“We’ll book the flights and send you the plan,” he said. “Can you resend your email? I promise I’ll open it this time.”
Jefferson chuckled. “I’ll shoot over the office location information as soon as we hang up. Safe travels, and I look forward to meeting you.”
He ended the call, his gaze lingering on the phone. Memories of his grandfather played like a film in his mind: learning how to ride a bike in the alley behind his apartment, eating sloppy joes and watching movies on Friday nights, spending Saturday mornings at the library. His mother hadn’t cared where he was, so James spent most weekends with his grandfather—weeknights, too, if he could manage it. Even before he understood what it meant, his grandfather’s apartment, his company, had always felt much safer than being with his mother and siblings.
“You okay?” Daphne asked, leaving his side to check the coffeepot. Seeing it empty, she pulled the grounds from the cabinet.
“Yeah. The memories are good ones now. It took a few years to get there, but they feel good now, not quite as…hard.”
“But?”
He shrugged and shook his head. “Confused, I guess. Or curious. He had an old Triumph bike, a classic even back then.” He paused, smiling at the memories of his first maintenance lessons. His grandfather kept the bike in his apartment as it wasn’t safe on the street, and four times a year, they’d take it apart, clean the pieces, and put it back together again. Knowing what he knew now about bikes, the process wasn’t as thorough as that, but it had felt that way back then.
“Maybe he left me that?” he posited.
“Maybe,” Daphne said, pouring water into the tank, then hitting the Power button. The machine immediately startedpercolating. “It would be fun to have something like that from him.”
He would have loved having his grandfather’s old bike, but forty-eight hours later, he sat in Henry Jefferson’s office gaping.
It was nothing like that.
“Eight million dollars?” he asked. For the second time.
Beside him, Daphne slid her hand over his. Henry, as they’d been asked to call him, smiled. “Your grandfather was a savvy man. He lived frugally, bought himself a life insurance policy, played the stock market better than most trained traders. It was valued at a little over three and a half million when he died, but some of the companies he invested in have not only stayed in business but have skyrocketed in value. There were a few duds in there, too, but not enough to make a serious dent.”
Lovell sat back, the leather of the sofa cooling his skin through his shirt. “I can see why he didn’t want me to have access to it until I was an adult.”
Henry nodded. “He suspected your mother would find a way to defraud you, maybe even something more sinister.”
He flinched but didn’t deny the statement. Three and a half million dollars would be life-changing for a lot of people. For his mom, it would have been a way to ensure a constant supply of her current drug of choice. He wouldn’t have put it past her to kill her youngest son to get her hands on it.
“There’s a letter from him in the packet. Drafted when he put everything into place. You were ten at the time,” Henry said.
Maybe the letter would explain some of this, because he still didn’t totally understand. Oh, he understood the facts, but, well, it hadn’t quite sunk in yet. And he had so many questions.
“Why thirty-five?” he asked. It wasn’t really relevant, but why not twenty-five or forty-five? Did his grandfather have some expectations of him by the time he reached this age?
“It might be more thoroughly explained in the letter, but according to my father, he wanted you established in your own right before receiving the inheritance,” Henry answered.
That sounded like his grandfather. He would have wanted Lovell to be old enough to fend off any vultures, but also old enough to have built a life that was his own, one based on honesty and hard work. Traits his grandfather valued and instilled in his grandson. At this point in his life, his decisions would be a lot less influenced by the money.
Daphne’s fingers twitched against his skin, and he looked over. She was staring at Henry, but with a look on her face that resembled the one her sister wore when thinking about something.
“Does anyone else know about the inheritance?” Daphne asked.
Henry looked to him, and Lovell nodded. “No one’s been told of it, no,” the lawyer answered.
“Not anyone from James’s early life?” she pressed. His senses went on alert. He recognized the trail her mind traveled down, and although he didn’t think it likely, he didn’t step in to redirect her.
Henry started to shake his head, then paused. “As I said in the letter, six months before your thirty-fifth birthday, we started looking for James Williams. It took us a while to dig up the name change—once we had that, finding you was much easier. But between the time we started looking and when weuncovered the name change, our private investigators might have reached out to people from your past hoping to find you.”
“Is there any way to find out?” Daphne asked. Henry’s gaze darted to him once again. Daphne’s hand squeezed his, drawing his attention. “Law firms like Marrick, Garrison, & Wheeler don’t deal with small estates. If someone from your past was contacted by the PI and did even the most cursory of searches, they would have figured that out.”
“But the firm only inherited the work, it wasn’t brought to them,” Lovell pointed out.
“They wouldn’t know that, though. It’s not unreasonable to think that they’d assume there was a big payout waiting for you.”
“My mother’s dead,” he said. “Died while I was in the army. I got the notice about a month later. I was twenty-one, I think.”
