“There’s a control panel under the portico.”
I managed to find it and turn the pool lights on but ended up accidentally turning a fountain on, too. Water sprayed upward in a magnificent arc as the pool light cycled through colors: pink, purple, blue, green, violet. It felt like watching fireworks. Like magic.
But I hadn’t come down here for magic. One touch turned off the fountain. Another stopped the cycle of colors in the light.
“What are you doing?” Grayson asked me, and I knew that he was asking why I was here, with him.
“Did Jameson tell you about the bag your grandfather left me?” I asked.
Grayson pushed off the wall, treading water as he measured his response. “Jamie doesn’t tell me everything.” The silences in Grayson’s sentences always spoke volumes. “In fairness, there’s quite a bit that I don’t tell him.”
That was the closest he’d ever come to mentioning that night in the wine cellar, the things he’d confessed to me.
I held up the glass circle. “This was one of several items in a bag that your grandfather instructed be delivered to me if Eve and I ever met. There was also—”
“What did you say?” Without warning, Grayson pulled himself out of the water. It was October and cool enough at night that he had to be freezing, but he did a very good impression of someone utterly incapable of feeling cold.
“When I met Eve, it triggered one of your grandfather’s games.”
“The old man knew?” Grayson was standing so still that if the pool light hadn’t been on, he would have disappeared into the darkness. “My grandfather knew about Eve? He knew that Toby had a daughter?”
I swallowed. “Yes.”
Every muscle in Grayson’s body had gone tight. “He knew,” he repeated savagely. “And he left her there? He knew, and he didn’t say a damn word to any of us?” Grayson strode toward me—then past me. He braced himself against the portico wall, his palms flat, the muscles in his back so tense that it looked like his shoulder blades might split the skin.
“Grayson?” I didn’t say more than that. I wasn’t sure what else to say.
“I used to tell myself that the old man loved us,” Grayson stated with all the precision of a surgeon slicing through good flesh to get to bad. “That if he held us to impossible standards, it was for the noble purpose of forging his heirs into what we needed to be. And if the great Tobias Hawthorne was harder on me than on my brothers, I told myself that it was because I needed to be more. I believed that he taught me about honor and duty because he was honorable, because he felt the weight of his duty and wanted to prepare me for it.”
Grayson slammed his hand down onto the wall hard enough for the rough surface to tear into his palm.
“But the things he did? The dirty little secrets in those file folders?
Knowing about Eve and letting her be raised by people who treated her as less than? Pretending that our family owed Toby’s daughter nothing?
There’s nothing honorable about that.” Grayson shook. “Any of it.”
I thought about Grayson never allowing himself to break because he knew the man he’d been raised to be. I thought about Jameson saying that Grayson had always been so perfect. “We don’t know how long your grandfather knew about Eve,” I said. “If it was a recent discovery, if he knew that she looked like Emily, maybe he thought it would be too painful —”
“Maybe he thought I was too weak.” Grayson turned to face me. “That’s what you’re saying, Avery, as hard as you try to make it mean something else.”
I took a step toward him. “Grief doesn’t make you weak, Grayson.”