“I used to lose,” Xander said suddenly as we rounded a corner. “On Saturday mornings, when my grandfather set us to a challenge, I always lost.” I had no idea why he was telling me this. “I was the youngest. The least competitive. The most apt to be distracted by scones or complex machinery.”
“But…,” I prompted. I could hear in his tone that there was one.
“But,” Xander replied, “while my brothers were trying to take one another down in the race to the finish line, I was generously sharing my scones with the old man. He was awfully chatty, full of stories and facts and contradictions. Would you like to hear one?”
“A contradiction?” I asked.
“A fact.” Xander wiggled his eyebrows—eyebrow.“He didn’t have a middle name.”
“What?” I said.
“My grandfather was born Tobias Hawthorne,” Xander told me. “No middle name.”
I wondered if the old man had signed Xander’s letter the same way he had signed Jameson’s.Tobias Tattersall Hawthorne.He’d signed mine with initials—three of them.
“If I asked you to show me your letter, would you?” I asked Xander. He’d said that he usually came in last in their grandfather’s games. That didn’t mean he wasn’t playing this one.
“Now, where would the fun be in that?” Xander deposited me in front of a thick wooden door. “You’ll be safe from Thea in there. There are some places even she dares not tread.”
I glanced through the clear pane on the door. “The library?”
“The archive,” Xander corrected archly. “It’s prep school forlibrary—not a bad place to hang out during free mods if you’re looking to get some time alone.”
Hesitantly, I pushed the door open. “You coming?” I asked him.
He closed his eyes. “I can’t.” He didn’t offer any more explanation than that. As he walked away, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was missing something.
Maybe multiple somethings.
The last girl who spent hour after hour in that house?She died.
CHAPTER 26
The archive looked more like a university library than one that belonged in a high school. The room was full of archways and stained glass. Countless shelves were brimming with books of every kind, and at the center of the room, there were a dozen rectangular tables—state of the art, with lights built into the tables and enormous magnifying glasses attached to the sides.
All the tables were empty except for one. A girl sat with her back to me. She had auburn hair, a darker red than I’d ever seen on a person. I sat down several tables away from her, facing the door. The room was silent except for the sound of the other girl turning the pages of the book she was reading.
I withdrew Jameson’s letter and my own from my bag.Tattersall.I dragged my finger over the middle name with which Tobias Hawthorne had signed Jameson’s missive, then looked at the initials scrawled on mine. The handwriting matched. Something nagged at me, and it took me a moment to realize what it was.He used the middle name in the will, too.What if that was the catch here? What if that was all it took to invalidate the terms?
I texted Alisa. The reply came immediately:Legal name change, years ago. We’re good.
Xander had said that his grandfather wasbornTobias Hawthorne, no middle name. Why tell me that at all? Deeply doubting that I would ever understand anyone with the last name Hawthorne, I reached for the magnifying glass attached to the table. It was the size of my hand. I placed the two letters side by side beneath it and turned on the lights built into the table.
Chalk one up for private schools.
The paper was thick enough that the light didn’t shine through, but the magnifying glass made quick work of blowing the writing up ten times its normal size. I adjusted the glass, bringing the signature on Jameson’s letter into focus. I could see details now in Tobias Hawthorne’s handwriting that I hadn’t been able to see before. A slight hook on hisr’s. Asymmetry on his capitalT’s. And there, in his middle name, was a noticeable space, twice that between any two other letters. Magnified, that space made the name appear as two words.
Tatters all. Tatters, all.“As in, he left them all in tatters?” I wondered out loud. It was a leap, but it didn’t feel like much of one, not when Jameson had been so sure that there was more to this letter than met the eyes. Not when Xander had made it a point to tell me about his grandfather’s lack of a middle name. If Tobias Hawthorne had legally changed his name to add inTattersall, that strongly suggested he’d chosen the name himself.To what end?
I looked up, suddenly remembering that I wasn’t alone in this room, but the girl with the dark red hair was gone. I shot off another text to Alisa:When did TH change his name?
Did the name change correspond to the moment he’d decided to leave his family in the billionaire version of tatters, to leave everything to me?
A text came through a moment later, but it wasn’t from Alisa. It was from Jameson. I had no idea how he’d even gotten the number—for this new phone or my last.
I see it now, Mystery Girl. Do you?
I looked around, feeling like he might be watching me from the wings, but by all indications, I was alone.
