With her hair scraped back into a tight knot at the base of her skull, her face pale and eyes flat, she looked more like a scarecrow than a woman. Hope had always been slender, slight of build despite her height, but this woman was scrawny. Brittle. Her face was devoid of makeup. She lacked all ornamentation outside of a simple set of gold studs in her ears.
The woman who called herself Hope Daniels stood in front of me wearing a beige suit that fit her as if it had been purchased for someone else, the jacket and skirt boxy, overwhelming her frame and hiding any hint of the body beneath.
Her matching pumps were dull and serviceable. She was neat and clean but utterly and completely bland. Forgettable. I studied her, searching for any hint of the Hope I’d known so well.
My Hope had reminded me of Alice. She’d been far quieter than our outspoken office manager, but Hope had the same core of steel and, like Alice, a funky, quirky style all her own.
I’d loved keeping an eye out for the secrets she’d hide in her school uniform. A headband embroidered with skeletons. Socks with mermaids woven into the pattern. She’d spent her allowance looking for ways to be different despite her guardian’s demand that she fit in. My Hope wouldn’t have been caught dead in beige.
Alice waited at the door, expectant, her eyes ping-ponging between me and Hope. When neither of us said a word, she raised an eyebrow and offered, “Coffee? Tea?”
“No, thanks, Alice. Hope won’t be here long enough for that.”
Narrowing her eyes at my rudeness, Alice shrugged a shoulder and excused herself. I had no doubt her next stop was Cooper’s office. Whatever. They were my friends, and this absolutely qualified as gossip. If the tables had been turned, I would have done the same.
Not only was a female visitor unusual, I was never rude. Well, lately, yeah, but it was only to the friends I knew would put up with my bullshit. Not in the office with a stranger. But then, Hope Daniels was no stranger.
In a low voice that held no inflection, Hope said, “May I take a seat?”
I leaned back in my chair. “Suit yourself.”
No reaction from Hope. There’d been a day when an unkind comment from me would have filled her eyes with tears—not that she’d ever been subject to an unkind comment from me. Not until the end. In the end, there’d been tears all around.
She sat, smoothing her ugly skirt over her legs and crossing her feet at the ankle. It was like the Hope I’d known had been wiped clean, an automaton substituted in her place. This new Hope grated against every nerve.
Hope had been a girl when I’d walked away from Sawyers Bend. Only a girl, but she’d been the spark that set the fire, the one who’d turned the gears that ended in heartbreak and loss, in a grudge that would last the rest of my life.
“What do you want?”
Showing her first sign of weakness, Hope drew in a long breath and looked down at the purse she’d stowed neatly on her lap. When she looked back at me, her eyes held the faintest glimmer of emotion.
The last words she’d spoken to me had shattered my life. This time was no different.
“Your father’s dead. Ford is in jail for his murder. All the assets, corporate and personal, are frozen until the will is read.”
I swallowed, fighting the burn of her words. Those people meant nothing to me. Not anymore. Hardening my heart, I forced myself to say, “Then read the will and leave me out of it.”
“We can’t. Your father stipulated the will couldn’t be read without you.”
Her words lanced through me, cauterizing the wound as they went, leaving me numb and hollow.
My father was dead.
I hadn’t seen him in fifteen years. I’d hated him far longer than that.
I wasn’t alone in hating my father. Prentice Sawyer was one of the most hated men in our patch of North Carolina. Hell, he was probably one of the most hated men in the country. Stalling, I said, “How? What happened?”
“Sterling found him in his office at Heartstone Manor. He was shot. He’d been dead a while.”
Sterling. My little sister. Half-sister. Most of my siblings were halves. Prentice collected wives, but he was shit at keeping them. I resisted the urge to ask if Sterling was okay. Sterling wasn’t my problem. None of them were.
“Where?”
“His office,” Hope repeated more slowly, as if I were hard of hearing.
“No, where on his body was he shot?”
“His forehead.”
Execution style. A crime of passion, I could have seen. An angry husband or a betrayed lover, sure. Not an assassination. And Ford was in jail for killing him? No way.
I had a lot of reasons to hate my brother, but there was no way he could have killed our father with a single shot to the forehead. Ford didn’t have it in him. He knew his way around a gun, all the Sawyer kids did, but that kind of cold-blooded murder? No.