And then Colin died. Because of the Hawthorne family. “Savannah let him recapture some of that,” Grayson inferred. It was the logical conclusion, and he was nothing if not logical.
“As much as any daughter could.” Acacia drew in another breath. “Savannah is going to judge me for staying with her father once I knew. To her, that will seem weak.” She brought her gaze back to Grayson’s. “But I assure you, I am not.”
No. You are not. “Gigi told me that you were recently visited by gentlemen in suits.”
To Acacia, that would seem like it had come out of nowhere, but that was the point. Less time for her to cover, less opportunity to manage her reaction.
“Gigi is mistaken.”
“If you need anything…,” Grayson said.
Gigi skidded into the kitchen. “I texted Duncan from Savannah’s phone. Party’s on for tomorrow night! In the meantime, who’s ready for step negative one?”
“Step negative one?” Grayson repeated.
“Two steps before step one,” Acacia clarified, and she met Grayson’s eyes with a clear, silent message: Their heart-to-heart was over.
“Gigi got herself arrested.” Savannah didn’t come all the way into the kitchen as she let that bomb drop. Keeping her distance from her mother—and me.
“Et tu, Brute?” Gigi said to her twin, then she turned to Grayson, her eyes narrowing as she realized where Savannah must have gotten her information. “And et tu, Brute?” she repeated, then cocked her head to the side. “What’s the plural of Brute?”
“It’s a name,” Grayson told her. “Not typically pluralized.”
“Fascinating!” Gigi declared. “Much more interesting than anything that may or may not have resulted in my calling the family lawyer—who, by the way, left me in jail overnight and most of the next day!”
Acacia held up a hand. “Back up. Jail?”
“It’s taken care of,” Grayson cut in.
Acacia gave him a look: part admonition, part warning, motherly. But she let the interruption slide. “Well, then. I’ll let the three of you get to step negative one. Savannah?” Acacia met her daughter’s eyes. “Be nice.”
CHAPTER 21
GRAYSON
This is Dad’s office,” Gigi told Grayson. She gestured to a sleek desktop computer. “I found the key to the safe-deposit box in there last week, affixed to an index card that was affixed to the inside of the computer, near the cooling fan.”
Grayson assumed that Gigi would, at some point, explain what they were doing in the study. For the time being, she’d given him an entry. He took it. “May I see the key?” he asked, nodding to the chain around her neck.
Steal the key. Subvert her search for the name.
Gigi reached back to unclasp her necklace, then handed it over to Grayson. He examined the key. Making it disappear was one option, but the better option might be making and swapping in a duplicate—and not a perfect one. Just flawed enough that it won’t open the safe-deposit box.
“May I take a picture of the key?” Grayson asked. “I want a closer look at the etchings here.” He rubbed his thumb over the head of the key, which bore the name of the bank. “There’s some chance that the key identifies the number of the box that it opens.”
“And if we had that,” Gigi said, thrilled to her bones, “we wouldn’t have to figure out the name dad used to figure out which box this key goes to!”
Steeling himself against her beaming smile, Grayson took a series of photographs of the key with his phone. Not just of the head of the key—and not just from one angle. If he could create a 3D rendering, he could easily have a decoy made.
For show, he pulled up one of the photos and zoomed in on the etchings.
“You’re really doing this,” Savannah stated sharply beside him. “With her.” Savannah knew how to weaponize silence, even if it was brief. “Because you don’t believe that my father would leave. You don’t believe there could possibly be another woman, because Sheffield Grayson would never cheat on his wife.”
The utter ice in those words was clear. Grayson didn’t let it bother him. Savannah had a right to be angry, and her instincts were good: He couldn’t be trusted.
“I believe,” Grayson told her calmly, “that Gigi is going to do this with or without my help.”
“Affirmative.” The girl in question grinned. “Chaotic good, thy name is Gigi. Let’s talk about step negative one.”
Savannah gave Grayson one last, piercing warning look, then turned to her sister. “Enlighten us.”
Gigi held out a hand to Grayson. “My key, if you please.”
“It’s clean,” Grayson told her, as he handed the necklace back to her. “No number.”
“But we will not be deterred!” Gigi declared. “And before we ransack Duncan’s dad’s office and look through his files—you can yell at me about that later, Sav—I figured we should make sure we’ve covered our bases here.”
“You haven’t already searched this place?” Grayson said mildly.
“I have.” Gigi smiled. “You two haven’t.”
If there was anything to be found here, the easiest way of keeping it out of her hands was finding it himself. “You said that the key was affixed to an index card.” Grayson rolled that over in his mind. “Do you still have the card?”
Gigi’s eyes grew saucer round, then she practically dove for the trash can. Victorious, she popped back to her feet. “Here.”
She handed him the card. Grayson noted that it had been cut down from the original size, possibly to fit inside the computer. But why use a card at all? He shrugged for Gigi’s benefit. “It’s just a white card.”
But as soon as she wasn’t looking, he pocketed it.
“Put your searching hats on, people.” Gigi grinned.
“I am not helping you with this,” Savannah told her sister emphatically.
Gigi patted her arm. “I believe that you believe that, but at a certain point, you have to ask yourself: Why are you here?”
“Because,” the taller—and older—twin said, “I don’t trust him.”
“Don’t take offense,” Gigi told Grayson. “She only means it in the literal sense. And who among us doesn’t have a few little deeply entrenched trust issues?”
Grayson felt the ends of his lips twitch, wanting to curl upward.
“Just look for anything that could indicate what name Dad might have used to register a secret safe-deposit box,” Gigi instructed. “A fake ID, scrap paper, an external hard drive. Maybe paperwork signed in another name?”
“Did your father have an actual office, off premises?” Grayson put no special emphasis on that question—nothing to make it clear that if the answer was yes, he’d be doing some breaking and entering tonight himself.
“No,” Gigi replied. “Dad sold his company a few weeks after Grammy went to the great Sunday brunch in the sky.”
Not long before he came after Avery. Grayson filed that away.
“Did you try Colin?” Savannah asked Gigi. The question came out quiet. “For the name.” That, more than anything that Acacia had said, told Grayson how much the twins had grown up in the shadow of their long-dead cousin.
“Too obvious,” Gigi replied, her throat seeming to tighten around the words. “But yes.”
Grayson knew what it was like to work and work and never be enough. To lose the person who’d made you and live forever thereafter with the knowledge that they’d preferred someone else.
“If you’re starting with the computer,” he told Gigi briskly, “I’ll try the desk.”
The desk was clean. So were the shelves. The chairs and side tables. The moldings on the walls. Grayson continued to search quickly and efficiently, keeping an eye on the girls as he did. He removed shades from lamps, examined every floorboard with military precision. Finally, he turned his attention to the art: two large landscape paintings on the walls and a bronze eagle that matched the two sculptures in the fountain outside.