Lucky for me, I was a quick learner. I cut from underneath the gymnasium wing to a tunnel that went below the music room. I passed beneath the solarium, then climbed a hidden staircase into the Great Room, where I found Nash Hawthorne leaning casually against a stone fireplace. Waiting.
“Hey, kid.” Nash didn’t bat an eye at the fact that I’d just appeared seemingly out of nowhere. In fact, the oldest Hawthorne brother gave the impression that the whole mansion could come crashing down around him and he’d just keep leaning against that fireplace. Nash Hawthorne would probably tip his cowboy hat to Death herself.
“Hey,” I replied.
“I don’t suppose you’ve seen Grayson?” Nash asked, his Texas drawl making the question sound almost lazy.
That did nothing to soften the impact of what he’d just said. “Nope.” I kept my answer short and my face blank. Grayson Hawthorne and I had been keeping our distance.
“And I don’t suppose you know anything about a chat Gray had with our mother, right before she moved out?”
Skye Hawthorne, Tobias Hawthorne’s younger daughter and the mother of all four Hawthorne grandsons, had tried to have me killed. The person who’d actually pulled the trigger was the one in a jail cell, but Skye had been forced to leave Hawthorne House. By Grayson. I will always protect you, he’d told me. But this… us… It can’t happen, Avery.
“No clue,” I said flatly.
“Didn’t think so.” Nash gave me a little wink. “Your sister and your lawyer are looking for you. East Wing.” That was a loaded statement if I’d ever heard one. My lawyer was his ex-fiancée, and my sister was…
I didn’t know what Libby and Nash Hawthorne were.
“Thanks,” I told him, but when I made my way up the winding staircase to the East Wing of Hawthorne House, I didn’t go looking for Libby. Or Alisa. I’d made a bet with Jameson, and I intended to win. First stop: Tobias Hawthorne’s office.
In the office, there was a mahogany desk, and behind the desk was a wall of trophies and patents and books with the name Hawthorne on the spine—a breathtaking visual reminder that there was nothing ordinary whatsoever about the Hawthorne brothers. They had been given every opportunity, and the old man had expected them to be extraordinary. But I hadn’t come here to gawk at trophies.
Instead, I took a seat behind the desk and released the hidden compartment I’d discovered not long ago. It held a folder. Inside the folder, there were pictures of me. Countless photographs, stretching back years. After that fateful meeting in the diner, Tobias Hawthorne had kept tabs on me. All because of my name? Or did he have another motive?
I thumbed through the photos and pulled out two. Jameson had been right, back in the tunnels. I was holding out on him. I’d been photographed with Toby twice, but both times, all the photographer had captured of the man beside me was the back of his head.
Had Tobias Hawthorne recognized Toby from behind? Had “Harry” realized we were being photographed and turned his head away from the camera on purpose?
As far as clues went, this wasn’t much to go on. All the file really proved was that Tobias Hawthorne had been keeping tabs on me for years before “Harry” had shown up. I thumbed past the photographs to a copy of my birth certificate. My mother’s signature was neat, my father’s an odd mix of cursive and print. Tobias Hawthorne had highlighted my father’s signature, as well as my date of birth.
10/18. I knew the significance there. Both Grayson and Jameson had loved a girl named Emily Laughlin. Her death—on October 18—had torn them apart. Somehow, the old man had intended for me to bring them back together. But why would Tobias Hawthorne have highlighted my father’s signature? Ricky Grambs was a deadbeat. He hadn’t even cared enough to pick up the phone when my mother died. If it had been left up to him, I would have gone into foster care. Staring at Ricky’s signature, I willed Tobias Hawthorne’s reasoning in highlighting it to become clear.
Nothing.
In the back of my mind, I heard my mother’s voice. I have a secret, she’d told me, long before Tobias Hawthorne had written me into his will, about the day you were born.
Whatever she’d been referring to, I was never going to guess it now that she was gone. The one thing I knew for certain was that I wasn’t a Hawthorne. If my father’s name on that birth certificate weren’t proof enough, a DNA test had already confirmed that I had no Hawthorne blood.
Why did Toby seek me out? Did he seek me out? I thought about what Jameson had said about his grandfather killing twelve birds with one stone. Going back through the folder again, I tried to find some shred of meaning. What wasn’t I seeing? There had to be something— A rap at the door was the only warning I got before the doorknob began to twist. Moving quickly, I gathered the photographs and slipped the file back into the hidden compartment.