Big. Balm. Bale.I started pulling words out, seeing what each of them left me with, and then I saw it.
All at once, I saw it.
“You have got to be kidding me,” I whispered.
“What?” Jameson was 100 percent in this now, whether he wanted to be or not. He knelt next to Grayson and me as I put the letters up, one by one.
Avery Kylie Grambs—the name I’d been given the day I was born, the name that Tobias Hawthorne had programmed into the bowling alley and the pinball machine and who knew how many other places in the House—became, reordered,A very risky gamble.
“He kept saying that,” Xander murmured. “That no matter what he planned, it might not work. That it was…”
“A very risky gamble,” Grayson finished, his gaze making its way to me.
My name?I tried to process that.First my birthday, now my name.Was that it? Was thatwhy? How had Tobias Hawthorne even found me?
I snapped the last blank tile into place, and the box’s lock disengaged. The lid popped open. Inside, there were five envelopes, one with each of our names.
I watched as the boys opened and read theirs. Nash swore under his breath. Grayson stared at his. Jameson let out a broken little laugh. Xander shoved his into his pocket.
I turned my attention from the four of them to my envelope. The last letter Tobias Hawthorne had sent to me had explained nothing. Opening this one, I expected clarity.How did you find me? Why tell me you’re sorry? What were you sorry for?
There was no paper inside my envelope, no letter. The only thing it contained was a single packet of sugar.
CHAPTER 88
Iplace two sugar packets vertically on the table and bring their ends together, forming a triangle capable of standing on its own.“There,” I say. I do the same with the next pair of packets, then set a fifth across them horizontal, connecting the two triangles I built.
“Avery Kylie Grambs!” My mom appears at the end of the table, smiling. “What have I told you about building castles out of sugar?”
I beam back at her. “It’s only worth it if you can go five stories tall!”
In my dream, that was where the memory had ended, but this time, holding the sugar in my hand, my brain took me one step further.A man eating in the booth behind me glances back. He asks me how old I am.
“Six,” I say.
“I have some grandsons at home who are just about your age,” he says. “Tell me, Avery, can you spell your name? Your full name, like your mom said a minute ago?”
I can, and I do.
“I met him,” I said quietly. “Just once, years ago—just for a moment, in passing.” Tobias Hawthorne had heard my mom say my full name. He’d asked me to spell it.
“He loved anagrams more than scotch,” Nash said. “And he was a man wholoveda good scotch.”
Had Tobias Hawthorne mentally rearranged the letters in my full name right in that moment? Had it amused him? I thought about Grayson, hiring someone to dig up dirt on me. On my mother. Had Tobias Hawthorne been curious about us? Had he done the same?
“He would have kept track of you,” Grayson said roughly. “A little girl with a funny little name.” He glanced at Jameson. “He must have known her date of birth.”
“And after Emily died…” Jameson was looking at me now—only at me. “He thought of you.”
“And decided to leave me his entire fortune because ofmy name?” I said. “That’s insane.”
“You’re the one who said it, Heiress: He didn’t disinherit usforyou. We weren’t getting the money anyway.”
“It was going to charity,” I argued. “And you’re telling me that on a whim, he wiped out the will he’d had for twenty years? That’s—”
“He needed something to get our attention,” Grayson said. “Something so unexpected, so bewildering, that it could only be seen—”
“—as a puzzle,” Jameson finished. “Something we couldn’t ignore. Something to wake us up again. Something to bring us here—all four of us.”
