CHAPTER 1
Avery
Cuttingthe ignition as soon as I threw my car into park, I let my head fall back to hit the headrest behind me and closed my eyes.
There was a soft ticking sound as my car’s engine settled. The silence filling the cab and causing my ears to ring wasn’t the most unpleasant thing after being crammed inside of a car for hours on end and traveling to get all the way out here.
No, it was the fact that now that I was finallyhereand back in Ellington Heights, I actually had to deal with what I’d been putting off for the past four months—with no choice but to face it head on. I’d run out of time to stave off the inevitable and now I was going to be paying the consequences for it.
See, the thing about death was that it wasn’t always about the grief and the coming to terms with that person no longer being involved in your life that was the shitty part. There were things outside of that emotional process that were just as big, if not more, of a pain in the ass than the actual burying of your relative and wishing them well in the afterlife.
Namely in the form of their estate.
My father was a complicated man and had lived the kind of life that most people tended to envy from the outside. The kind of life that would be slapped on the cover of magazines with salacious headlines and that had reporters lined up outside the gates to our family’s mansion come sunrise.
He’d never let any kids, a wife, a well paying corporate job, or whatever responsibilities that went with any of those titles, stop him from living however he wanted to.
Mainly at the detriment to everyone around him.
Growing up, my relationship with him had been, to put it nicely, quite strained. Living in his shadow my whole life and then watching him completely destroy everything I’d ever known after the death of my mother, had erased any goodwill I had for the man, which carried over well after I became a legal adult.
So, on the day of his passing, when I’d received a phone call from his lawyer to talk me into coming back to Ellington Heights in order to work through settling his estate, I was met with a sort of crossroads.
Pushing it off had gotten me nowhere to delay the inevitable truth that I knew would be waiting for me once I finally made the drive back to my place of birth. His entire life was mess after mess and even in death, none of that was escapable.
The only difference now was thatIhad to deal with it.
Opening my eyes again, I stared through the windshield at the mansion that I grew up in and was forced out of the day I turned seventeen.
Fond memories were seldom things to be found within those walls. And while the staff that had been left behind to take care of me after my father had decided that jet-setting around the globe was a far more lucrative use of his time than continuing to raise his only heir by himself, had been good to me, their care levels were directly associated with their paychecks.
As I’d gotten older, I’d blamed them less and less for it. Their responsibility in keeping me alive and fairly functional was all that any of them had been signing up for upon walking through those large double doors. Any more than that was simply a waste of their time.
They had their own families to worry about, after all.
Sighing to myself, I slipped two fingers under the car door handle and popped it open. The hot afternoon breeze hit me instantly, soaking me in the high humidity that I’d long since forgotten about upon leaving this god-forsaken town.
My dress shoes crunched against the graveled drive leading up to the marbled steps. The familiar arched doors greeted me with their iron filigree accents curling around the glass panels. At one time, I used to think that they were beautiful—a symbol of my mother’s delicate touch that guests would see first thing upon entering our home.
Now, all I felt was deep dread.
The doors parted easily when I pushed at them, a small chime coming from deeper inside the foyer was all that awaited me. Soon, the telltale footsteps of someone rushing to the door, their shoes clapping loudly against the tile, beckoned me into shutting the door behind me and turning to face the hall leading down to the kitchen.
Luanne, our family’s live-in chef, stopped short the second she spotted me. She had a dirty dishtowel thrown over her shoulder, her black apron hand-printed with flour and other powdered ingredients. Her wiry gray hair was thrown up in a messy style on the top of her head, pieces of it falling down the back of her neck.
“Well, I’ll be...” she muttered. “As he lives and breathes.”
I held back another sign in favor of plastered a smile on my face. “Good afternoon, Hazel. It’s been a while.”
She was in motion before I could even blink, ripping off the towel from her shoulder and curling it up a few times between her hands before snapping at me with it. It caught me right in the thigh, the pain biting my skin even through the fabric of my slacks.
“Ow!” I howled.
She snapped it at me again and caught me right above the previous spot, just as she would any other unruly child she came across. “Don’t you ‘it’s been a while’ to me, young man! You come waltzing in here like it’s any other normal Tuesday night dinner. Ha!”
“Okay! All right!” I threw my hands up in surrender.
“You never call, you never write!” she kept going on. Her disappointed scowl was the stuff of nightmares—mine, to be exact. Even after I was accepted into college, I still woke up sweating some nights, remembering those long days spent at the dinner table while she lectured me about my homework.
