The Fake Heiress's Survival Guide

Everyone in this story loves me. That's the problem.

I'm the fake heiress. Swapped into a rich family as a baby, raised as the golden girl, the sweet one everybody trips over themselves to protect. The real daughter, the one whose life I'm living, is my exact opposite. Poor. Plain. Easy to overlook.

I know how her story ends, because I've read it.

She spends years getting bullied and ignored. Then she dies of stomach cancer, quiet and alone, and only at the funeral does everyone finally understand how much they loved her.

Too late. Roll credits.

I read that ending twice, just to be sure.

So on my first day inside this book, I didn't scheme. I didn't gloat. I didn't do a single thing the villain is supposed to do.

I took my little sister to the hospital and booked her a full stomach workup.

Call it a welcome-home gift.

This time around, sweetheart, you don't get the cancer.

Chapter 1

The night my sister came home, the whole family sat down to dinner and performed not staring at her.

She sat across from me. Small, sun-browned, drowning in a borrowed sweater, watching a table full of food like it might disappear if she blinked. She didn't reach for anything.

She lasted about four minutes before hunger won. Her fork crept out and speared a single piece of the spicy chicken.

My mother slid the entire platter to my side of the table before the girl had even finished chewing.

"Winter loves this dish," she said warmly, nudging it against my plate. "I made it just for you, sweetheart. Go on, eat."

The light in the girl's face went out. Soft, like a hand closing over a candle.

I picked the platter back up. I scraped half onto my plate. Then I scraped the other half onto hers.

"We've got the same taste," I said. "Both of us, straight for the meat. Guess that settles it. We're sisters."

The table went quiet. My mother's fork stopped in the air. Across from me, the girl's mouth fell open, like the word had reached in and knocked something loose.

Her name was Ivy. She was the real daughter of this house, swapped out of her crib fourteen years ago, and I was the stranger wearing her life. My parents had figured out somewhere along the way that I didn't share a drop of their blood, and it hadn't changed a thing. They loved me like I was theirs.

Bringing Ivy home came with one condition: the family I'd been born to had to sign away every claim to me, so I could go on being the daughter of this house. They'd signed fast. Happily, even. Ivy's people weren't rich, and to them a daughter was a mouth to feed and, eventually, a check to cash. When my parents offered real money for the paperwork, they practically threw a party.

So the house stayed exactly the house. It just came with one more girl in it now, small and half-starved and flinching at everything, sitting at the far end of the table like a guest who wasn't sure she'd been invited.

After dinner I went up to study. My mother followed me in and sat on the edge of my bed.

"Winter." She smoothed my hair. "Now that there's suddenly a sister in the house, are you angry at us? Even a little?"

"No."

She hadn't expected an answer that clean. She tried again, careful. "It won't bother you, having another person around all the time?"

"This house has a wing I've never set foot in. I'm not going to notice one more girl at breakfast."

Her eyes filled. "Is it because you found out? About where you came from. Do you think those people are your real parents now, and you don't want us anymore?"

"Why would you think that?"

She caught my hand in both of hers. "Because every child on earth throws a fit over a new sibling. And you, of all children, the most spoiled girl I ever raised, you're not fighting me. You're not crying. It scares me. Like you've gone somewhere I can't reach. Like you've decided you're not my treasure anymore."

I didn't have anything to say to that.

The words came out of her in a rush. "Winter, I have held you since you were a baby. You called me Mom for fourteen years. You are the only child I claim. Nobody gets to make you feel small in this house, not ever. If you don't want her here, we send her to boarding school. She lives on campus. And it goes back to just the three of us, exactly the way it was."

Exactly the way it was.

I knew how that version turned out. I'd read it, cover to cover, every last page.

I set down my pen and looked at her.

"She's not going anywhere," I said.

My mother's smile wavered, like I'd answered her in a language she didn't speak.

Chapter 2

Here's what took me a while to understand about my mother: she really is the villain of this story. Just not mine.

Read it from Ivy's seat and the woman is a nightmare. A real daughter comes home half-starved, and her mother's first instinct is to guard the favorite. But sit where I'm sitting and you get the whole of it. The very first thing she thought about, the night her own blood walked through the door, was making sure I still felt safe. That I still knew my seat at this table was mine.

She's Ivy's villain. She's the best mother I've got.

So I put my arm around her shoulders.

"Mom. Those people never raised me a single day. If I'd stayed with them, I'd have been a check to cash, same as Ivy. The people who raise you outrank the people who make you. Whatever happens, the two of you are the only parents I get."

My mother is a soft woman under all the money. She made a wet sound and threw her arms around me.

I let her hold on. Then I set both hands on her shoulders and made her look at me.

"But Ivy is your daughter too."

Her eyes slid away.

"She just walked into a house where she doesn't know the rules yet. So you're going to spoil her. You spoiled me for fourteen years. She missed every one of them. You owe her the back pay."

Something in her face loosened, almost grateful, like I'd lifted a rock off her chest. I gave her a small push toward the door. She went, quick and light, hugging the good silk comforter to carry to Ivy's room.

Parents play favorites. That part's real. But most of the time it isn't the favoritism that decides anything. It's what the favorite does with it.

Because I knew the other version of this house.

In the book, Ivy dies of stomach cancer. After she's gone, the boy who was supposed to love her finally loses his mind over her ghost, and my own wedding quietly falls apart. I end up unable to get out of bed. My father's company craters. And my mother doesn't survive the year.

A little theatrical, sure. But I believe in the bill always coming due.

If Ivy just gets to grow up happy, this little family of ours never has to burn down.

I knocked on my father's study door.

"Move my sister to my school," I said. "So we can keep an eye on each other."

In the original, that's not how it went. Ivy got shipped off to a different academy, vanished for a year, fell behind, dropped out, and finally washed up at my school, where I bullied her through the worst adolescence a person can have.

I was rewriting that. And, as a bonus, getting her to the male lead a little early.

Because I happened to remember: the boy went to our school.

When break ended, my mother took Ivy to enroll. Transfer student, a different homeroom from mine. My class was the top track. Half of us were the children of very serious money, and the other half were the actual geniuses, because somebody has to keep the averages honest.

I pulled a textbook out of my bag. The room stopped.

The girl I was wearing had been good at exactly one thing, and it wasn't school. She'd come here to date.

A boy with a lollipop parked in his cheek slung an arm around my shoulders. "Babe. You take the wrong pills this morning?"

I looked at the hand on my shoulder. "You're my boyfriend?"

"Uh. Yeah."

I went back to my book. "Not as of today."

His jaw came loose. "The hell is wrong with you?"

"Nothing." I turned a page. "I'm getting into MIT."

For a second he just stared. Then he spun to the room and announced it like breaking news. "Winter Whitlock's lost it! She says she's getting into MIT!"

The whole class howled.

I turned another page and let them.

Chapter 3

In the book, the girl I'd replaced grew up to study art, went abroad, and drifted home years later, the whole arc just a runway for our heroine's tearful career as somebody's stand-in. Me, I don't have an artistic bone in my body. I just want into that little trade school across the river in Cambridge. In my last life I missed the cutoff by a hair, and it always bugged me. Now I'm fourteen again, so obviously I'm taking another shot.

That first morning I sized up the textbooks and the teachers and decided the odds were fine. Middle-school material is not a serious obstacle.

At lunch I went to the next building to find Ivy. Mom had told me they'd put her in homeroom ten, but the room was empty.

I asked a couple of kids heading to the cafeteria. The second they heard I was looking for the new transfer, their eyes started sliding to the walls.

Bad sign. I caught one by the sleeve. "Where is she?"

"...Tiffany and them took her to the bathroom."

My stomach dropped.

If the original me was the white-lotus darling, Tiffany was her attack dog, the girl who spent the entire book helping her make Ivy's life hell. Apparently the attack dog had initiative. I hadn't said a word to her, and she'd already gone hunting on her own.

I hit the bathroom door at a run.

Four girls from homeroom ten, Tiffany in front, taking turns kicking Ivy where she'd curled up on the tile.

"What kind of mutt thinks she gets to walk into our school?" Tiffany was saying. "You like your welcome present?"

I threw my jacket at the sinks and put Tiffany's head down into one of them.

"Who," I said, "are you calling a mutt?"

"Winter!" She thrashed. "Have you lost your mind? Since when is this your problem?"

I cranked the faucet on and held her face under it. "She's my sister. Still not my problem?"

Down on the tile, something flickered behind Ivy's eyes.

We were a bunch of fourteen-year-old girls in a bathroom, so the fight was mostly hair and fingernails, and there was one of me. I came in swinging and got wrecked for it.

But when Tiffany tore a hand loose and cocked it back at my face, Ivy came up off the floor and sank her teeth into Tiffany's wrist. Hard enough to draw blood.

That was the exact moment their homeroom teacher walked in.

Ms. Ackerman marched all four of us to her office. "Who started this?"

Tiffany got there first, cradling her wrist. "Ms. Ackerman, we were just saying hi to the new girl, and Winter came flying in and attacked us."

"Some hello. I heard the crying from the next building over." I let that sit. "Is homeroom ten always this welcoming?"

I lifted Ivy's arm so the woman could see exactly what her class's hello looked like.

Ms. Ackerman looked at her own student's bloody wrist and made her choice.

"Whatever the disagreement was," she said, "these things are always mutual. No smoke without fire. And if you walked in on it, you should have come to a teacher, not put your hands on anyone."

"Oh." I turned to Ivy, sincere as anything. "You hear that? Ms. Ackerman's teaching you something. No smoke without fire. So from now on, anybody you don't like the look of, you go ahead and hit them first. Clearly they had it coming. Beat them bloody, doesn't matter. Long as you swing first, you're the innocent one in the room." I looked back up. "Right, Ms. Ackerman?"

Her face went flat. "Winter. Watch your mouth."

"I'm only following your teaching. Word for word."

"You"

She opened her mouth to keep going, and that was when the dean walked in. My homeroom teacher, Ms. Sinclair, was right behind him.

Chapter 4

My father had written the school a lot of very large checks over the years, and my mother and Ms. Sinclair were practically friends, so the math worked out the way money usually does. Tiffany and her crew each walked away with a formal write-up on their record.

Outside the office, Tiffany cradled her bandaged wrist and shot me a look that could curdle milk.

"I can't believe you'd claim a mutt like that as family," she said. "And not even have the decency to be embarrassed."

"She's a Whitlock. Same as me." I held her eyes. "So which one of us is the mutt?"

Tiffany came from money too. She strutted that school like she held the deed, and the only person alive who scared her was me. Right now she looked like I'd slapped her.

"Ha. Bites people, does she." She lifted her chin. "Guess I'm due for a rabies shot."

"Get the full three-in-one while you're at it," I said. "Covers you the whole year."

She surged forward like she'd take another swing. Then she watched me push my sleeves up, happy to go again, and her friends hauled her off by the arms.

Nobody wants two write-ups in one day.

I walked Ivy out and debriefed her. "You know why they went after you?"

"Because I'm..." Her eyes dropped. "Because I'm kind of trashy. I don't fit."

I sighed. "No. Because they're rotten."

She looked up, startled. Nobody had ever put it to her that plainly.

"You heard them. They called it a welcome present. If it wasn't you, it'd be some other new kid. Any excuse would do." I stopped and turned her to face me. "So here's the rule. When you meet someone rotten, don't go hunting for the reason in yourself. It isn't you."

Ivy nodded, fast and hard.

The Doyles had raised exactly one girl, and every wrong thing that ever happened under their roof had been set at her feet. Nobody had ever told her the problem might not be her.

She looked up at me with these wide, stray-puppy eyes, and I had a hand on her head before I'd decided to put it there.

"The cruelty in this world doesn't always come with a reason, and you can't always dodge it. But when it turns up at your door, you fight back. You make them pay. You make them understand you're not easy, so next time they think twice." I paused. "Keep swallowing it down instead, and all you'll get out of it is stomach cancer."

Ivy's small eyes went very round.

"It's science," I said gravely. "Bottle up enough of it and your stomach rots from the inside."

She was a serious kid. She turned the words over and filed them somewhere she'd be able to find them again.

Downstairs, Mom had arrived. She got out of the car already crying and pulled me into her arms. Ivy hung back, looking anywhere else, awkward and a little envious.

"Fighting? On the first day?" Mom turned my scraped hand over in hers, her voice shaking. "Ms. Sinclair told me the whole thing started because of Ivy."

"The kids across the hall have a problem with me. They found out Ivy's my sister, so they took it out on her."

That frightened her worse. "How are you making enemies like this at school? How am I supposed to sleep at night?"

"It's fine. When one of them went to slap me, Ivy jumped in and bit her." I looked over. "Isn't that right, Ivy?"

Mom laughed, wet and startled. "I had no idea Ivy was such a little fighter. Looking out for her big sister already." Then her face shifted. "Wait. How did you get this banged up too? Let me see."

Ivy scratched the back of her head, shy, while Mom pulled her in to check her over. Over Mom's shoulder her eyes found mine, wet and full of something close to gratitude.

Guilt, probably. Because when Mom drove us to the hospital after, she had them see to Ivy first.

The doctor dabbed iodine on the bruises and clucked her tongue, cheerful, not even unkind. "Pretty little thing like you. How'd you let yourself get so filthy? Look at all this ground-in dirt."

Ivy stared at the floor and didn't say a word.

She'd worked it out a long time ago: when people talked about her like that, the safest thing a girl could do was disappear.

Chapter 5

My mother's mouth went tight. She turned and caught my eye, waiting for me to make the face back at her, the one that says yes, would you look at this, what a shame.

I didn't. I looked at Ivy, frozen on the exam table, already bracing to be laughed at, and I smiled at her instead.

You could see the exact second she decided I wasn't laughing. She let out a breath, dropped her eyes, and let the doctor finish, quiet again, like a girl who'd just found something to hold on to.

Once the bruises faded, I told everyone we were going out for a buffet lunch and took her to a spa for the day instead. The kind with the full-body scrub, where an auntie works you over from scalp to heel and takes you down to a fresh layer of skin. By the time she was done, Ivy's kneecaps could have caught the light.

Then I took her shopping.

I caught her sighing at herself in more than one mirror, sneaking looks at Mom's skincare shelf like it was a locked cabinet.

My whole philosophy on looks is this: if it bothers you, go fix it. Ivy needed it right now, needed the armor of it, and that has nothing to do with being fourteen.

Naturally, that was when we ran into Tiffany again.

Tiffany's feelings about me were complicated. Two heiresses under one sky. In the version where I never showed up, she and the original me would have been thick as thieves, a matched set of mean girls. Instead I'd put her head in a sink over Ivy, and now she hated me the way you hate someone you were supposed to love.

She rolled her eyes at Ivy first. "Winter, you must have so much free time. Walking your mutt around the mall." She looked her up and down. "Dress it up however you want. A mutt's a mutt."

Ivy went red and set down the lace top she'd been holding, ashamed, all at once, of her own taste.

"I don't really get fashion either," I said, and steered Ivy out of the junior boutique, falling into step behind Tiffany. "Tell you what. Whatever Tiffany buys, we'll buy too."

Tiffany gave a smug little sniff and swept into Herms, chin up, working the room like she knew her way around a handbag.

Ivy had never set foot in a store like that. When she saw there was a line just to get through the door, she nearly lost her nerve. The doorman took one look at her, young, flinching, and ran out of patience. "Are you coming in or not?"

Ivy was two seconds from crying. She couldn't nod. She couldn't shake her head either.

Then a bright voice rang out from inside. "Ms. Whitlock!"

A sales associate came clicking out on her heels, polished head to toe. "You usually come in with your mother. All on your own today?"

I tipped my head at Ivy. "Helping my sister shop. Put a full look together for her."

The SA swept Ivy under her arm like she'd been waiting for her all day. "Of course. Right this way. And what can we get you to drink, sweetheart?"

Tiffany stood there with her mouth open as the SA walked Ivy straight into the VIP room.

You can thank my mother for that. She clears six figures a night on this floor. Every associate up here knows my face, and my father, who could not care less about shopping, gets his car valeted the second he pulls up.

Tiffany and her friends clustered outside the case, pawing at bags through the glass. Inside, the SA knelt on the carpet to fit shoes onto Ivy's feet.

A month in my house had put some color and softness back into her. In a little dress, hair done simply, she looked like a different girl entirely.

The only thing still off was the way she wore it. She kept glancing back at me, a bird that had been startled one too many times, every price tag on the racks landing in her like a dart.

I took my time. I slid a card out of my shirt pocket and set it on the glass table between us.

Chapter 6

"Dad's card," I said. "Fifty grand a month. If you blow past it, pout at him a little and he'll clear the balance early."

I set a second card down beside it.

"That one's my allowance for the year. I lose track. Six figures, somewhere in there. You're the real heiress, Ivy. Whatever number you're picturing, yours runs higher than mine, never lower."

I crossed my legs and watched the doll in the mirror. "Money isn't the problem here. Take whatever you like."

So that's how you build a princess.

The proof was standing right in front of me. A girl who thirty seconds ago had been apologizing to price tags was now looking at a wall of handbags like she had every right to.

When the SA came sailing back out with Ivy, both of them glowing, I wandered over to Tiffany with my hands in my pockets.

"Still deciding? That one's a classic. You really can't go wrong."

Tiffany's jaw worked.

She'd come in here to be somebody. But a normal rich family doesn't hand a fourteen-year-old a blank check and turn her loose, and a store like this runs on exactly that kind of comparison. Ivy stood a few feet off in her whole new life, studying the display like it might study her back, and Tiffany was stuck up on the horse she'd climbed, with no way down.

"I'll take this one," she said finally, jabbing a finger at a bag on the shelf. She forced her spine straight. "All this waiting, and they won't even show me the good stuff."

I leaned on the counter and tapped the glass.

"Bring out the Birkin you've got in the back," I told the SA. "The one you're holding for me. It's my sister's first bag."

The SA beamed and went to get it.

Because that's the thing about a bag like that. You don't walk in and buy one. You wait years, you spend a small fortune, and one day, if they decide they like you, they offer. Tiffany could stand in that line every weekend for the rest of her life and never once be offered.

For one clean second, Tiffany looked like she'd taken every dart on those price tags straight to the chest.

Sorry. VIP gets the ones they keep in the back.

Walking in, Tiffany had been on top and Ivy had been the stray at her heel. Walking out, the two of them had quietly traded places, and nobody had to say a word about it.

Girls that age still measure each other in the shallow currency. A bag. A dress. And it is genuinely stunning what one bag can do. It can knock the swagger out of a girl who's worn it for years, or hand a girl who's never owned a scrap of it her first real spine.

Mom was over the moon at the made-over Ivy, turning her this way and that, praising her eye, informing the room that the bag would hold its value.

There is no such thing as unconditional love. My mother loves me because she raised me for fourteen years, and because I am pretty and polished in the same way she is. We are a family. We share the same habits, the same good and bad little household religions. Ivy is the newcomer. Folding her in was always going to come with growing pains.

But time smooths most things over. Money smooths the rest.

Even Tiffany got there eventually. Calling Ivy a mutt was a waste of breath. She was my mother's daughter now. Of course she'd learn to spend, learn to dress.

She sent me a snippy little message that night.

Tiffany: [Money must feel amazing. Maybe spend a little less of it and worry about your sister's report card instead. lol]

Hearing the word "grades" come out of Tiffany, of all people, left me almost tender toward her.

When I'd read the book, I'd had exactly one thought about this whole cast: does anybody in this story ever crack a textbook, or is it all backstabbing and dating and dramatic hospital scenes?

Then I made Ivy dig out her tests, and I understood the true scope of the problem.

"Every subject failing, fine, I can work with that." I stared at the page. "But this. An eighteen. On a physics test. How do you even manage an eighteen?"

Ivy stood in front of me with her hands behind her back, staring at the same glaring 18, just as stumped as I was.

Mom was already halfway out the door, thrilled to be taking Ivy to the salon.

"Hold on," I said. "Ivy needs a tutor."

Mom's face went careful. "Is she really that far behind?"

Chapter 7

I hid the test behind my back. "...Not exactly. There's no midterm yet, so who knows. She just feels like she's falling behind in class."

Spending money is the one thing my mother is genuinely gifted at. She had a private tutor lined up and in the house by that same afternoon.

I signed Mom's name on Ivy's test for her. "One time only. You clear a passing grade on the midterm. Minimum."

Ivy heaved a sigh and gazed off into the middle distance like a woman with nothing left to live for.

Seriously. How bad are these grades, heroine.

The tutoring got handled, and my life went quiet again.

Just when I thought the plot had settled down for a while, I walked out the back gate after school one day and straight into a brawl.

A pack of guys from the trade school next door had a boy from ours down on the ground, and they were going to town on him. I turned and ran back for campus security.

Halfway there, it hit me. This was the male lead's entrance.

I couldn't have told you his name. These tragic little books all blur together, the male leads a single interchangeable heartbreak machine, and who can keep them straight. What the book did mention was this: the reason he spends his entire life fixated on his first love is that she saved him once, back when they were kids. He was on the ground, half beaten to death, lights going out, and she appeared over him like a crack of daylight and showed him the way through.

I looked at Ivy, working through a skewer at the snack cart.

I could hand her that moment. Right now.

"Come here," I called.

She trotted over, cheeks packed, the skewer still in her teeth.

"There's a fight in the alley behind the school." I nodded toward it. "Go show the guard the way in."

And that was how I sent my little sister off to meet the boy who was supposed to ruin her life.

Ivy does whatever I tell her. She shouldered her backpack and went, and it wasn't until later that it occurred to me I should have confiscated the skewer first. No self-respecting heroine meets her male lead with grease on her chin