Chapter 6: Nicholas's POV: The Drawer

Nicholas's POV

The house in Evanston was too quiet at six in the morning.

I stood in the kitchen in yesterday's shirt and drank coffee out of Claire's chipped blue mug, because it was the first one my hand found.

Her reading glasses were still folded on the windowsill.

Her slippers were still by the back door.

I had not noticed, until she left, how much of the house was hers.

My phone buzzed with the news alert.

HEIRESS HID FORTUNE FROM HUSBAND, ABANDONED MARRIAGE.

Under it was a photograph of Claire holding a plate of lasagna on our front steps.

I read the whole article standing up.

It said she had concealed a nine-figure fortune for five years.

It said her "devastated husband" had no knowledge of her real identity.

I had given no one a quote, and I had not been devastated.

I had been angry yesterday, and this morning I was sick.

I put the phone down and went upstairs to her study.

The room was small, with a desk under the window and a bookshelf of dictionaries.

I had never cared what was in it.

I had called it her hobby room so often that I stopped hearing myself say it.

The bottom drawer of the desk was locked.

The key sat in the pencil cup, where anyone could have found it.

In five years I had never looked.

I opened the drawer.

Inside was a gray accordion folder, labeled in her neat handwriting.

HOSPITAL FUND.

I pulled out the first sheet.

It was a letter on Ames Row Holdings letterhead to the billing office at my mother's hospital.

It authorized payment of the full cost of Judith Linden's monthly infusion treatment, in perpetuity, as an anonymous grant.

My mother's treatment cost eleven thousand dollars a month.

There were sixty letters in the folder, one for every month, and every one had Claire's signature at the bottom.

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