2. Penelope
Staring down at my cell phone, I reread the letter I received from my great-grandfather that day. I don’t need to look at the screen, though, because I memorized each word years ago. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve read this letter—enough that the actual paper copy has gotten so thin that I took a photo of it and saved it to my phone and cloud so I could never lose it.
Years ago, when this all started, Mom made me recite this letter to her over and over again until I could relay each word, line, and paragraph on demand. This godforsaken letter outlines the rules. The stipulations that I have to abide by to receive the money my great-grandfather bequeathed to me in his will.
Penelope,
For hundreds of years, the Rhodes name has been admired for our reputation for our hardworking nature and upstanding moral values. I myself, devoted my entire life to upholding my father’s and his father’s legacy.
However, despite my guidance and firm hand, both my heir and his heir in turn, have sullied our family’s good name and made a mockery of the fortitude and perseverance our ancestors and I strove so hard to instill. As such, I have decided to cut away the rotten fruit in our orchard and try to recover our great family name with your generation.
I am worth a great deal of money, all of which will ultimately become yours if you can prove that you are prepared to work hard to be successful and contribute to the Rhodes legacy I want to create for the future generations to come.
The world can be a complicated and difficult place to navigate, and as such, I have created strict guidelines that I expect you to abide by. This inheritance is not free money. I expect you to work for it, and by asking you to obey this set of rules, I am providing you with the incentive to become a person worthy of the Rhodes name.
Should you fail to live up to the standard I expect of you, the bequest will be revoked, and my lawyers will act on my wishes on who should inherit in your stead.
Below is a list of my expectations of you as my sole heir.
I expect you to graduate as an exemplary student from Green Acres Academy—the school I attended and continued to act as a benefactor for until the time of my death—with no less than a 4.0 grade point average.
You will apply to, and be accepted into, one of the below mentioned colleges.
You will graduate from one of the aforementioned educational facilities with a useful degree and no less than a 4.0 grade point average.
As my heir, you will create a beneficial alliance through a marriage to a son from a suitable family from the list provided. Your husband will relinquish his family name and will henceforth assume the name of Rhodes. As a reward for his sacrifice, you will surrender control of all of my business assets to your husband, who will take over the day-to-day running of my companies. You will then assume your main job as a loving and supportive wife, engaging in useful charity work that will aid in the recovery of our family’s legacy.
To ensure that you remain a person of the utmost moral fortitude, you will enter into the married state as a virgin. An annual medical examination will be required of you, and a report provided to Stanton, Stanton, and Kingston Attorneys at Law.
Unless you are physically unable, you will provide at least one male heir to inherit the Rhodes fortune upon your death. If you are unable to have children or fail to produce a male child before your thirtieth birthday, the Rhodes fortune will pass to the next eligible recipient, and you and your husband will be provided for with an annual stipend until your death.
You will maintain the reputation and good standing of the Rhodes family by being a person of impeccable respectability and worth. As a wife and mother, you will support your husband and children in any way required and within the expectations of our family heritage.
You will remain married and faithful for a minimum of twenty years, unless you become a widow, at which point an alternative marriage should be sought from one of the approved family bloodlines. Should it be your wish to dissolve the relationship after this point, if a suitable heir has been created, you may file for divorce and be provided with the widow’s maintenance allowance, while the rest of your estate will be passed to your eldest male child.
Upon producing a male heir, you agree that your children, both male and female—should they wish to inherit upon your death—will adhere to also live by these guidelines to ensure the purity of my bloodline and legacy.
If, at any point in the future, you deviate from the above-listed rules and bring disrepute on the Rhodes name, you will forfeit all rights to my estate. Upon reaching your twenty-fifth birthday, should you decide that you no longer wish to inherit, then you may choose to refuse the inheritance and continue to live your life as you see fit.
I understand that you may feel that these guidelines are extreme, but I fear that without this guidance, you and all future generations will be lost to the laziness and false sense of expectation that my wealth has given my son and grandson. You, Penelope, are my final chance to set straight the failings I have encountered in my own child and grandson. I truly hope you succeed and live a happy, prosperous, and fruitful life.
Regards,
Reginald Rhodes the Second
I don’t try to stop the disgusted scoff from falling from my lips as I close the screen on my cell. I remember the very first time I read this letter. The lawyer who had read my great-grandfather’s will had handed it to me, but before I’d had a chance to unseal the envelope, Mom had snatched it out of my hands and turned her back on me while she read it.
After both she and Dad had read it, they turned and looked at me. Back then, I didn’t recognize the look in their eyes, but I see it for what it is now. It was greed and hatred and opportunity.
My dad had assumed—like everyone else—that Great-Grandfather’s fortune would pass to his only son and that he’d have to wait for his father, my grandfather, to pass before the wealth would become his.
The will and the letter’s content gave my parents a chance to control the business’s money and assets, and all they had to do was force me to live by someone else’s rules.
Eventually the lawyer had insisted on giving me the envelope with the letter in it, but before I could open it, Mom had told me not to read it. She told me that something very important had happened. That I was very important now, and because of that, they wouldn’t be traveling anymore, that they wouldn’t ever leave me behind again, and all I had to do was do what I was told.
Later that day, Mom and Dad had sat me down and we’d read the letter together. Just me and them. That day, I became Penelope Rhodes, heiress. That day, I became a monster, and I had no idea.
At fourteen, I didn’t really understand the implications of what the rules would mean for my life. At the time, it’d all seemed so silly. Who in their right mind would leave all their money to a fourteen-year-old?
When my grandparents found out about the will, they went crazy. I had to go to court and meet a judge, and by the time everything had been settled, the entire world, or at least the world we live in, the world of the filthy rich, knew that eventually I’d be worth billions. In the blink of an eye, I went from being the quiet new girl at school to Penelope Rhodes, heiress to a fortune and looking for a husband.
I’d like to say I handled my new notoriety well, that I didn’t let it change me, that my family laughed it off. That they loved me more than the money. But none of that is true. My parents lost their minds, I lost mine, and somehow everything I’ve done in the last three and a half years, the way I’ve lived my life to adhere to that old man’s rules, has led me here.
It’s my sister’s engagement party tonight. She’s marrying the boy my parents had desperately wanted for a son-in-law, but they’d intended for him to marry me, not my sister. I don’t think I was ever really interested in him, but in the last few years, Mom and Dad have told me so many times that he’d be my husband that I started to believe it.
Truthfully, I barely know anything about my sister’s fiancé, other than the fact that Gulliver Winslow is from the right kind of family. With my list of rules came a second list filled with names of suitable husbands for me. I don’t know if my great-grandfather had started to lose his mind when he devised his plan to reform our family or if he honestly thought he was helping, but he wrote down all of the names of all the available male members of the families he deemed suitable for me to marry into.
For the last three and a half years, I’ve been taking part in the world’s most fucked-up version of The Bachelorette. The list covers every worthy man ranging from five years younger than me to twenty years older, and each weekend since that day in the lawyer’s office, Mom crosschecks the names against the engagement announcements in the society papers, unhappily crossing off every name that appears.
Just like Mom promised, my parents stopped traveling and instead focused all of their attention on me and making sure I followed every rule set out for me to the letter. They’ve dedicated their every waking moment to molding me into the perfect socialite. I’m thin, beautiful, poised, cunning, manipulative, flirtatious, meek, bold, and innocent. I’m whatever the man I’m wooing wants me to be, because that’s all I am. A puppet, whose strings are moved this way and that depending on who I’m performing for.
In the last three years, I’ve met every man on the list. I’ve played the part of their perfect wife, flirted with the ones my parents asked me to flirt with, and ignored the ones they thought were beneath us. Everything I’ve done, every thought I’ve had for the last few years has been about securing me a husband, and yet today is my sister’s engagement party, not my own.
A crazed laugh falls from my lips. My life ended the day that will was read. I became who that letter told me to be, and I did it willingly. I did it because, for the first time in my life, I was important.
I didn’t realize that with every day that passed, I was changing into a demon in designer clothes. I didn’t realize that every rule I followed made me more and more of a monster. My great-grandfather thought his rules would make me a better person, but he couldn’t have been more wrong. Before he died, I might have been a spoiled brat desperate for attention and my own unique identity, but after, I became the hero in my own story and the villain in my sister’s.
But that all changed the day I watched my parents beat the shit out of my twin. My dad punched her; he hit and slapped and kicked her, and not only did my mom sit by and do nothing, but she joined in. They beat her until she was bloody and bruised, cowering like a terrified dog on the floor at their feet.
That was the moment that I saw just how wrong everything I’d done had been. It shouldn’t have taken them hurting her, but it did, and with fresh eyes, I saw just how evil a person I’d become. I saw them too. I was evil, and they were evil too. But what do you do when you realize that about yourself? It’s not like you can just take it back. If I could, I’d like to think I would. Or maybe I wouldn’t, because despite it all, despite all the truly despicable things I’ve done since I first read that will, I still want the money.
I want the power that comes with it. I want to be wanted, envied, and desired, and without that billion-dollar payout I’m just another rich girl with a horrible personality and questionable morals.
But for the first time in three years, I’m going to do something to try to atone for my sins. So here I am, planning my own judgment, ruining my future, and changing my whole life because I am a terrible person, and bad people have to pay a penance for their actions. Today is my penance, my day of reckoning, so to speak, and it all started at five o’clock this morning.