Page 3 of Heir

There wasn’t much money to be made from this little hobby of mine. And I wasn’t good enough to try to make it a career.

I had no money.

Neither did my mom nor stepdad.

I looked around at the grand house my dad had bought her when they first married. I lived there for the first eighteen years of my life.

She’d married Kenton Myers when I was twelve, and it was just the three of us for five years.

Kenton was someone you would call an opportunist.

He was a con man.

Unluckily for him, he picked my mom, thinking she had money.

And she did when Uncle William was alive.

But the government seized most of his assets because of how much debt he had been in when he died. So there was no money left over.

My mom held on for as long as she could, taking out a second mortgage on the house, hoping to keep all her rich friends and lavish activities. However, she’d just received an eviction notice.

It was why she wanted to make my other uncle happy.

Uncle Frank was my dad’s youngest brother.

We didn’t talk to him much, and I had a feeling my two uncles didn’t get along. But now that Uncle William was gone, he was the only one with Gallagher money, and I didn’t know what Mom was planning on doing to get some of it. I was afraid to ask.

She stepped closer to me and took away the orange juice next to my plate. I watched as she walked to the sink and poured the liquid out.

“Don’t you know how much sugar is in this?” she asked when I looked at her. “Seriously, Gemma. When was the last time you weighed yourself?”

I blinked.

I hadn’t weighed myself in years. I didn’t even want to know what the numbers were when I went to the doctor, and they weighed me for the checkup.

It took years of being away from her and countless therapy sessions for me not to be so obsessive with the number.

But a morning with her and I could already feel the compulsion coming to the forefront in my brain. My foot twitched with the need to burn away any calories I might have consumed already.

Breathe in, breathe out.

I bit the inside of my cheek to not say anything. I wouldn’t win an argument against her anyhow. She placed a cup of water in front of me.

I looked down at such adecadentbreakfast.

I would say the lack of protein or nutrition was because of her financial strain, but this had been my breakfast for years.

It was what I had been expecting she would give me when she asked me to come over for breakfast, which was why I’d scarfed down a breakfast burrito on the drive over here from my apartment. I was trying hard not to feel guilty over that.

I wasn’t even overweight.

If anything, I was still recovering from all those years of her restricting my diet, and I could do with a few more calories. I really had been getting better, but there were still rare days when I could hear her voice in my head, screaming,How do you expect me to love a fat child, Gemma?

I took a sip of my water, looking up and meeting Kenton’s eyes as he munched greedily on a piece of bacon.

Mom might have watched her and my figures for most of our lives, but she spoiled Kenton.

There was not a thing that this man wanted or needed that she didn’t do whatever it took to give to him.

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