"Money, Money, Money" [2] G. Hawthorne

24 - I am literally the fresh prince of belair

I made it outside to Libby and found Nash already there.

"Hey now, darlin'," he murmured. "Come back inside. You didn't do anything wrong."

Libby lifted her head up and looked past him to me. "Sorry, guys. When I saw her go down, I went on autopilot." Before our lives had gotten turned upside down, Libby had been an orderly at a nursing home. She grimaced. "This is exactly what Alisa meant when she told me not to cause a scene tonight."

"She told you what now?" Nash said, his voice low and dangerous.

"Excuse me?" I said.

Oh Alisa was dead.

Libby shrugged.

"You had no way of knowing that Rebecca's mom was going to explode like that," Avery told Libby, then I cut a glance toward Nash, who sighed.

"She's the Laughlins' daughter. Grew up on the estate. It was before my time—she's got about fifteen years on Skye. From what I've gathered, the relationship between Mr. and Mrs. L and their daughter has always been a bit tense. After they lost Emily..." Nash shook his head. "She blamed my family."

Both Jameson and Grayson had been there the night Emily died.

"She said all her babies die," I murmured. Belatedly, I processed the fact that she'd been looking right at Rebecca —her living daughter—when she'd said it.

"Miscarriages." Nash said quietly. "She and her husband were older when they started trying for kids. Mrs. Laughlin

mentioned once that they'd lost multiple babies before they had Emily."

If I thought about any of this for too long, I was going to start feeling even sorrier for Rebecca Laughlin. "Are you okay?" I asked Libby instead.

She nodded and looked toward Nash. "Could you give us a minute?"

With one last look at my sister, Nash sauntered off, and Libby turned back to me. "Kayla, what did you say to Dad earlier?"

I wasn't going to have this conversation with them. "Nothing."

"I get it," Libby told me. "You hate him, and you have every right to. And, yes, the thing with Skye is kind of weird, but—"

"Weird," I repeated. "Libby, she tried to have me killed!" It took me a full three seconds to realize what I'd done.

Libby stared at me. "What? When?" Libby knew Skye moved out—but she didn't know why. "Have you told the police?" she demanded.

"It's complicated," I hedged. I was trying to figure out how to explain my promise to Grayson, but Libby didn't give me more than a second.

"And I'm not," she said quietly, her chin jutting out.

At first, I wasn't sure what she was saying. "What?"

"I'm not complicated," Libby clarified. "That's what you

think. It's what you've always thought. I'm too optimistic and too trusting. I never went to college. I don't think the way you think. I give people too many chances. I'm naive—"

"Where is this coming from?" I asked.

Blue hair fell into Libby's face as she looked down. "Forget it," she said. "I signed the emancipation papers. Pretty soon, you officially won't have to listen to me. Or Dad. Or anyone." Her voice caught. "That's what you want, right?"

I hadn't asked to be emancipated. That was all Alisa, but I recognized that it was probably the right move. "Lib, it's not like that."

Before I could say anything else, Lena and Isaac came out of nowhere.

"Come on we gotta go."

Libby just shook her head. "You do what you have to do, Kayla - and I'll try not to cause any more scenes."

**********

"How many vacation homes do you have?" Lena asked me on the way home.

I shook my head. "I don't know."

"You could actually look at the binder Alisa gave you," Isaac 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. I had dreamed of traveling. Stashed in my enormous closet, in a ratty bag from home, was a stack of blank postcards. 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.

***************

"To my daughter Skye Hawthorne, I leave my compass, may she always know true north." The next morning, I paced in front of Lena, unable to contain myself. 

"The part about the compass and true north was in both of Tobias Hawthorne's wills. The older one was written twenty years ago. The clues in that will couldn't have been meant for the Hawthorne grandsons—not originally." If there was a connection between that line in the will and the home I'd inherited in Colorado, that message had been meant explicitly for Skye. "This game was for Tobias Hawthorne's daughters."

"Daughters, plural?" Lena inquired.

"The old man left Zara a bequest, too." My mind raced as I tried to recall the exact wording. "To my daughter Zara, I leave my wedding ring, may she love as wholly and steadfastly as I loved her mother."

What if that was a clue, too?

"One piece of the puzzle is at True North," I said. "And if there's another one, it must have something to do with that ring."

"So," Lena said gamely, "first, we go to Colorado, and then we steal ourselves a ring."

It was tempting. I wanted to see True North. I wanted to go there. I wanted to experience even a fraction of what that binder told me my new world had to offer. "I can't," I said, frustrated. "I can't go anywhere. I have to stay here for a year to inherit."

"You go to school,"Lena pointed out. "So, obviously, you don't have to stay holed up at Hawthorne House twenty- four hours a day." She grinned. "Kayla, my billionaire friend, how long do you think it would take us to fly by private jet to Colorado?"

**************

WC: 1167

I had a bio exam today. Theory went exceptionally but in the practical I'm pretty sure everyone's failing cause there was some magnification calculation shit that everyone screwed up so.

(It's not final exams so I'm not too worried yet)

Love ya,

Mia