Page 78 of The Heiress

The surprise of the century became the main attraction at the fundraiser and Georgia very wisely used her new-mom status to encourage more donations than ever. Record breaker!

I’m already planning to cover baby fest in six weeks! SIX WEEKS!

Holy. Crap. Georgia hid her pregnancy from Bernard until she was eight months pregnant? Why?

And why surprise him on such a public stage?

My gut began to churn because something wasn’t right and my feminine instincts concocted a story that made me very, very sad.

* * *

The doorcreaked open and Jace peeked in. “You’re still at it?”

The computer and I had become one. Just as I was finishing up gossip columns, my inbox dinged with a new message. All the photos and papers Hazel had sent out to be digitized were done and I now had the files. For the last hour I’d been combing through the images digitized from a box from Dad’s office.

I didn’t want to turn around because I was afraid my tear-stained face would freak Jace out. Turns out my voice did that anyway. “I got Mom and Dad’s photos.” I sounded like a frog that had been attacked by a paper shredder.

Jace was beside me in a flash, still tired, tie gone, and really worried. “I’m here.”

It was the perfect thing to say to bring me to the present. I didn’t like being stuck in the past, but my inability to find anything of substance in the house led me to believe I could still find something in these files. Some sort of clue.

So I dove in, fully prepared to cry when I saw Mom smiling or Dad waving. I missed them. I missed our little family. We were just a threesome, but we were happy and I always felt loved.

There was a giant black hole where they used to be.

Jace kneeled down beside me, which of course still put him just above my eye level. “Do you want to keep going or do you need to stop?”

“I want to keep going a little while.”

“Then let’s move to the bed. You’ll be more comfortable and you can tell me what you’re thinking.”

Jace changed while I hiccup-cried through photographs of our trip to the Grand Canyon. Then he curled around me as I clicked through a random series of photos from all different points in my life. Some even had little Jace in them.

“You really liked tall socks,” I laughed at a photo of us at a football field when we were about twelve.

“And you really liked pink.” He kissed my shoulder.

It was true. I wore an alarming amount of pink in these pictures.

The next file wasn’t a picture. It was a document. The pages were out of order so I had to click through a few before I oriented myself to what exactly I was looking at.

“This is your house,” Jace said.

It was indeed the paperwork from when they bought our house on Calusa Key. Since David found out that my parents weren’t actually living on the island when I was born, this felt big. The hair on my arm rose up.

“Sam?”

I zoomed in and began reading every line twice. I didn’t want to miss any detail. “There’s got to be something here. This is when they moved back to the island, the same time period as when I disappeared.”

“Yeah, okay.” He focused on the screen, too. Our heads practically touched as we moved closer and closer, reading over the pages of documentation that went into buying a house. Lot size, tax value, flood zone (Spoiler: you’re buying a house on an island eight feet above sea level. You’re in a flood zone!). “Damn, property was cheap back then.”

“Comparatively. It was still expensive for my parents.” It was, quite frankly, out of their price range. Even if their one hundred-thousand-dollar lot was now worth five hundred thousand.

The next page answered a few questions and raised a few more.

“Holy shit. Your parents paid in cash?” Jace asked incredulously.

I had been stuck on the same line for the last thirty seconds reading and re-reading, sure I was wrong. But now Jace said it out loud, so it must be true.

---