“I’m unaware of any special copies of Mr. Hawthorne’s prior will, but McNamara, Ortega, and Jones certainly has an original on file that you could view.”
I knew exactly what Alisa meant when she said “special,” but just because there wasn’t an equivalent to the Red Will didn’t mean that this was a dead end. Not yet.
“How soon can I see it?” I asked, my eyes still on Jameson’s.
“I need you to do two things for me first.”
I scowled. When I’d asked to see the Red Will, Alisa had leveraged my request to put me in a room with a team of stylists. “Not another makeover,” I groaned. “Because this is about as made over as I get.”
“You’re perfectly presentable these days,” Alisa assured me. “But I will need you to clear some time in your schedule for an appointment with Landon right after school.”
Landon was a media consultant. She handled PR—and prepping me to talk to the press.
“Why do I need to meet with Landon right after school?” I asked suspiciously.
“I’d like you interview-ready within the next month. We need to be sure that we’re the ones controlling the story, Avery.” Alisa paused. “Not your father.”
I couldn’t say what I wanted to say, which was that Ricky Grambs wasn’t my father. It wasn’t his signature on my birth certificate.
“Fine,” I said sharply. “What else?” Alisa had said “two things.”
“I need you to recover your senses and let your poor bodyguard onto that roof.”
After school, I met with Landon in the Oval Room.
“Last time we met, I taught you how not to answer questions. The art of answering them is a bit more complicated. With a group of reporters, you can ignore questions you don’t want to answer. In a one-on-one interview, that ceases to be an option.”
I tried to at least look like I was paying attention to what the media consultant was saying.
“Instead of ignoring questions,” Landon continued, her posh British accent pronounced, “you have to redirect them, and you must do so in a way that ensures that people are interested enough in what you’re saying that they fail to notice when you take a detour directly toward one of your preordained talking points.”
“My talking points,” I echoed, but my thoughts were on Tobias Hawthorne’s will.
Landon’s deep brown eyes didn’t miss much. She arched an eyebrow at me, and I forced myself to focus.
“Lovely,” she declared. “The first thing you need to decide is what you want people taking away from any given interview. To do that, you will need to formulate a personal theme, exactly six talking points, and no fewer than two dozen personal anecdotes that will humanize you and redirect any category of question you might receive toward one of your talking points.”
“Is that all?” I asked dryly.
Landon ignored my tone. “Not quite. You’ll also need to learn to identify ‘no’ questions.”
I could do this. I could be a good little heiress celebrity. I could refrain from rolling my eyes. “What are ‘no’ questions?”
“They’re questions that you can answer in a single word, most typically no. If you can’t spin a question around to a talking point, or if talking too much will make you look guilty, then you need to be able to look the interviewer in the eye and, without sounding the least bit defensive, give her that one-word answer. No. Yes. Sometimes.”
The way she said those words sounded so sincere—and she hadn’t even been asked a question.
“I don’t have anything to feel guilty about,” I pointed out. “I haven’t done anything wrong.”
“That,” she said evenly, “is exactly the kind of thing that is going to make you sound defensive.”
Landon gave me homework, and I left our session determined to ensure that Alisa held up her end of the bargain. An hour later, Oren, Alisa, Jameson, and I were on the way to the law firm of McNamara, Ortega, and Jones.
To my surprise, Xander was sitting out front when we got there. “Did you tell him we were coming?” I asked Jameson as the two of us stepped out of the SUV.
“I didn’t have to,” Jameson murmured back, his eyes narrowing. “He’s a Hawthorne.” He raised his voice loud enough for Xander to hear it. “And he’d better not have me bugged.”
The fact that surveillance technology was even a possibility here said a lot about their childhood.