A.N.: Sorry I'm a little late :( tons of avery pov here, and lot of og book stuff
ily all sm and hope you have the best week ahead of you :)
<3!
Skylar
For Trinity, driving to school meant arriving in a ten million dollar car, four body guards on motorcycles, and causing a crowd of paparazzi that rivalled my own. While it seemed totally unnecessary, I was grateful that it took the attention of my inconspicuous black sedan that had been sprawled all over the world in the past two weeks.
Once I made it into the building, Trinity came over, "Still on for later, right? I'll see you at the foundation after school?"
"Avery." Oren spoke from the front seat. "We're here."
Here was the Hawthorne Foundation. It felt like it had been an eternity since Zara had offered to show me the ropes. As Oren exited the car and opened my door, I registered the fact that, for once, there wasn't a reporter or photographer in sight.
Maybe it's dying down, I thought as I stepped into the lobby of the Hawthorne Foundation. The walls were a light silvery-grey, and dozens of massive black-and-white photographs hung on them, seemingly suspended midair. Hundreds of smaller prints surrounded the larger ones. People. From all over the world, captured in motion and moments, from all angles, all perspectives, diverse along every dimension imaginable—age and gender and race and culture. People. Laughing, crying, praying, playing, eating, dancing, sleeping, sweeping, embracing—everything.
I thought about Dr. Mac asking me why I wanted to travel. This. This is why. "Ms. Grambs."
I looked up to see Grayson and Trinity, who had somehow managed to change out of her uniform into a silky black pant suit. I wondered how long they'd watched me taking in this room. I wondered what they'd seen on my face.
"I'm supposed to meet Zara," I said, fending off Grayson's inevitable attack.
"Zara isn't coming." Trinity descended down the staircase gracefully, "She's convinced that you are in need of... guidance."
There was something about the way she said that word that slid past every defence mechanism I had and straight under my skin. "For some reason, my aunt seems to believe that guidance would be best received coming from my brother and I."
Grayson looked exactly as he had the day I'd met him, down to the color of his Armani suit. It was the same light, liquid gray as his eyes—the same color as this room. Suddenly, I remembered the coffee table book I'd seen in Tobias Hawthorne's study—a book of photographs, with Grayson's name on the side.
"You took these?" I breathed, staring at the photos all around me. It was a guess—but I'd always been a good guesser.
"My grandfather believed that you have to see the world to change it." Grayson looked at me, then caught himself staring.
"He always said that Grayson was the one with the eye." chimed in Trinity.
"And Trinity had the hands to bend the world." Grayson said, his voice sounding almost... pained?
Invest. Create. Cultivate. Nash's explanation of their childhood came back to me, and I wondered how old Grayson was the first time he held a camera, how old he was when he started traveling the world, seeing it, capturing it on film. I wondered how old Trinity was when she was hurt by the world, how old she was when her grandfather started teaching her about money, how old she was when she started to control millions.
I wouldn't have pegged Grayson as the artist.
Irritated that I'd been tricked into thinking about him at all, I narrowed my eyes. "Your aunt must not have noticed your tendency to make threats. I'm betting she also didn't know about the background check on my dead mother. Otherwise, there is no way she could have come to the conclusion that I'd prefer working with you."
Grayson's lips twitched. "Zara doesn't miss much. And as for the background checks..." Trinity disappeared behind the front desk and reappeared holding two folders. I glared at him, and he arched a brow. "Would you prefer I kept the results of my searches from you?"
Trinity held out one folder, and I took it. He'd had no right to do this—to pry into my life or my mom's. But as I looked down at the folder in my hand, I heard my mother's voice, clear as a bell, in my head.
I have a secret...
I flipped open the folder. Employment records, death certificate, credit report, no criminal background, a photograph...
I pressed my lips together, trying desperately to stop looking at it. She was young in the picture, and she was holding me.
I forced my eyes to Grayson's, ready to unleash on him, but Trinity calmly handed me the second folder. I wondered what he'd found out about me—if there was anything in this folder that could possibly explain what his grandfather had seen in me. I opened it.
Inside, there was a single sheet of paper, and it was blank.
"That's a list of every purchase you've made since inheriting. Things have been purchased for you but..." Grayson dipped his eyes toward the page. "Nothing."
"Is that what passes for an apology where you're from?" I asked him. I'd surprised him. I wasn't acting like a gold digger.
"My brother," Trinity spoke up, with an air around it, an air that demonstrated yet again the bond between the Hawthorne siblings "does not need apologize for being protective. This family has suffered enough, Avery." Her eyes went dangerously hard.
"If I were choosing between you and any one of them, I would choose them, always and every time." Grayson interrupted "However..." His eyes made their way back to mine. "I may have misjudged you."
There was something intense in those words, in the expression on his face— like the boy who'd learned to see the world saw me.
Trinity pov
"You're wrong." Avery flips the folder close, turning away from Grayson. "I did try to spend some money. A big chunk. I asked Alisa to find a way to get it to a friend of mine."
"What kind of friend?" Grayson asks. His expression shifts. "A boyfriend?"
"No." She snaps. What did he care if she had a boyfriend? "A guy I play chess with in the park. He lives there. In the park."
"Homeless?" Grayson stared at her differently now, like in all his travels, he'd never encountered anything quite like her.
After a second or two, I step in, "My aunt is right. You're in desperate need of an education."
Gray starts walking, and I have no choice except to follow, but I refuse to stay in his wake, like a duckling toddling after its mother. In one smooth motion, I step in front of him and fell into stride with him. He stopped at a conference room and held the door open for Avery. I brush past him, taking long strides to the back wall.
Grayson let the conference room door close behind him, then continued walking to the back wall, Avery trailing after him. It's lined with maps: first a world map, then each continent, then broken down by countries, all the way down to states and towns.
"Look at them," he instructs, nodding toward the maps, "because that is what's at stake here. Everything. Not a single person. Giving money to individuals does little."
"It does a lot," Avery said quietly, "for those people."
"With the resources you have now, you can no longer afford to concern yourself with the individual."
Grayson speaks like this was a lesson he'd had beaten into him. By granddad. "You, Ms. Grambs," he continues, "are responsible for the world."
She looks at him like those words lit a match, a spark, a flame.
I could freeze her in her tracks.
Grayson turns to the wall of maps. "I deferred college for a year to learn the ropes at the foundation. My grandfather assigned me to make a study of modes of charitable giving, with an eye to improving ours. I was to make my pitch in the coming months." Grayson stared hard at the map that hangs even with his eyes. "Now I suppose that I will be making my pitch to you." He seemed to be measuring the pace of his words. "The foundation conservatorship has its own paperwork. When you turn twenty-one, it's yours, just like everything else."
That hurts him, more than any of the terms of the will. I think about Skye referring to him as the heir apparent, even though she insisted that Jameson had been granddad's favourite. Grayson had spent his gap year dedicated to the foundation. His photographs hung in the lobby.
But granddad chose Avery. "I'm—"
"Don't say that you are sorry. You do not deserve to be sorry." I see how my words slice her open.
"Don't be sorry, Ms. Grambs. Be worthy of it." Grayson's pulled her apart.
Avery pov
He might as well have ordered me to be fire or earth or air. A person couldn't be worthy of billions. It wasn't possible—not for anyone, and definitely not for me.
"How?" I asked them. How am I supposed to be worthy of anything?"
"Our job is not to make you worthy. Our job is to teach you how to think." This side of Trinity scared me yet again.
I push back the memory of Emily's face. "I'm here, aren't I?"
Grayson began to walk down the length of the room, passing map after map. "It might feel better to give to someone you know than a stranger, or to donate to an organisation whose story brings a tear to your eye, but that's your brain playing tricks on you. The morality of an action depends, ultimately and only, on its outcomes."
There was an intensity in the way he spoke, the way Trinity stood. I couldn't have looked away or stopped listening, even if I'd tried.
"We shouldn't give because we feel one way or another," Trinity told me. "We should direct our resources to wherever objective analysis says we can have the largest impact."
He probably thought he was talking over my head, but the moment he said objective analysis, I smiled. "You're talking to a future actuarial science major, Hawthorne. Show me your graphs."
By the time Grayson and Trinity finished, my head was spinning with numbers and projections. I could see exactly how Grayson's mind worked—and it was disturbingly like my own. Trinity was a mystery, her brain seemed to work in sync with Grayson's, but at the same time it was wired differently.
"I get why a scattershot approach won't work," I said. "Big problems require big thinking and big interventions—"
"Comprehensive interventions," Trinity corrected.
"Strategic."
"But we also have to spread our risk." Grayson interjected. "With empirically driven cost-benefits analyses."
Everyone had things they found inexplicably attractive. Apparently, for me it was suit-wearing, silver-eyed guys using the word empirically and taking for granted that I knew what it meant.
Get your mind out of the gutter, Avery. Grayson Hawthorne is not for you.
His phone rang, and he glanced down at the screen. "Nash," he informed me.
"Go ahead," I told him. "Take it." At this point, I needed a breather—from him, but also from this. Math, I understood. Projections, I could wrap my mind around. But this?
This was real. This was power. One hundred million dollars a year.
Grayson answered his phone and left the room. I walked the perimeter, looking at the maps on the walls, memorising the names of every country, every city, every town. I could help all of them—or none. There were people out there who might live or die because of me, futures good or bad that might be realised because of my choices.
What right did I even have to be the one making them?
"Any questions?" Trinity sat in one of the chrome framed chairs, casually exuding power. Apparently, she had a habit of appearing or announcing her presence in that manner.
"Is he always like this?"
"You tell me, Avery Kylie Grambs. You've known him for three weeks. Does he always make you weak and delusional by wanting him?" She raised an eyebrow.
I know for a fact my emotions don't show that much, even though Grayson Hawthorne said I had an expressive face. I was entirely convinced Trinity is supernatural.
"I'm not delusional!" I defend myself.
"Whatever makes you feel better." Trinity's lips curled into a smirk. "Get your head out of the gutter, Avery." Her eyes flash.
How is she reading my mind? She repeated the exact words I'd told myself moments ago.
I may control billions, but Trinity Hawthorne seems to control my mind.
Overwhelmed, I came to a stop in front of the very last map on the wall. Unlike the others, this one had been hand-drawn. It took me a moment to realize that the map was of Hawthorne House and the surrounding estate. My eyes went first to Wayback Cottage, a small building tucked in the back corner of the estate. I remembered, from the reading of the will, that Tobias Hawthorne had given lifetime occupancy of this building to the Laughlins.
Rebecca's grandparents, I thought. Emily's.
I wondered if the girls had come to visit them when they were small, how much time they'd spent on the estate— at Hawthorne House. How old was Emily the first time Jameson and Grayson laid their eyes on her? What about Trinity?
How long ago did she die?
Trinity pov
The door to the conference room opens behind me and Grayson walks back in. Something is wrong in the way he walks.
"Avery." Grayson spoke behind her.
"What?" She asks.
"That was Nash."
"I know," She said. He'd told us who was on the other end of the line before he'd answered.
Grayson laid a hand gently on her shoulder. Alarm bells rang in the back of my head. Why was he being so gentle?
"What did Nash want?"
"It's about your sister."