CHAPTER 36

When the line went silent, I said Grayson’s name, then Jameson’s. Again. And again. Nobody heard me. I hung up and called back, but nobody picked up.

No matter how many times I called, no one picked up.

I was worried—about Grayson, about the barely controlled anger I’d heard in his father’s voice. Beneath that worry, my gut was churning for different reasons. What did you do, Harry?

If the fact that Toby Hawthorne had survived the fire had been public knowledge, would his father have been able to bury this scandal? Would the police have been so easy to buy off—assuming they had been bought off—if this weren’t a tragedy with no survivors?

If he set that fire… I couldn’t think much past that, so I thought about Tobias Hawthorne instead. Why had the billionaire disinherited his entire family after the fire on Hawthorne Island? Why use his will to point to what had happened there, when he’d apparently paid good money to cover it up?

“Avery.” Alisa’s heels hit the pavement with a rapid click, click, click as she approached me. “You need to get back inside. The live auction is about to start.”

I made it through the rest of the evening. As Max had promised, most of the items in the live auction had been donated by… me. A weeklong stay in a four-bedroom house on Abaco, in the Bahamas. Two weeks in Santorini, Greece, private plane included. A castle in Scotland to be used as a wedding venue.

“How many vacation homes do you have?” Max asked me on the way home.

I shook my head. “I don’t know.”

“You could actually look at the binder I gave you,” Alisa suggested from the front seat.

I barely heard her, but that night, after I’d placed another six fruitless phone calls and spent hours turning the conversation with Grayson’s father over in my head, I slipped out of bed and walked to my desk. The binder in question was just sitting there. Alisa had given it to me weeks ago, as a primer on my inheritance.

I flipped through it until I found myself staring at a villa in Tuscany. A thatched cottage in Bora-Bora. A literal castle in the Scottish Highlands. This was unreal. Page after page, I drank in the pictures. Patagonia. Santorini. Kauai. Malta. Seychelles. A flat in London. Apartments in Tokyo and Toronto and New York. Costa Rica. San Miguel de Allende…

I felt like I was having some kind of out-of-body experience, like it was impossible to feel what I was feeling and still be flesh and blood. My mom and I had dreamed of traveling. Stashed in my enormous closet, in a ratty bag from home, was a stack of blank postcards. Mom and I had imagined going to those places. I’d wanted to see the world.

And the closest I’d ever come was postcards.

A ball of emotion rising in my throat, I flipped another page—and I stopped breathing. The cabin in this photograph looked like it had been built into the side of a mountain. The snow-covered roof was A-line, and dozens of light fixtures lit up the brown stone like lanterns. Beautiful.

But that wasn’t what had robbed the breath from my lungs. Every muscle in my chest tightened as I lifted my fingers to the text at the top of the page, where the details of the home were written. It was in the Rocky Mountains, ski in/ski out, eight bedrooms—and the house had a name.

True North.