Page 70 of The Brothers Hawthorne

I planned this.Grayson ignored the stab of guilt.This is what was supposed to happen.

“If you don’t have the key, ma’am, and you’re not the primary account holder, then I’m afraid you’re going to have to—”

The bank manager didn’t get the chance to finish that sentence. Savannah reached beneath the high-necked shirt she was wearing and pulled out a chain, identical to Gigi’s.

On the end of the chain, there was another key. “Try mine,” Savannah said.

Grayson stared at her.

“Since when do you have a key?” Gigi asked.

“I found it,” Savannah said quietly, “with the ID.”

Grayson Hawthorne was not often taken by surprise.This is what happens when you fail to look ten steps ahead.Tobias Hawthorne’s voice was as clear in his head as if the old man were right there.When you let your emotions get in the way. When you allow yourself to become distracted.

Savannah slid the key off her chain and handed it to her mother. Acacia placed it in the lock. And this time, when she turned it, the lock clicked.

The bank manager carefully removed the box from the wall and set it down on a tall glass table in the middle of the room. “I’ll give you a moment,” he said.

Acacia looked at her daughters in turn, then Grayson. Slowly, she opened the lid to the box.

The first thing Grayson saw was a photo of himself.

EIGHT YEARS AGO

Grayson stared at the massive ring of keys. The alternative was looking at the old man, who must have followed him all the way across the estate to the tree house.

“Yours wasn’t the slowest time,” Tobias Hawthorne commented, no particular emphasis in his tone. “But neither was it the fastest.”

Grayson watched as his grandfather bent and laid the ring of ornate keys down on the tree house floor. There were easily a hundred keys on the ring, each with a distinct head, many of them elaborately designed and delicately made. The challenge had been to figure out which key opened the newly installed lock on Hawthorne House’s grand front door.

Grayson had come in third.

“Jameson won.” Grayson set his jaw, refusing to allow that to bother him. It was a simple fact, after all, and the only thing that his grandfather respected as much as winning was control.

“Do you think it was a competition?” Tobias Hawthorne queried, cocking his head slightly to one side. “I was aiming more for rite of passage.”

After completion, they’d each been given a bronze pin, fashioned in the shape of a key. Grayson could feel his digging into the palm of his hand now. “Then why are you here talking about my time?”

The question came out cool, measured.Good.

“Jameson wanted to win.” The old man’s tone betrayed something else now: appreciation.

Grayson did not let himself look down. “Jameson always wants to win.”

The look in his grandfather’s eyes saidexactly, but his mouth said, “And sometimes you let him.”

“I didn’t let him win,” Grayson said, and this time, he nearly lost control, biting out the words. He reeled his frustration back in and gave his grandfather a cool, detached stare. “Is that what you wanted to hear?”

Tobias Hawthorne smiled. “Yes and no.” He stared at Grayson like a man used to answering his own questions, like he could get every answer he wanted just from looking at Grayson’s face. “Tell me where you went wrong.”

The prompt was soft in volume, neither gentle nor harsh in tone.

Grayson felt it like a blow. He let his gaze go down to the keys, tracing back over his method of solving them. “I was looking for a code, concentrating on the wrong thing.”

“Complicating something in no need of complication?” his grandfather suggested. “And in doing so, you failed to see the whole picture.”

There was no word on the planet that twelve-year-old Grayson hated more than any version of the wordfail.