Total pages in book: 74
Estimated words: 67432 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 337(@200wpm)___ 270(@250wpm)___ 225(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 67432 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 337(@200wpm)___ 270(@250wpm)___ 225(@300wpm)
“What if it really was someone trying to rob her?” I asked, already knowing the answer.
“Oh, someone definitely tried to rob her, but I’m sure it was the inheritance they were after. Not the jewelry or the clothes or the cars.”
Jen’s statement sent a chill down my spine. Her implication was clear but hard to swallow. Our mom had built up a fortune, and with that blessing came a massive curse. Money changed people, but not just the ones who were earning it. When the bank account was as large as my mother’s, it created a kind of gravitational pull that affected how people in her orbit acted. Cousins thrice removed would crawl out of the woodwork after her Forbes article came out. Old friends from high school that she couldn’t pick out of a lineup appeared at her front door, begging for a handout. Employees and neighbors and dog walkers and randoms off the street. They all wanted a slice of the pie.
A lot of us stood to gain a life-changing amount of money from my mom’s death, and that sent up red flags all across the board. It was Jen who brought it up first, mentioning how maybe money could have been a motivating factor.
Then came the details of her death. Details that didn’t exactly add up. She was murdered in her own home, strangled to death and left to die on her brand-new Persian rug. The police said the robber must have forced his way in, and when my mother didn’t relent, she was choked out.
Except there wasn’t any sign of a break-in. And my mother wouldn’t have opened the door for just anyone. She’d always warned us: if anyone ever came after us for something, we gave it to them. Material possessions could be replaced, but people couldn’t. She was a cautious woman, with security cameras all around her house.
Cameras that happened to be down for maintenance— a total of fifteen minutes. That’s all the time it took for someone to strangle our mother and take some of her more expensive pieces of jewelry before running out and leaving behind a shattered family.
It didn’t add up. And now we were set to all get together at our family villa in France for a yearly vacation that appeared to be on the precipice of getting canceled until my father had announced that he was selling the villa and that this would be our last year to visit. He wanted us there, enticing the family further by saying the will would be read at the villa.
And so here we were, a few weeks out from flying overseas to spend time with someone who’d murdered our mother, discussing the prospect in a coffee shop without having any inclination of what to do first.
I tried to rub the tension out of my forehead. “I think I need another coffee,” I said, finishing the last bit that was left in my cup. “Want anything?”
Jen swirled her half-full cup and shook her head. She leaned back in her chair and looked out the window, the overcast sunshine casting a soft glow on her, reminding me a lot of Mom. They shared the same sharp cheekbones and thin nose, the same long dark hair that had skipped my genes altogether. My short blonde hair came directly from my dad, along with my slightly shorter and much stockier frame, built even more by the years of rugby I played in college.
Six years separated me from my last match, and although I still went to the gym, I had lost some of the definition I’d had back then. Which I was completely fine with, and none of the guys I’d hooked up with had complained, either.
That made my mind wander as I stood in line behind a couple of frat bros chatting about their next social. I looked around the coffee shop, wondering if there were any older and more sensible guys I could check out. My taste wasn’t exactly picky, but I did like my guys to have some chest hair and, at the minimum, a total of five brain cells.
No one. I was about to turn my focus back to the colorful menu that hung above the smiling baristas when a familiar face jumped out at me, having just walked in.
An extremely familiar face, and one I hadn’t seen in years. Not since we were both in the police academy together. I dropped out a few months into it, but that was more than long enough for me to get to know the man currently walking toward me, shocked amusement playing on his handsomely bearded face, shaved around the neck and kept trimmed around his face.
He looked just like the guy I had spent all those nights with, pretending to be brushing up on our laws and call codes only to be brushing up on each other, tracing secret words between our shoulders and on our lower backs. All night long. Sometimes throughout the day, too. We were fire and gasoline, opposites that created a guaranteed chemical explosion, one of those explosions burning us to a crisp and destroying anything we had between us.