The Inheritance Games: TikTok Made Me Buy It

I couldn’t get Emily’s face out of my mind, but I hadn’t looked at the picture closely enough to recall every detail of her features. Her eyes had been green. Her hair was strawberry blonde, like sunlight through amber. I remembered the wreath of flowers on her head but not her hair’s length. No matter how hard I tried to visualize her face, the only other things I could remember were that she’d been laughing and that she’d looked right at the camera, head-on.

“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-gray, 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. I wondered how long he’d watched me taking in this room. I wondered what he’d seen on my face.

“I’m supposed to meet Zara,” I said, fending off his inevitable attack.

“Zara isn’t coming.” Grayson walked slowly toward me. “She’s convinced that you are in need of… guidance.” There was something about the way he said that word that slid past every defense mechanism I had and straight under my skin. “For some reason, my aunt seems to believe that guidance would be best received coming from me.”

He 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 I was the one with the eye.”

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 wouldn’t have pegged him 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…” He 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?”

He 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 he 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.

“I won’t apologize for being protective. This family has suffered enough, Ms. Grambs. If I were choosing between you and any one of them, I would choose them, always and every time. 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.

“You’re wrong.” I flipped the folder closed, turning away from him. “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 asked. His expression shifted. “A boyfriend?”

“No.” I answered. What did he care if I had a boyfriend? “A guy I play chess with in the park. He lives there. In the park.”

“Homeless?” Grayson was looking at me differently now, like in all his travels, he’d never encountered anything quite like this. Like me. After a second or two, he snapped out of it. “My aunt is right. You’re in desperate need of an education.”

He started walking, and I had no choice except to follow, but I refused to stay in his wake, like a duckling toddling after its mother. He stopped at a conference room and held the door open for me. I brushed past him, and even that split second of contact made me feel like I was going two hundred miles an hour.

Absolutely not. That was what I would have told Max if she were on the phone. What was wrong with me? Grayson had spent most of our acquaintance threatening me. Hating me.

He let the conference room door close behind him, then continued walking to the back wall. It was 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 instructed, 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,” I said quietly, “for those people.”

“With the resources you have now, you can no longer afford to concern yourself with the individual.” Grayson spoke like this was a lesson he’d had beaten into him. By whom? His grandfather? “You, Ms. Grambs,” he continued, “are responsible for the world.”

I felt those words like a lit match, a spark, a flame.

Grayson turned 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 hung 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 hurt him, more than any of the terms of the will. I thought about Skye referring to him as the heir apparent, even though she insisted that Jameson had been Tobias Hawthorne’s favorite. Grayson had spent his gap year dedicated to the foundation. His photographs hung in the lobby.

But his grandfather chose me. “I’m—”

“Don’t say that you are sorry.” Grayson stared at the wall a moment longer, then turned to face me. “Don’t be sorry, Ms. Grambs. Be worthy of it.”

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 him. How am I supposed to be worthy of anything?

He took his time replying, and I found myself wishing that I were the kind of girl who could fill silences. The kind who laughed with abandon, flowers in her hair.

“I can’t teach you how to be anything, Ms. Grambs. But if you’re willing, I can teach you a way of thinking.”

I pushed 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 organization 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 he moved. 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,” Grayson 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 finished, my head was spinning with numbers and projections. I could see exactly how his mind worked—and it was disturbingly like my own.

“I get why a scattershot approach won’t work,” I said. “Big problems require big thinking and big interventions—”

“Comprehensive interventions,” Grayson corrected. “Strategic.”

“But we also have to spread our risk.”

“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, memorizing 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 realized because of my choices.

What right did I even have to be the one making them?

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?

How long ago did she die?

The door to the conference room opened behind me. I was glad that Grayson couldn’t see my face. I didn’t want him to know that I’d been thinking about her. I made a show of studying the map in front of me, the geography of the estate, from the northern forest called the Black Wood to a small creek that ran along the western edge of the estate.

The Black Wood. I read the label again, the rush of blood through my veins was suddenly deafening. Blackwood. And there, in smaller letters, the winding body of water was labeled, too. Not a creek. The Brook.

A brook, on the west side of the property. Westbrook.

Blackwood. Westbrook.

“Avery.” Grayson spoke behind me.

“What?” I said, unable to fully tear my mind from the map—and the implications.

“That was Nash.”

“I know,” I said. He’d told me who was on the other end of the line before he’d answered.

Grayson laid a hand gently on my 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.”