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Chapter Twenty-One
Harrison waswilling to admit that he had no right to yell at Sera for not believing him. Other than them sleeping together, he had not given her any more reason to believe him. Then he had blown up at her, and now it was over.
Ending their relationship hadn’t ended the investigation or ended the fact that he wanted her in his bed, in his life. Yesterday he had done the interview with Aspen. It had gone well, and he had been able to keep his temper in check. There had even been more questions than Sera had asked in the first interview. Aspen had even been able to get him to expand on his previous answers. Every moment he was being interviewed, he had wanted Sera there with him, beside him. To have her support instead of her suspicions. He could see that after Aspen’s interview, he hadn’t taken either interview with Sera seriously, just like most work-related talks with Sera.
Aspen had told him that the Kylie Nash interview had gone well and that Sera was making a report about it. The woman hadn’t gone into much detail about it, but she had said she was very believable, which didn’t bode well for him.
So far, he hadn’t seen Sera since the blowup, but he hadn’t gone out of his way to see her. Nor had she gone out of her way to see him. This was why he didn’t do interoffice romances: the fallout.
At least Wednesday afternoon had passed quickly as he finished his last appointment with Gaines and Marlo Hawthorne. Every year they revised their will. Some years they split their sizable estate between their three children, and sometimes their son got everything. Their daughters never got anything more than twenty-five percent apiece, and typically, like this year, they only got fifteen percent.
Every year it was the same; they came in and signed everything, but their children were never seen or talked about that much. In fact, his office didn’t even have addresses for any of the Hawthorne children, which would make distributing the inheritances an issue when the couple actually died.
Marlo sat with her purse on her lap, as if there might be a thief in the building, and waited for the meeting to be done with bored disinterest. Gaines acted like his estate wasn’t a tenth of the size it had been the first time he had written the will nine years before. The family money that each had inherited years before was completely gone, as was the estate that they had lived on for most of their marriage. The company that Gaines had inherited and then run into the ground after thirty years had been dispersed years before. They were now left with a condo and a small amount of money that Harrison was unsure if it would last until the couple was dead.
Still, they came in and acted like their three kids should be grateful for the pennies they would receive in a few years. If it were Harrison, he would spend those pennies to find out where their kids were and get them back.
“So that takes care of another year,” Harrison said, gathering up the signed documents and putting them in a blue folder. Sera was right; it made him smile at the color.
“And you don’t need the children to sign, correct?” Marlo asked, pulling her purse closer as if she could sense he was born poor.
“You can send them here if you see them,” he suggested like he did every year. “I will get these completed and send them to you in the mail in a few days.”
“The post will lose it,” Marlo replied. So far, in nine years, she hadn’t said anything that made him think that she had any connection to the real world at all.
“Then you’ll have to come back for them.” They always did.
Marlo, still hugging her purse, got up and then glared at her husband for not getting up as fast as she had, or maybe at the exact same time. Harrison followed them from the office.
As he reached the outer office, he saw Sera was waiting in the chairs along the wall. His eyes drank in her black skirt and her wavy hair. She was gorgeous today, like every day.
But Sera’s eyes were on Marlo Hawthorne. Harrison didn’t know what she saw in the older woman, but it made Sera sit up straighter, still holding her green folder.
“Sera?” Gaines was the first to speak.
“Seraphina?” Marlo talked over her husband, her voice controlled.
Sera jumped to her feet, clinching the folder between her hands and bending it as she said, “Mother, Father.”
Dumbfounded, Harrison looked at the three of them as they just stared silently at each other. Yes, every year, he allocated Kaine, Arabella, and Seraphina Hawthorne’s inheritance, but never had he thought that same person was Seraphina Lovely. He couldn’t see her being raised with the kind of money the Hawthorne’s had many years before.
“How have you been, Seraphina?” Gaines was the first to get over the shock of seeing their daughter. His eyes actually softened as he looked at her.
Sera, for her part, smiled at her father, but not her usual smile. It was cool and brittle. “You don’t really care, do you?”
“I-it would be nice to know,” Marlo stammered.
“So, you can tell your friends? Well, I have done nothing for you to brag about, Mother. When I do, I will call.” She turned and walked out of the office.
The older couple were still in complete shock as to what had just happened, but it seemed that the bridge-building they had thought could happen with their daughter wasn’t going to occur today.
“Does she work here?” Gaines asked in disbelief.
“Yes,” Harrison answered, but he wasn’t going to tell them much. Based on her response to their question, Sera didn’t want them to know.
“Oh god, Gaines, she’s a secretary. I knew this would happen. You had to let her go to college,” Marlo stated, looking at the door her daughter had just exited.
“I just let her do what she wanted to do,” Gaines defended his actions.
