The shower was too hot, but Grayson didn’t back away from the spray or turn down the heat. He wasn’t sure how long he’d stood there when his phone rang. But when he turned the water off and stepped out of the shower, when he saw the call was incoming from a blocked number, he prepared himself.
Eve’s spy would have reported back by now.
Grayson shouldn’t have answered her call, but he did. “What do you want?”
“Answers.” That’s not Eve’s voice. It was the girl who’d called before. Her register was lower than Eve’s, not quite husky but only a hair’s breadth from it. “Specifically, two of them.”
“Two answers.” Grayson’s reply sounded haughty to his own ears.
“I was four.” Within that lower register, her pitch rose and fell. “It was my birthday. I lived with my mom. I barely knew my father, but for some reason, I was with him that day.”
Your father, Grayson filled in, but he didn’t interrupt her, didn’t stop her, forced himself to listen to every pause, every breath, every word.
“My father”—she said that phrase like she had to force herself to put those two words side by side—“gave me a candy necklace with just three pieces of candy left on it. I guess he ate the rest?” That only half sounded like a question. Her voice went husky, breaking at odd intervals like what she was saying broke her. “So. He gave me the necklace and a flower. A calla lily. And he leaned forward and whispered in my ear, A Hawthorne did this.”
She didn’t pause, but Grayson’s brain latched on to those words, forcing him to play catch-up as she continued speaking.
“And then he turned and started walking away, and that’s when I saw the gun.” Now she paused. “I couldn’t move. I just stood there, holding what was left of that candy necklace and the flower, and I watched my father and his gun walk up the stairs.”
There was something in the way she paced the words that made it sound like she was relaying something that had happened to someone else.
“And at the top of the stairs, he turned around, and he said words that didn’t even make sense, gibberish. And then he disappeared. Less than a minute later, I heard the gun go off.”
The deliberate lack of intensity in her voice hit him almost as hard as her words, as the mental image she’d given him.
“I didn’t go upstairs.” That sounded almost like a question. “I remember dropping the flower, and then, all of a sudden, my mom and stepdad were there, and it was over.” This time, he heard her inhale, audibly, sharply. “I forgot about it. Blocked it out. And then a couple of years ago, I started hearing and seeing the name Hawthorne all over the news.”
It wasn’t a full two years ago. Grayson pushed down the urge to make that point. “My grandfather died.”
“There was a new heiress. Mystery. Intrigue. A real Cinderella story. Hawthorne. Hawthorne. Hawthorne.”
Grayson thought about what she had said—what she had been told. A Hawthorne did this. “You remembered.”
“In dreams, mostly.”
For some reason, that hit him hard. I almost never dream. The words very nearly escaped him. “You said you had two questions.” Grayson needed to keep this conversation on track.
“I said that I wanted two answers.” Her correction was cutting and precise. She wasted no more time in specifying the first. “What did your grandfather do?”
Grayson could have argued with her, could have pointed out that Hawthorne was not an uncommon name. But instead, he thought of a room in Hawthorne House filled with stacks and stacks of files. “I could not say.” He kept his voice just as curt as hers. “But probabilities being what they are, whatever Tobias Hawthorne did or did not do, it likely ruined your father financially.” That was all he intended to say, but he couldn’t shake the feeling that he owed her more.
Couldn’t shake the thought of a little girl holding a single lily and a mostly eaten candy necklace. Staring at an empty staircase. A gunshot ringing in her ears.
“If you tell me your father’s name…” Grayson started to say.
She cut him off. “No.”
Annoyance surged. “What do you expect me to do without a name?”
“I don’t know.” She sounded… not vulnerable. Not angry, exactly. “The last thing he said, at the top of the stairs…”
“Words that didn’t even make sense,” Grayson murmured.
“What begins a bet?” she quoted. “And then he said: Not that.” The girl waited for Grayson to speak, but impatience didn’t let her wait long. “Does that mean anything to you, Hawthorne boy?”