The First to Lie

by Hank Phillippi Ryan

  The lights brightened, but barely a notch, keeping the audience in an artificial twilight.

  “And we are so grateful,” Brinn began. She put a hand to her chest, covering the diamond for a beat. “Even in our continuing grief, for knowing Trevor’s memory will live on, and his—”

  Ellie thought Brinn might have been choked by emotion, as her husband seemed to be, but then saw the look on Brinn’s face. Perplexed, confused, bewildered. Ellie felt, even as she turned, a shift in the atmosphere. Looking out over the audience, she heard sounds like—cell phone pings. And then, ping. Ping. Ping. Ping. Then one by one, faces in black tie and gowns and glitter were brightened by the glow of individual devices.

  Faces no longer looking at Brinn. No longer looking at Winton. But faces, artificially green and blue, studying tiny screens.

  The rear doors of the ballroom clanged open, and Ellie saw three men in black suits rushing out, gowned women trailing behind them, the exit doors clanging again as they slammed shut.

  “Ellie,” Gabe whispered. And when she looked, his cell phone too glowed like it bore a secret.

  “His memory will live on,” Brinn continued, her voice now wavering, “and we know you’ll … we know you’ll…”

  The exit doors clanged again, and again, as other couples left the auditorium. The murmur of the audience had grown to an insistent hum, and the pings did not stop.

  Ellie longed to read the phone, but couldn’t take her eyes off Brinn Vanderwald, who’d turned to her husband, raw panic on her face.

  “Your story,” Gabe whispered, moving up to the step behind her. “It’s posted. Breaking news. Alerts are pinging all over social media.”

  “What? My story?” Ellie grabbed the phone, scanned the words. “BREAKING NEWS. PHARMINEX DEADLY COVER-UP,” the headline screamed. “PHARM CO HIDING DANGEROUS DRUG.” Monifan. Ellie saw the word over and over as she scanned. Infertility, nondisclosure, incapable, women, danger. Liability, lawsuits, fraud, deception, highest levels. “How the hell—?”

  “Ladies and gentlemen?” Winton Vanderwald stepped back to the microphone, put himself almost in front of his wife. “We cannot help but wonder—”

  Ellie felt the mechanism rumble under her feet again, and the navy velvet curtains began to close, slowly, slowly. She saw the crowd, almost as one entity with one intent, turn its back to the stage and flood toward the back doors. She saw Detta Fiddler, her own phone aglow, dash onto the stage and hurry the couple off. Now only the gradually closing curtains separated Ellie from the Vanderwalds. One step, and she’d be up there with them.

  CHAPTER 63

  ELLIE

  The sound came from backstage, a wail or cry like no or what or simply alarm or fear or surprise, and Ellie could not bear it. She heard Gabe step up behind her, felt his hand trying to hold her back, but she twisted away, up the last step and behind the blue curtain.

  Winton Vanderwald was being hustled though a door offstage by someone in a dark suit. That door stayed open, but behind it, Ellie saw only light. Brinn, face white and drawn, just that slash of red lipstick, stood listening as Detta Fiddler whispered in her ear, holding up a cell phone so Brinn could see, scrolling, while Brinn seemed to be trying to comprehend.

  “But no,” she said, her hand to her chest. “That cannot be!”

  Detta whispered again.

  “No!” Brinn’s eyes went wild, and she grabbed the phone herself, scrolling through the screens. “No. I won’t allow it, it’s—it’s—”

  Ellie stood, almost an arm’s length from the woman, watching this drama unfold, concealing herself in the folds of the velvet curtain. No one noticed her, so focused were they on what had turned a celebration into a calamity. Brinn looked smaller than Ellie had imagined; maybe her sorrow had physically diminished her, made her no longer the powerfully vital woman Ellie knew she once had been. The delicate bones of her shoulders showed through the sheer fabric of her dress, her tiny wrists were diamond-encircled but fragile, and her veined hands, fingernails bright crimson, held the cell phone that Ellie now understood contained the end of life as Brinn knew it.

  But how did the story get there? Who had—

  “Good evening, Brinn.” A figure stood, silhouetted, in the backstage door. Then walked toward Brinn Vanderwald and Detta Fiddler.

  Ellie saw who it was and eased farther into the curtains.

  Meg, or not-Meg, but appearing as someone else entirely: glamorous in movie star makeup, her hair tumbling voluptuously down her shoulders, her pocketed black sheath dress chic and severe, both wrists jangling with bangle bracelets, her elegant pumps glittering bronze.

  What would Brinn call her?

  “It’s been a long time, Lacey,” Brinn finally said.

  Lacey.

  “I see you’ve read my big news story,” Lacey said, as she stepped closer.

  “Your…” Ellie saw Brinn’s chin rise, her gaze assess this newcomer.

  Ellie knew Brinn thought this woman had killed her son. But did Lacey know that? Ellie could almost hear Brinn’s mind calculating, deciding how to handle this reunion.

  Detta stepped between them, but Brinn waved her away. “Will you go get my husband, please?” Her voice was a whisper in the darkened wing of the stage.

  Ellie didn’t dare move from her hiding place as Detta left the two of them—mother-in-law and widow—face-to-face.

  Brinn, smiling, stepped forward and linked her arm through Lacey’s, held on to her as if she needed support.

  “Lacey, darling, we’re so pleased to see you after all this time,” Brinn said. “We did hope you’d join us this evening—it’s all for your poor Trevor, after all. And especially now, with whatever annoying unpleasantness has occurred. Winton will have his people take care of it, as always, so come with me, dear. We’ll find Win, together, just like old times, and then we’ll want to hear all about what you’ve been doing.”

  Go, Brinn, Ellie thought. Had to hand it to her. She’d essentially taken the woman into custody. All Ellie had to do was get Gabe and call for the cops Monteiro had assured her were there. But to do that, she’d have to reveal herself. And Brinn seemed to be managing this.

  “What I’ve been doing? Mother? Darling?” Lacey seemed to draw Brinn even closer, and Ellie saw the older woman wince, just a flash, just for an instant. “What I’ve been doing, since you ask, is writing that little story that seems to have all your devoted friends in such disapproval that they’ve turned their backs on you. Walked out of your life. How does that feel, Mother? And how does it feel, knowing your precious Pharminex is about to—how shall we put it? Drown? In its own immoral, vile—”

  “You wrote this story?”

  Ellie’s eyes went wide.

  “But you know?” Lacey went on. “All I wanted, all I ever wanted, was children. A child. To have a family. To have someone love me. And you took that from me! You took me to that damn doctor, and you didn’t warn me, and you took my children, and my life, and my future and my happiness and now—”

  “Lacey, darling, I never meant to hurt you. You must know that. Sometimes it happens, sometimes it—”

  Brinn, Ellie saw, was trying to pull away from Lacey, but Lacey was not letting go.

  Ellie saw Lacey reach into her dress pocket and pull out a—

  “No!” Ellie almost didn’t think, leaped forward, before even the entire weapon was out of Lacey’s pocket, but Lacey had twisted and stabbed the ice pick into Brinn, once, just once, as Ellie screamed for help and yanked Lacey away. Ellie grabbed at her, twisting and grabbing and wrenching the ice pick out of her hand. The thing flew into the dark recesses behind them. Ellie ducked and spun as Lacey fought back, screaming at her, clawing at her, but Ellie had to stop her, stop her, and Brinn, with a choking gasp, fell to the wooden floor, a bloom of bright red creeping across her ivory silk.

  “No!” Ellie’s cry did not sound like her own voice and she knew she was bleeding too, but then Gabe was behind her, grabbing her, and two peop
le in black were clamping onto a shrieking Lacey, dragging her toward the door. Monteiro? Ellie registered, before her knees crumbled.

  “I called nine-one-one, everyone’s on the way, and ambulances.” Gabe clutched her close, keeping her upright against him. “Hey. You’re bleeding.”

  “It’s fine, I think,” she said. “Just my arm. But…” She looked down at Brinn, face now ashen, the pool of red on her chest spreading from her dress to the dusty floor.

  The light in Brinn’s eyes faded, then brightened, as she searched Ellie’s face. Her lips moved silently. Then, as Ellie watched, Brinn seemed to draw on some inner strength, and she tried again.

  “Brooke?” she said. A quiet smile changed her face, briefly, to relief. And then to peaceful certainty. “My Brooke.”

  CHAPTER 64

  BROOKE

  More footsteps, and commotion, clattering toward the three of them backstage—Brinn, as pale as her ivory dress, thin-lidded eyes closing, fluttering, opening again. Brooke and Gabe, kneeling on the dusty floor, side by side in black velvet dress and black tuxedo. An upstage door banged open, lights flicked on, spotlights snapped to bright, one after another. Brooke looked up to see that portrait of Trevor, still smiling, still carefree, still gone.

  “I need that,” she told Gabe, and grabbed the white handkerchief from his jacket pocket. She held it, with both hands, over the wound in her mother’s chest. “Mother?” Brooke said. “Hang on. I’m here.”

  “Brooke?” Brinn whispered. “Your father? Does he—has he—?”

  “He’s fine. You’ll be okay, Mother,” she lied. “You’ll be fine.” She looked at Gabe, still beside her. “Right?”

  Gabe shook his head, almost imperceptibly. “Brooke,” he said.

  “Right. I’m Brooke. Ellie is Brooke. Now you know.” Brooke focused on the increasingly crimson handkerchief instead of on him. “Crazy, huh? You’ve been theorizing almost every woman we met was Brooke. Everyone but me. But I had to hide who I was, can you understand? I had to take this company down. But I couldn’t—not as Brooke.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “But I mean, what you don’t know is that I—”

  “My family, my mother—back when I was a teenager—there’s no way to explain it,” Brooke interrupted. She didn’t care what he said. Or thought. And she couldn’t cry, she couldn’t, not now. Whatever was happening with her mother was out of her control, and it felt like the past had come back, and instead of as the solution she hoped for, as disaster. Brooke—Ellie—Brooke—had vowed to make things right. To stop more people from being manipulated and harmed and deceived by the Vanderwald power. Harmed like the Vanderwalds had harmed her, their own daughter.

  And the child teenaged Brooke had been forced to destroy.

  And, as Trevor himself had told Brooke that day on the Caduceus, the Vanderwalds had also deceived Lacey. Whose mind had snapped as a result.

  That doll in Lacey’s crib.

  Both women, Brooke and Lacey, had vowed revenge, Brooke realized. Each in her own way.

  Now it had come to this again, mother and daughter and power and life and death.

  “It’s a long story, Gabe,” Brooke said. “Too long for now.”

  “I know all about it,” Gabe said. “You—”

  Brinn stirred. A feather-light motion, and her eyes turned clear and determined.

  “Mother?” Even saying the word felt distant, of another time.

  “We were only doing what we thought was right for you, Brookie,” her mother whispered. “Back then. I’m so sorry. We wanted you to be happy.”

  “I understand,” Brooke lied again.

  Footsteps from all sides now, clattering up the stage stairway where Ellie had watched the ceremony, pounding through the open back door, running across the stage itself, uniformed police and white-jacketed EMTs, turtlenecked security guards and a woman in dazzling gold sequins.

  “I’m a doctor,” she yelled. “Let me through.”

  “Oh, thank you, thank you.” Brooke kept the pressure in place, knowing that was her mother’s only hope. “She—”

  “Got it.” Bejeweled hands replaced Brooke’s on her mother’s chest as the sequined doctor took charge. Bustling EMTs unlatched orange suitcases of equipment and oxygen and blood pressure cuffs, and one of the medics gently, firmly, moved her and Gabe out of the way.

  “Where will you take her?” Brooke asked.

  “Mass General,” the doctor called over her shoulder.

  In the recessed velvet of the stage curtains, Brooke felt the tears stream down her face—she could not stop them—whether from loss or joy or confusion or relief or an overwhelming wave of change and uncertainty. Of being who she was, finally. Brooke.

  Her wash of tears was making this feel like a dream, otherworldly and diffuse, but it wasn’t a dream. The EMTs clanked open a folding metal stretcher, and as Brooke heard a soft count of three, they lifted her mother onto it, wheeling her away, the gold sequins hurrying behind.

  Lieutenant Monteiro. It took her a beat to realize who had approached from the shadows, nearly unrecognizable in bow tie and dinner jacket.

  “You have her?” Brooke asked. “Meg? Lacey? She didn’t get away. Tell me she didn’t.”

  “That’s why I’m here, Nora,” Monteiro said. “I need Ellie now, though, to—”

  “Where’s my—where’s Winton Vanderwald? He needs to know where his wife—”

  “Her mother recognized her, Lieutenant,” Gabe said.

  “Did she recognize you?” Monteiro asked.

  “She who?” Brooke looked at Monteiro, then Gabe, then Monteiro again. “Recognize who?”

  CHAPTER 65

  Monteiro’s phone buzzed. He put it to his ear. “Yup. Got ’em both,” he said into the phone. Then he turned to Gabe and Brooke. “You have two minutes. Then I’ll need you both in the back. Deal? ’Cause then I’ve gotta get her out of here.”

  Brooke watched Monteiro start to stride away, phone clamped to his ear.

  “Wait! Lacey, you mean?” she asked him. “Or my mother? Recognize who?”

  “Two minutes,” Monteiro called over his shoulder. “I mean it.”

  “Who recognize who?” Brooke, bewildered, brushed the dust from her velvet knees and sleeves. This dress will never be the same, she thought, and then almost cried again at her own ridiculousness. The dress was not what she was grieving.

  “You, Brooke,” Gabe said. “Recognize me. It’s me, Brooke. Liam. Liam Endicott.”

  “Liam?” She frowned, her brain suddenly cotton and glue and impossibility.

  He put both hands on her shoulders, looked her in the eyes, and in them she saw the sapphire sky and the seagulls, and maybe even smelled the sweetly summery fragrance of the ocean.

  “I love you more than the stars and the sky, Brooke. Remember?”

  “Liam?” Even saying his name, a name she hadn’t allowed herself to say out loud for so long, it all rushed back over her, consumed her, how much she had adored him, and her loss, and her mother’s betrayal, and the hopelessness of youth and love. This Liam—Liam—she almost saw him now, behind the no-longer teenaged face, the no-longer-bleached no-longer-shaggy hair, the tortoiseshell glasses and the confidence. His voice was lower now, and thick with emotion.

  “Your mother finally told me what ‘happened.’ What she’d done. I was there, in your rehab. After the sailing … accident. She may have felt guilty about what she’d done to you. She may have had her guard down, seeing you like that. But I told her I’d never stopped wondering about you. I was such a jerk. I am so sorry, Brooke. Back then my parents demanded I never contact you again. They told me they knew you hated me. That I needed to go to college. That this whole mess could ruin our lives. Would ruin them. And when I realized they were full of shit, it was too late.”

  And in the musty gloom of the now-silent stage, Brooke saw tears in his eyes too, tears of maybe regret and guilt and something left behind. She opened her mouth to say something, but now he
r brain was going too fast to create any words.

  “Brooke? I lost a child too,” he went on. “I know it’s not the same, but—”

  She looked at the floor then, afraid to meet his eyes. It wasn’t the same, not at all. But she’d never considered what he’d lost too. Still, she’d thought of him every day. Even chosen her name for him—Liam Endicott. L. E. Ellie.

  “So funny that we took the same tack for our lives. Justice. Retribution. Bringing down—well, not just Pharminex, in my job, but any pharmaceutical company that uses drugs as power. One that takes people’s money and then destroys their lives. Like they did to you. And to me.”

  “And to Lacey. And Trevor,” Brooke said. “And all those people we’ll never know.”

  “And when I finally found you—I mean, it was more like you found me. You’d called my law firm, researching, so of course we looked you up. I recognized you instantly, even under that blond wig. And your Nora ‘disguise’—well, that’s just grown-up Brooke with a lot of makeup. But I needed to tell you I did the wrong thing. I needed to tell you I made the wrong choice.”

  Brooke tried to battle back through the past. At least he’d had a choice. She felt angry, and bitter, and hurt and thrilled, and how could that be?

  “You’re an idiot!” She felt like punching him, or falling into his arms. “Why didn’t you just tell me? Why did you pretend to be someone else? Guy, or whoever? And Gabe? And why did you keep telling me about every damn one else you supposedly thought might be Brooke?”

  “So you wouldn’t realize I knew it was you! Brooke, we were kids back then. And after all those years I just show up? What if you actually did hate me? Wouldn’t see me? Wouldn’t listen to me? Or didn’t even remember me? I wanted to prove to you that I—that I cared about what happened to you. To us.” He let out a long breath. “I wanted to take responsibility. To prove to you that there was still good in the world. That even in grief, there’s love.”