Page 251 of The Billion Heirs Boxed Set

22

CHANCE

I sit on the dusty floor, stunned, staring at the words on the document.

Five hundred thousand dollars. Half a million dollars for Linda Marsh to leave town and take her daughter with her.

Not only that, but another fifty thou each year she stayed away. Kept Avery away from here. From me.

I shake my head. I don’t remember a lot about Linda Marsh. She worked odd hours and Avery and I did our share of making out in their mobile home. We couldn’t make out at my place. My old man made it clear how he felt about Avery.

Plus? I didn’t like being home. I missed my mother.

God, my mother…

Without looking at the rest of the contents of Linda’s box, I push it aside and scour the small room, tossing more boxes until I find it. The one I knew would be there.

Lisabeth Davies.

My mother. She was tall and gorgeous with hair the color of a Montana sunset. I last saw her the summer I turned thirteen. She cried when she left, told me she loved me, said she’d be back for me as soon as she could.

I believed her for a while. I believed my beautiful mother would return and get me out of my bastard father’s house.

But she didn’t. She never came. I never saw or heard from her again.

I grew to hate her, and then I met Avery. Avery, who taught me how to love again. That someone would stick around for me. To be mine to keep always. Unconditionally.

Until she, too, left. Walked away without a word just as my mother had.

And ripped my heart to shreds.

“Why’d you stay at the ranch?” Austin asked me a couple nights ago when we were sharing a beer on the deck.

“Because this ranch saved me,” I told him. “When Avery disappeared, I threw myself into ranch work. I couldn’t leave. This place was like a person to me. My savior, in a way.”

“Even though our father was here?” he wondered. He never met Jonathan Bridger but hates him just as fiercely.

“In spite of that,” I added. “I had nothing to do with him, not once I turned eighteen. I even moved out of this house. I only moved back after he died.”

The box is light. I rip off the lid and—

The only contents are a death certificate.

I pick it up and scan it.

A tear falls from my eye. It’s dated a week after she left.

I shake my head. My mother didn’t leave me. She died. Cause of death is listed as…

Suicide.

My mother wasn’t suicidal.

Was she?

Living with Jonathan Bridger could drive anyone to the brink. What was different about her? Why did my father keep her around longer than his first two wives? He dumped Austin’s mom when she was pregnant. Same, as far as I remember, with Miles’s mom. Why did he keep me here, but abandon his first two sons? I fear I may never know the answers to those questions.

And why, after all these years, did he bring them back here when he died?