That took the wind out of Alisa’s sails, but only slightly. “Of course he did.” She let out a breath, then took in another, and then repeated the process two or three times. “If you had told me, Avery, I might have been able to get a handle on this. We could have hired a team to—”
“Find him?” I said. “Your team already looked.”
“There are teams,” Alisa told me, “and there are teams. I have a fiduciary duty to the estate—to you. There is no way I could license millions to find Harry, but to find Toby?”
I dug my phone out and pulled up the picture Libby had sent me of Toby’s message. “He doesn’t want to be found.” I passed the phone into her hands.
“Stop looking.” She read the words aloud, completely unimpressed. “Who took this? Where was it taken? Have we verified the handwriting?”
I answered the questions in the order she’d asked them. “Libby. New Castle. The handwriting is definitely Toby’s.”
Alisa rolled her eyes heavenward. “You sent Libby after him?”
I was getting ready to tell her that there was nothing wrong with Libby, when Grayson clarified the situation. “And Nash.”
It took Alisa a full four or five seconds to recover from the fact that Nash had known—and that he was with Libby now. “And you,” she told Grayson heatedly. “You had time to look up the legal precedent, but it didn’t occur to you to talk to a lawyer?”
Grayson looked down at the cuff link on his right sleeve, considering his response. He must have decided on honesty, because when he lifted his gaze back up to Alisa, all he said was, “We couldn’t be certain where your loyalties would lie.”
This time Alisa didn’t look angry. She looked like she might cry. “How could you say that to me, Gray?” She searched his expression for a response, and I was reminded that she’d grown up with the Hawthorne family. She’d known Grayson and Jameson and Xander their entire lives. “When did I become the enemy here? I have only ever done what the old man wanted me to do.” She spoke like those words were being physically torn out of her. “Do you have any idea what that’s cost me?”
It was clear from the tone of her voice that she wasn’t just talking about the will, or me, or anything that had happened in the wake of Tobias Hawthorne’s death. She’d called him “the old man,” the same way they did, when I’d only ever heard her refer to him as Mr. Hawthorne or Tobias Hawthorne before. And when she spoke about what her loyalty to the old man had cost her…
She’s talking about Nash.
“I am holding this empire together by a thread.” Alisa swiped angrily at her face with the back of her hand, and I realized a single tear had escaped. Her expression made it damn clear that it would be the last. “Avery, I will handle this situation. I will put out this fire. I will do what needs to be done, but the next time you keep a secret from me, the next time you lie to me? I will throw you to the wolves myself.”
I believed her. “There is one more thing.” I gulped—there was no way of sugarcoating this. “Well, two more things. One: Toby was adopted, and his biological mother was the Laughlins’ then-teenage daughter.”
Alisa stared at me for a good three seconds. Then she arched an eyebrow, waiting for the other thing.
“And two,” I continued, thinking back to the moment when Grayson had stopped me from saying this on camera—and how. “I have reason to believe that Toby is, in all likelihood, my father.”
CHAPTER 65
Well,” Max said, flopping down on my bed. “That could have gone better.” She’d seen the interview. The whole world had. “Are you sure you’re okay?”
Grayson had warned me, from the very beginning, not to pull at this thread. He warned me against telling anyone about Toby, and how many people had I told?
When we’d arrived back at Hawthorne House, I had tried to talk to him, but my mouth had refused to say a single word.
“Grayson didn’t have to kiss me,” I told Max, the words bursting out of my mouth, like I didn’t have much bigger things to think about. “He could have cut me off.”
“Personally, I find this turn of events delightful,” Max declared. “But you look like a motherfaxing deer caught in motherfaxing headlights.”
I felt like one. “He shouldn’t have kissed me.”
Max grinned. “Did you kiss him back?”
His lips. Mine. “I don’t know!” I bit out.