“Avery.” Alisa’s heels hit the pavement with a rapid click, click, click as she approached me. “You need to get back inside. The live auction is about to start.”
I made it through the rest of the evening. As Max had promised, most of the items in the live auction had been donated by… me. A weeklong stay in a four-bedroom house on Abaco, in the Bahamas. Two weeks in Santorini, Greece, private plane included. A castle in Scotland to be used as a wedding venue.
“How many vacation homes do you have?” Max asked me on the way home.
I shook my head. “I don’t know.”
“You could actually look at the binder I gave you,” Alisa suggested from the front seat.
I barely heard her, but that night, after I’d placed another six fruitless phone calls and spent hours turning the conversation with Grayson’s father over in my head, I slipped out of bed and walked to my desk. The binder in question was just sitting there. Alisa had given it to me weeks ago, as a primer on my inheritance.
I flipped through it until I found myself staring at a villa in Tuscany. A thatched cottage in Bora-Bora. A literal castle in the Scottish Highlands. This was unreal. Page after page, I drank in the pictures. Patagonia. Santorini. Kauai. Malta. Seychelles. A flat in London. Apartments in Tokyo and Toronto and New York. Costa Rica. San Miguel de Allende…
I felt like I was having some kind of out-of-body experience, like it was impossible to feel what I was feeling and still be flesh and blood. My mom and I had dreamed of traveling. Stashed in my enormous closet, in a ratty bag from home, was a stack of blank postcards. Mom and I had imagined going to those places. I’d wanted to see the world.
And the closest I’d ever come was postcards.
A ball of emotion rising in my throat, I flipped another page—and I stopped breathing. The cabin in this photograph looked like it had been built into the side of a mountain. The snow-covered roof was A-line, and dozens of light fixtures lit up the brown stone like lanterns. Beautiful.
But that wasn’t what had robbed the breath from my lungs. Every muscle in my chest tightened as I lifted my fingers to the text at the top of the page, where the details of the home were written. It was in the Rocky Mountains, ski in/ski out, eight bedrooms—and the house had a name.
True North.
CHAPTER 37
To my daughter Skye Hawthorne, I leave my compass, may she always know true north.” The next morning, I paced in front of Max, unable to contain myself. “The part about the compass and true north was in both of Tobias Hawthorne’s wills. The older one was written twenty years ago. The clues in that will couldn’t have been meant for the Hawthorne grandsons—not originally.” If there was a connection between that line in the will and the home I’d inherited in Colorado, that message had been meant explicitly for Skye. “This game was for Tobias Hawthorne’s daughters.”
“Daughters, plural?” Max inquired.
“The old man left Zara a bequest, too.” My mind raced as I tried to recall the exact wording. “To my daughter Zara, I leave my wedding ring, may she love as wholly and steadfastly as I loved her mother.”
What if that was a clue, too?
“One piece of the puzzle is at True North,” I said. “And if there’s another one, it must have something to do with that ring.”
“So,” Max said gamely, “first, we go to Colorado, and then we steal ourselves a ring.”
It was tempting. I wanted to see True North. I wanted to go there. I wanted to experience even a fraction of what that binder told me my new world had to offer. “I can’t,” I said, frustrated. “I can’t go anywhere. I have to stay here for a year to inherit.”
“You go to school,” Max pointed out. “So, obviously, you don’t have to stay holed up at Hawthorne House twenty-four hours a day.” She grinned. “Avery, my billionaire friend, how long do you think it would take us to fly by private jet to Colorado?”
I called Alisa, and she arrived within the hour.
“When the will says that I have to live in Hawthorne House for a year, what does that mean exactly? What constitutes living at Hawthorne House?”
“Why do you ask?” Alisa replied, blinking.
“Max and I were looking at the binder you gave me. At all of those vacations homes.”
“Absolutely not.” Oren spoke from the doorway. “It’s too risky.”
“I agree,” Alisa said firmly. “But since I have a professional obligation to answer your question: The will’s appendix makes it clear that you may spend no more than three nights per month away from Hawthorne House.”