I had no idea what to make of that—any of it. I flipped to the next page and the next and the next. They were full of pictures, four or five a year, from the time I was six.
He would have kept track of you,I could hear Grayson saying.A little girl with a funny little name.
The number of pictures went up significantly after my sixteenth birthday.After Emily died.There were so many, like Tobias Hawthorne had sent someone to watch my every move.You couldn’t risk everything on a total stranger, I thought. Technically, that was exactly what he’d done, but looking at these pictures, I was overwhelmed with the sense that Tobias Hawthorne had done his homework.
I wasn’t just a name and a date to him.
There were shots of me running poker games in the parking lot and shots of me carrying way too many cups at once at the diner. There was a picture of me with Libby, where we were laughing, and one where I was standing with my body between hers and Drake’s. There was a shot of me playing chess in the park and one of me and Harry in line for breakfast, where all you could see was the back of our heads. There was even one of me in my car, holding a stack of postcards in my hands.
The photographer had caught me dreaming.
Tobias Hawthorne hadn’t known me—but he’d knownaboutme. I might have been a very risky gamble. I might have been a part of the puzzle and not a player. But the billionaire had known that I could play. He hadn’t entered into this blindly and hoped for the best. He’d plotted, and he’d planned, and I’d been a part of that calculation. Not just Avery Kylie Grambs, born on the day that Emily Laughlin had died—but the girl in these photos.
I thought about what Jameson had said, that first night when he’d stepped from the fireplace into my room. Tobias Hawthorne left me the fortune—and all he’d left them wasme.
CHAPTER 90
Early the next morning, Oren informed me that Skye Hawthorne was leaving Hawthorne House. She was moving out, and Grayson had instructed security that she wasn’t to be allowed back on the premises.
“Any idea why?” Oren gave me a look that strongly suggested that he knew that I knew something.
I looked at him, and I lied. “Not a clue.”
I found Grayson in the hidden staircase, with the Davenport. “You kicked your mother out of the House?”
That wasn’t what I’d expected him to do, when he’d won our little wager. For better or worse, Skye was his mother.Family first.
“Mother left of her own volition,” Grayson said evenly. “She was made to understand it was the better option.”
Better than being reported to the police.
“You won the bet,” I told Grayson. “You didn’t have to—”
He turned and took a step up so that he was standing on the same stair as me. “Yes, I did.”
If I were choosing between you and any one of them, he’d told me,I would choose them, always and every time.
But he hadn’t.
“Grayson.” I was standing close to him, and the last time we’d stood together on these stairs, I’d bared my wounds—literally. This time, I found my hands rising tohischest. He was arrogant and awful and had spent the first week of our acquaintance dead set on making my life hell. He was still half in love with Emily Laughlin. But from the first moment I’d seen him, looking away had been nearly impossible.
And at the end of the day, he’d chosen me.Over family. Over his mother.
Hesitantly, I let my hand find its way from his chest to his jaw. For a single second, he let me touch him, and then he turned his head away.
“I will always protect you,” he told me, his jaw tight, his eyes shadowed. “You deserve to feel safe in your own home. And I’ll help you with the foundation. I’ll teach you what you need to know to take to this life like you were born to it. But this… us…” He swallowed. “It can’t happen, Avery. I’ve seen the way Jameson looks at you.”
He didn’t say that he wouldn’t let another girl come between them. He didn’t have to.
CHAPTER 91
Iwent to school, and when I came home, I called Max, knowing that she probably didn’t even have her phone. My call got sent to voicemail. “This is Maxine Liu. I’ve been sequestered in the technological equivalent of a virtual convent. Have a blessed day, you rotten scoundrels.”
I tried her brother’s phone and got sent to voicemail again. “You have reached Isaac Liu.” Max had commandeeredhisvoicemail as well. “He is an entirely tolerable younger brother, and if you leave a message, he will probably call you back. Avery, if this is you, stop trying to get yourself killed. You owe me Australia!”
I didn’t leave a message—but I did make plans to see what it would take for Alisa to send the entire Liu family first-class tickets to Australia. I couldn’t travel until my time in Hawthorne House was up, but maybe Max could.
I owed her.
