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Erin had refused to tell me who’d hired her, honoring the person’s wish to remain anonymous. But I couldn’t shake the feeling that it had been Adam Pierce—and that if I could just find him, I could get answers to so many burning questions about my mother, my life, even myself.
Cole left on Friday to go home for the weekend like usual, and on Saturday, Mason, Elijah, and Finn all had a field trip. Leah was back home too, so I decided to take advantage of the quiet around campus to dig through every document and piece of paper Erin Bennett had given me. She wouldn’t tell me who had hired her, but maybe there would be something in one of them that would give me a clue.
I pulled everything out of my desk drawer and spread it out on the floor in the living room, using the opportunity to stretch my hamstrings while I meticulously combed through the pages. I had copies of court filings she’d made, but there was no mention in any of them who had hired her, just who she was representing.
The question that kept nagging at me was why, if Adam Pierce actually was my father and had hired Erin to free up my trust, he hadn’t wanted me to know he’d done it.
Unless he was trying to honor my mother’s wishes somehow? To keep the truth of my paternity a secret just like she had done?
Why, though?
It made no fucking sense.
Frustration built up inside me as the pile of papers left to comb through dwindled, and the pile I’d already examined grew taller and taller. When I was finally out of documents, I got up and flopped onto the couch, letting out a frustrated groan.
Maybe I could hire a detective or something once I got access to more of my inheritance.
But should I? If whoever did this went to such lengths to stay hidden, maybe they had a reason.
I couldn’t even hold onto that thought for ten seconds before curiosity rose up to drown it out again. Maybe they didn’t want me to find out, but I wouldn’t let that stop me from trying. As I’d learned over and over again since entering this world, there were strings attached to everything—and I had a right to know what hidden corners these particular strings disappeared into.
Rolling over onto my stomach, I grabbed my phone from the table, suppressing a smile as I read a text from Finn bitching about how boring their field trip was.
Then I pulled up my camera app and swiped the screen several times to jump back to previous pictures. As I’d worked with Erin, I had documented a few forms before we sent them in, so I could reference the info later if I needed to. It was mostly stuff I’d filled out myself, so I didn’t have a lot of hope that there would be anything on the documents that might reveal who had hired her.
But my other option for how to spend the rest of the day was studying, and I didn’t mind taking an excuse to avoid that for another few minutes.
I swiped idly through the pictures, flipping over onto my back and hooking my leg over the back of the couch.
Then I stopped.
Swiped back to the previous image.
My head came off the cushion as I squinted at the screen, and then I drew my fingers across it to zoom in on the image.
I’d taken a picture of several forms spread out across the grungy coffee table at Mina’s house. The bottoms of the documents were cut off by the frame of the picture, but at the top edge of the image, most of Erin’s phone had ended up in the shot.
There was a message open on the screen, and at the bottom, an address.
An address in Roseland.
My heart lurched in my chest, and I tilted the screen to try to get a better view. The image was blurry when it was zoomed in like this, so it was hard to make out the street name, but I was sure the listed city was Roseland, California.
I sat up, grabbing a piece of paper and bending over the coffee table, writing out every possibility I could think of for what the address might be. The numbers were easier to read, partly since there were fewer options for those.
Typing quickly, I went down the list, plugging each possible street name and number into my phone and seeing if anything came up. On the third try, I got a match for an actual address in Roseland, and when I Googled that address, my brows scrunched together.
“What the fuck?”
I switched back to the photo one last time, but the more I looked at it, the more certain I was that the address I’d typed in was correct.
Shaking my head in confusion, I pulled up my texts and sent a message to Cole.
ME: Hey, you home right now? I was looking for information about Adam Pierce, and I found something really weird.
I flopped back into a slouch against the cushions, staring at the screen and willing him to respond. Fortunately, it didn’t take him long.
COLE: Yeah. I’m home. What’d you find?
