It was at least a minute before she looked up. “I’m sorry,” she said, her voice wavering. “It’s just, what you just said about Toby identifying with this poem—you could have been describing me. I didn’t even know he liked poetry.” She stood and turned three-sixty, taking in the rest of the wing. “What else?”
“The title of the poem led us to a legal text on Toby’s bookshelf,” I said, the air thick with memories. “In a section on the fruit of the poisonous tree doctrine, we found a coded message that Toby left behind before he ran away—another poem, one he wrote himself.”
“What did it say?” Eve asked, her tone almost urgent. “Toby’s poem?”
I’d been over the words often enough that I knew them by heart. “Secrets, lies, all I despise. The tree is poison, don’t you see? It poisoned S and Z and me. The evidence I stole is in the darkest hole. Light shall reveal all, I writ upon the…”
I trailed off, the way the poem had. I expected Eve to finish it for me, to fill in the word that both Jameson and I had known went at the end. Wall.
But she didn’t. “What does he mean, the evidence he stole?” Eve’s voice rang through Toby’s empty suite. “Evidence of what?”
“His adoption, I’m guessing,” I said. “He kept a journal on his walls, written in invisible ink. There are still some black lights in this room from when we read them. I’ll turn them on and kill the lights.”
Eve reached out to stop me before I could. “Could I do this part alone?”
I hadn’t been expecting that, and my knee-jerk reaction was no.
“I know you have just as much right to be here as I do, Avery—or more. It’s your house, right? But I just…” Eve shook her head, then looked down. “I don’t look like my mom.” She fingered the ends of her hair. “When I was a kid, she kept my hair short—these ugly, uneven bowl cuts she’d do herself. She said it was because she didn’t want to have to mess with it, but when I got older, when I started taking care of my hair myself and grew it out, she let it slip that she’d kept it short because no one else in our family had hair like mine.” Eve took a breath. “No one had eyes like mine. Or a single one of my features. No one thought the way I did or liked the things I liked or felt things the same way.” She swallowed. “I moved out the day I hit eighteen. They probably would have kicked me out if I hadn’t. A few months later, I convinced myself that maybe I had family out there. I did one of those mail-in DNA tests. But… no matches.”
No one even remotely Hawthorne-adjacent would have handed over their DNA to one of those databases. “Toby found you,” I reminded Eve gently.
She nodded. “He doesn’t really look like me, either. And he’s a hard person to get to know. But that poem…”
I didn’t make her say anything else. “I get it,” I told her. “It’s fine.”
On my way out the door, I thought about my mom and all the ways we were alike. She’d given me my resilience. My smile. The color of my hair. The tendency to guard my heart—and the ability, once those guards were down, to love fiercely, deeply, unapologetically.
Unafraid.
CHAPTER 28
I found Jameson on the climbing wall. He was at the top, where the angles became treacherous, his body held to the wall through sheer force of will.
“Your grandfather left me a game,” I said. My voice wasn’t loud, but it carried.
Without a moment’s hesitation, Jameson dropped from the wall.
He was too high up. In my mind, I saw him landing wrong. I heard bones shattering. But just like the first time I’d met him, he landed in a crouch.
When he stood up, he gave no signs of being worse for wear.
“I hate it when you do that,” I told him.
Jameson smirked. “It’s possible that I was deprived of maternal attention as a child unless I was bleeding.”
“Skye noticed if you were bleeding?” I asked.
Jameson gave a little shrug. “Some of the time.” He hesitated, just for a fraction of a second, then stepped forward. “I’m sorry about last night, Heiress. You didn’t even call Tahiti.”
“You don’t have to apologize,” I told him. “Just ask me about the game your grandfather designed to be delivered to me if and when Eve and I ever met.”
“He knew about her?” Jameson tried to wrap his mind around that. “The plot thickens. How far through the game are you?”
“Solved the first clue,” I said. “Now I’m looking for a chess set.”
“There are six in the game room,” Jameson replied automatically. “That’s how many it takes to play Hawthorne chess.”
Hawthorne chess. Why was I not surprised? “I found all six. Do you know if there’s a seventh somewhere else?”
“I don’t know of one.” Jameson gave me a look: part trouble, part challenge. “But do you still have that binder Alisa made for you, detailing your inheritance?”
I found an entry in the binder’s index: Chess set, royal. I flipped to the page indicated and read, tearing through the description as fast as I could. The set was valued at nearly half a million dollars. The pieces were made of white gold, encrusted with black and white diamonds—nearly ten thousand of them. The pictures were breathtaking.
There was only one place this chess set could be.
“Oren,” I called out to the hallway, knowing he’d be somewhere within earshot. “I need you to take us to the vault.”
The last time I’d been to the Hawthorne vault, I’d jokingly asked Oren if it contained the crown jewels, and his very serious response had been To what country?
“If what you’re looking for isn’t here,” Oren told Jameson and me as we surveyed the steel drawers lining the walls, “some pieces are kept in an even more secure location off-site.”
Jameson and I got to work gingerly opening drawer after drawer. I managed not to gawk at anything until I came to a scepter made of shining gold interwoven with another lighter metal. White gold? Platinum? I had no idea, but it wasn’t the materials that caught my eye. It was the design of the scepter. The metalwork was impossibly intricate. The effect was delicate, but dangerous. Beauty and power.
“Long live the Queen,” Jameson murmured.
“The Queen’s Gambit,” I said, my mind racing. Maybe we weren’t looking for a chess set.
But before I could follow that thought any further, Jameson opened another drawer and spoke again. “Heiress.” There was something different in his tone this time.
I looked at the drawer he’d opened. So this is what ten thousand diamonds looks like. Each chess piece was magnificent; the board looked like a jewel-encrusted table. According to the binder, forty master artisans had spent more than five thousand hours bringing this chess set to life—and it looked it.
“You want to do the honors, Heiress?”
This was my game. A familiar, electric feeling coming over me, I examined each piece, starting with the white pawns and working my way up to the king. Then I did the same thing with the black pieces, glittering with black diamonds.