Page 39 of Back to You
“Thank you.” The phone line clicked, leaving me with dead air.
I sent Dane a quick text, then got in my car and putted my way across town to a small brick building right off the main drag. The bells on the door dinged when I went inside. I glanced around at the bleakness of drab gray walls and equally-depressing mottled blue carpet. A petite Asian woman sat behind the reception desk. She waved me over.
“Are you Mr. Bay? Mrs. Schubert is expecting you. Third door on the left, you can’t miss it.” She flashed me a warm smile that was somehow the brightest ray of sunshine in this dreary office. I thanked her and hurried down the narrow hallway. When I came to the door with the attorney’s name placard, I raised my fist and knocked.
“Come in. Hello there, Mr. Bay. I’m sorry we had to meet under such dire circumstances. I’m sorry for your loss. Ginny was one of my longest clients. She was such a wonderful person, and I know she held you in very high regards. That’s why I’ve brought you here today, to discuss her will. Sit?”
I sank down in the stiff-backed leather seat, which looked far more comfortable than it actually was. “I didn’t know Grandma Gin had a will,” I admitted.
Dawn Schubert smiled knowingly and began flipping through the stack of paperwork on her desk. There was no preamble. “As you probably know, Ginny had no children of her own and her next-of-kin are all deceased. Her late husband, Calvin Wesley, left her everything when he passed and now, she’s entrusted her estate to you.”
I stared at her, unsure if I heard her correctly. “I’m sorry, what?”
She cleared her throat and began to read from the document on her desk. It was all a bunch of legalese mumbo-jumbo, but even in my addled state, I got the basic gist of what she was saying. Grandma Gin had left me everything she owned. Me. Some stray she’d brought in off the streets like one of her cats.
And now this woman was saying that everything Gran owned—including her home, her car, and all eleven cats—was now mine…as well as four-hundred fifty-seven thousand dollars and half a million in stocks and bonds. My mouth went dry as I tried to piece together exactly what that meant.
“Wait, wait, wait.” I held up my hand, my voice wobbling. “You’re telling me that Grandma Gin was loaded?” How? But it made sense. She’d never once lived beyond her means, but she also never went without. What she wanted, she usually got. I’d always assumed it was smart budgeting on her part. Now I realized that in the grand scheme of things, money was the least of Gran’s concerns.
Holy shit. She’d looked out for me until the bitter end. Oh, Gran… Heat pricked the corners of my eyes. I sucked in a ragged breath and pinched the bridge of my nose to try and keep it together. “I’m sorry. This is… It’s a shock.”
“I understand. Let’s continue.”
In a daze, I listened to the attorney read off Grandma Gin’s last will. She truly had left me everything. “Everything will work out,” she’d told me once, when I was frustrated over something at work. “It always does. We’ve got angels looking out for us, child.”
As it turned out, Gran was my angel.
I signed the needed paperwork and walked out of there a wealthy man. Why, then, did my heart feel like it was breaking in two? Why did my world suddenly feel like it’d be tipped off its axis and was spinning wildly out of control?
Dane. I needed Dane.
Shaken to the core, I drove home on auto-pilot. My only destination was Dane. The minute I walked through the door and saw him standing in the kitchen, I broke. I collided with his chest like I was a fiery meteor and he was a dying planet. Our bodies crashed together, and with a sob, I held on for dear life.
