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“Why the hell not?”
Laughing, she put down the mug and caught Alessandra’s eye. “It’s about my parents. My past. Last night, when I overheard you and Toni talking . . .” She’d been hurt. Badly. But it felt silly to say as much out loud—they were all adults, after all. “Well, let’s just say I’m a bit of a hypocrite—”
“Stop it,” Alessandra scolded. “You’re too hard on yourself.”
“No, I’m not. I should have told you both sooner, but I don’t like to talk about it. I guess I was embarrassed.” She looked down into her coffee. “My father was a software engineer—”
“Who stayed back in South Carolina?”
“Right.” She looked up. “We came to Pennsylvania after my mother remarried, when I was nineteen. After . . .” She took a deep breath. “After we lost everything.”
“What do you mean, everything?”
“We were rich.” Charlotte shrugged. “My dad and his business partner developed a piece of software in the early eighties and co-founded a company. They became—we became—millionaires. Virtually overnight.”
“Millionaires?”
“My parents bought a humongous house, complete with servants and a nanny. My mom quit her job as a dental hygienist and never looked back.”
She thought of how differently they’d been raised. Alessandra had been brought up by a single mom, always busy, always hustling. Charlotte’s mother, on the other hand, had an abundance of time—but not enough to be involved in her only child’s daily life.
“She took to the role like a champ,” she said, trying not to sound bitter. “Mother loved nothing more than entertaining. She still does. I mean, sure, she and my stepdad live in a more modest house, but her car is leased to the hilt, and the parties . . . somehow she’s managed to keep a modicum of the lifestyle we once enjoyed. Lord knows how.”
“Charlotte, I had no idea. I don’t mean to pry, but . . .”
“He and his business partner,” she said, answering the question she knew was coming. “They’d been embezzling from the business, for years.” This time she laughed with as much bitterness as she felt for the man she had once called uncle. “The same man who never missed a birthday party. Whose family we vacationed with every summer. Conspired with my father to embezzle millions after their company had gone public.”
To this day, she still could not reconcile either man with the ones who bankrupted them.
“And they both went to jail for it.”
“Your real father?”
“Is in jail. In South Carolina.”
“Wow.” Alessandra put her mug on the counter with a clang, her expression mutinous.
Out of nowhere, Charlotte burst into laughter at Alessandra’s expression. Charlotte was pretty sure this outpouring had something to do with the utter craziness of the past twenty-four hours. Vampires. Cheld. Confessions. Torr. “Is there a full moon? Because things feel a bit crazy suddenly.”
“I don’t know.” Alessandra picked her tea back up. “But if there is, it’s a good day to be off.”
“Tell me about it. Speaking of which, don’t you have a class today?”
“I do, but not until this afternoon. I did have office hours this morning.” She shrugged. “But no one ever comes anyway . . .”
“Sorry,” Charlotte muttered, wrapping her hands around her coffee mug to warm them. “Too bad we couldn’t do this every morning.”
“Right? Technically, I suppose I don’t have to work—”
“Oh my goodness, Kenton’s money.” How could she not have realized? “It’s because—”
“Yep. He’s over seven hundred years old. They’ve all gotten really good at investing.”
“Wait a second. Then why is Lawrence opening a bar?”
Alessandra smiled. “He doesn’t need the money. It’s apparently something he’s always wanted to do.”
Now that they were back on the subject of Kenton and his family, Alessandra filled in the gaps of the story she’d learned last night. She told her more about the feud between the Derricksons and the Morleys, and described her abilities as a Cheld. And then she truly shocked Charlotte by admitting that Kenton had originally come to Stone Haven with the intention to kill her.
