again.

There's no solving it. Love never came with reasons, and it doesn't come with answers.

Chapter 9