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My heart picks up. I never saw the will, I just signed everything Clint’s lawyer put in front of me because I was too numb to care. I let him fight everything out in the courtroom without ever showing me a document. Now that I’m sitting here, I realize how stupid and naive I was not to oversee everything he did. I’d been groomed to be quiet and let men handle this kind of thing.
I simply hadn’t known better.
My hand shakes as I unfasten the folder and let it fall open.
My eyes skim over the contents, but they halt at the date scrawled over the top.
The day Clint died. The time is four-thirty in the afternoon. An hour before the coroner came to take his body to the hospital.
What the fuck?
My eyes dart over the paper. Down to the bottom where Clint’s signature is scrawled. Clear as day. Below it are two lines marked for witnesses and on those lines I see two names that make my heart go still.
Gerard Sovereign.
Westin Quinn.
My breathing comes fast and my vision flickers. This is the original will, this is notarized. My fingertips skim over the bumps where it’s been stamped. But there’s no way this can be real because it has my husband’s signature on it, and by four-thirty that Monday, Clint was dead.
I stumble back to the bed, sinking down.
The will was a fake.
It was always a fake. Avery and Thomas were right to fight it in court.
I was wrong.
The folder spills onto the bed as I scramble for my phone. It has a solitary bar of signal. Shakily, I tear down the hall and burst out onto the cold balcony.
Now I have two bars.
I call Clint’s lawyer. Snow falls in soft spirals and lands on my face. Melting on my cheeks. The phone rings three times and cuts out. I dial him again and wait.
“Hello?”
He sounds confused, and he has good reason to be. It’s almost ten at night.
“Jay,” I whisper. “This is Keira.”
“Is this about the unsettled accounts?” he asks. “They’ve been paid up as of this afternoon.”
A sob pushes up my throat.
“No,” I whisper. “I have something I want to ask.”
“Okay, but there’s a consulting fee.”
“No,” I whisper harshly. “There’s not, not for this. If you or the judge in my court case have ever taken money from Gerard Sovereign, I want you to tell me that you can’t answer this question because it pertains to confidential information.”
There’s a long, long silence. My eyes burn with hot tears threatening to spill down my cold cheeks.
“I’m sorry, Keira,” he says finally. “I can’t answer that question as it pertains to confidential information.”
Everything changes. It feels like the sky shatters, and I close my eyes and let the tears flow. My hands shake as I lift the phone from my ear and hang up. It takes me almost five minutes to jerk myself from my reverie. My face prickles with cold and my feet are totally numb.
He didn’t just kill Clint and disappear for seven months. No, he’d orchestrated everything from the beginning.
Nothing that had happened was by accident.
