Oren met me the moment I stepped foot into the Great Room. That he’d been waiting made me wonder why he’d left my side in the first place. Had it really been a phone call—or had Tobias Hawthorne left him with instructions to let the five of us finish the game alone?
“Do you know what’s down there?” I asked my head of security. He was more loyal to the old man than he was to me. What else did he ask you to do?
“Besides the tunnel?” Oren replied. “No.” He made a study of me, of the boys. “Should I?”
I thought about what had happened down there while Xander was gone. About Rebecca and what she had told me down below. About Skye. I looked at Grayson. His eyes caught mine. There was a question there, and hope, and something else I couldn’t name.
All I told Oren was “No.”
 |
That night, I sat at Tobias Hawthorne’s desk, the one in my wing. In my hands, I held the letter he’d left me.
Dearest Avery, I’m sorry.
—T. T. H.
I’d wondered what he was sorry for, but I was starting to think I’d had things reversed. Maybe he hadn’t left me the money as an apology. Maybe he was apologizing for leaving me the money. For using me.
He’d brought me here for them.
I folded the letter in half and then in half again. This—all of it—had nothing to do with my mom. Whatever secrets she’d been keeping, they predated Emily’s death. In the grand scheme of things, this entire life- changing, mind-blowing, headline-grabbing chain of events had nothing to do with me. I was just a little girl with a funny little name, born on the right day.
I have some grandsons at home, I could hear the old man telling me,
who are just about your age.
“This was always about them.” I said the words out loud. “What am I supposed to do now?” The game was over. The puzzle was solved. I’d served my purpose. And I’d never felt so insignificant in my life.
My eyes were drawn to the compass built into the desk’s surface. As I had my first time in this office, I turned the compass, and the panel on the desk popped up, revealing the compartment underneath. I traced my finger lightly over the T etched into the wood.
And then I looked down at my letter—at Tobias Hawthorne’s signature.
T. T. H.
My gaze traveled back to the desk. Jameson had told me once that his grandfather had never purchased a desk without hidden compartments. Having played the game, having lived in Hawthorne House—I couldn’t help seeing things differently now. I tested the wood panel on which the T had been etched.
Nothing.
Then I placed my fingers in the T, and I pushed. The wood gave. Click.
And then it popped back up into place.
“T,” I said out loud. And then I did the same thing again. Another click. “T.” I stared at the panel for a long time before I saw it: a gap between the wood and the top of the desk, at the base of the T. I pushed my fingers underneath and found another groove—and above it a latch. I unhooked the latch, and the panel rotated counterclockwise.
With a ninety-degree turn, I was no longer looking at a T. I was looking at an H. I pressed all three bars of the H at the same time. Click. A motor of some kind was engaged, and the panel disappeared back into the desk, revealing another compartment underneath.
T. T. H. Tobias Hawthorne had intended for this to be my wing. He’d signed my letter with initials, not his name. And those initials had unlocked
this drawer. Inside, there was a folder, much like the one that Grayson had shown me that day at the foundation. My name—my full name—was written across the top.
Avery Kylie Grambs.
Now that I’d seen the anagram, I couldn’t unsee it. Unsure what I would find—or even what I was expecting—I lifted the folder out and opened it. The first thing I saw was a copy of my birth certificate. Tobias Hawthorne had highlighted my date of birth—and my father’s signature. The date made sense. But the signature?
I have a secret, I could hear my mother saying. About the day you were born.
I had no idea what to make of that—any of it. I flipped to the next page and the next and the next. They were full of pictures, four or five a year, from the time I was six.
He would have kept track of you, I could hear Grayson saying. A little girl with a funny little name.
The number of pictures went up significantly after my sixteenth birthday. After Emily died. There were so many, like Tobias Hawthorne had sent someone to watch my every move. You couldn’t risk everything on a total stranger, I thought. Technically, that was exactly what he’d done, but looking at these pictures, I was overwhelmed with the sense that Tobias Hawthorne had done his homework.
I wasn’t just a name and a date to him.
There were shots of me running poker games in the parking lot and shots of me carrying way too many cups at once at the diner. There was a picture of me with Libby, where we were laughing, and one where I was standing with my body between hers and Drake’s. There was a shot of me playing chess in the park and one of me and Harry in line for breakfast, where all you could see was the back of our heads. There was even one of me in my car, holding a stack of postcards in my hands.
The photographer had caught me dreaming.
Tobias Hawthorne hadn’t known me—but he’d known about me. I might have been a very risky gamble. I might have been a part of the puzzle and not a player. But the billionaire had known that I could play. He hadn’t entered into this blindly and hoped for the best. He’d plotted, and he’d planned, and I’d been a part of that calculation. Not just Avery Kylie
Grambs, born on the day that Emily Laughlin had died—but the girl in these photos.
I thought about what Jameson had said, that first night when he’d stepped from the fireplace into my room. Tobias Hawthorne left me the fortune—and all he’d left them was me.
