Chapter 3
Chapter Three
FORREST
I wasn’t invited to pick Sterling up at Heartstone Manor, the family estate she’d banned me from a year before. Instead, she knocked on my door at eight a.m. sharp, just as she’d told me she would. I opened it to find a Sterling I wasn’t expecting.
She stood at my door in a navy linen sheath dress, her golden hair tamed into a sedate, gleaming twist, one sleek lock falling to curve around her cheek. Her makeup was artful and sophisticated, dramatic in a daytime-appropriate way, but the whole effect was not the Sterling I knew. This Sterling was polished, elegant, and bland. She was all image, her costume a wall between me and the woman I knew she hid inside.
“Ready?” she asked me, a challenge in her blue eyes.
I nodded. “I’m ready.”
“You can drive,” she said. “I don’t want to pay for gas.”
Most people wouldn’t get it—the heiress to the Sawyer fortune worrying about paying for gas. But I did. When her father had been alive, Sterling had a limitless credit card, the monthly bill covered by Prentice. Then Prentice was dead, and Sterling’s oldest brother, Griffen, took over.
Unlike Prentice, Griffen Sawyer did not believe in parenting with a blank check. As far as I could tell, Griffen was the closest thing to a real parent Sterling had since her stepmother died when she was seven. Griffen had come back to Sawyers Bend to find his little sister at the bottom of a bottle. He’d given her an ultimatum: get your shit together or get out.
I didn’t know Griffen Sawyer well, but I worked with his brothers, Royal and Tenn, and they talked about him often. I knew enough that I’d bet there was no way Griffen Sawyer would have thrown his baby sister out on the street. But Sterling hadn’t known it, and between her two options, she chose to get her shit together.
Once she cut back on drinking, she got a job at the inn, taking over for an employee who was out on maternity leave. After my lies were exposed and Sterling dumped me, she hadn’t wanted to see me at work every day. Understandable, though I’d felt her absence every day. Like someone had switched off half the lights, the inn was darker after she quit. She’d gone to work for her sister, Quinn, at Quinn’s backcountry guide business, Sawyer Outdoor Adventures. According to town gossip, Sterling had revamped Quinn’s website, organized her inventory system, started a summer camp program, and was doing some kind of outreach with local businesses to bring in more customers.
I wasn’t surprised. When she’d been at the inn, she’d taken to event planning as if she’d been doing it for years. I thought there wasn’t much Sterling couldn’t do if she put her mind to it. And now she was sitting beside me, headed to Willow Springs, Georgia, determined to get into a safe deposit box we didn’t have the key for.
“Do you have a plan?” I asked.
“What do you mean?” Sterling kept her eyes pointed firmly out the window, locked on the deep blue sky, the trees a vibrant green under the bright July sun.
Monday morning traffic was light once we were clear of town. I didn’t know what excuse Sterling had given Quinn for missing work. I doubted she’d told her sister she was with me. I’d told Tenn and Royal that I had a last-minute appointment and wouldn’t be in. Not a lie. Just not the whole truth.
“Do you have a plan to open the box?” I asked. If it was even a box we were looking for. We’d assumed the number on my father’s code referred to a safe deposit box, but we didn’t know. We didn’t know much of anything. Not really.
“Yep,” she agreed.
“We don’t have a key,” I reminded her.
“Nope,” she said, a little too quickly.
Was she lying? “Do we have a key?” I asked.
Her eyes flicked my way, bouncing off the second they hit my face as if looking at me scalded her eyeballs. My gut twisted. I hated it, fucking hated that she couldn’t even look at me. If I thought apologizing would do any good, I’d be on my knees. But that was the problem with lying—if you did it enough, people didn’t believe a fucking thing you said, including when you apologized. I’d have to show her she could trust me and hope she was paying enough attention to see. That would be hard when she refused to meet my eyes
I swallowed my emotions and repeated, “Do we have a key?”
“We might,” she said.
I resisted the urge to demand more. If she was willing to tell me what she knew, she would have already. It was driving me crazy. I was dying to know how she thought we were going to get into safe deposit box 42001 without a key.
I’ll admit I was a little curious about what might be inside. Only a little, though. I knew that the second Sterling had her money, she’d walk away, and I’d never see her again. If I thought I could get away with it, I would have offered her a bigger cut just to spend time with me, to give me a second chance. But I had a feeling a move like that would only play into every misconception she had about me. Paying for her company wasn’t the way to win her back. It might just be the way to drive her off for good.
My thoughts ran in circles as we drove. How were we going to get in the box? What had my father hidden there? What if the number didn’t refer to a box? Then what?
And the thought most often on repeat: How could I keep Sterling with me long enough to prove I was worth another chance with her?
Getting her to look at me for longer than a second would be a start.
I didn’t come up with any answers in the three hours it took us to get to Willow Springs. I thought I’d recognize the town when we pulled in, but too much had changed since I’d lived there. We passed strip malls packed with chain stores, gas stations, and, finally, a supermarket. When I was a kid, we’d driven to the next town over for groceries and gas. Willow Springs had grown while I’d been away.
Nothing seemed familiar until we turned, and I saw the brick buildings lining Main Street, their black shutters and old-fashioned awnings exactly as I remembered. We drove by the big, square park at the center of town, a bronze statue of the town founder in the center. Bittersweet nostalgia struck at the flashes of memory. Going to the library across the square and picking out my own books. Getting ice cream at the shop by the park and eating it on the benches with my dad.
For just a second, I could taste the sweet, cold ice cream, and hear the rumble of my father’s voice. Then I popped back to the present, to Sterling sitting beside me, trying to pretend I didn’t exist. I let out a short sigh. I’d been living a good life until I decided to go chasing after my father’s lost statue. Since then, it seemed like I’d made one bad decision after another. My job at the inn was the only thing that hadn’t been a mistake. When it came to my personal life, I couldn’t seem to get anything right.
I followed the GPS down Main Street to a left turn onto East Eagle Street. The bank was on the corner. It was go time.
I didn’t remember the bank from my childhood, but it looked like every other small-town bank I’d ever seen. Brick, white columns, two stories. I pulled into a spot and turned to look at Sterling. Her teeth cut into her lower lip—her only outward sign of worry. Otherwise, she was cool perfection. Feeling my eyes on her, she straightened in her seat, her mouth relaxing, and her mask of perfection fell into place once again.
For a second, the Sterling beside me had reminded me of the woman I loved, and my heart ached. I loved all versions of Sterling, but the perfectly polished figure beside me wasn’t the woman I missed. I missed who she’d become in those last days before it had all fallen apart when she’d trusted me, laughed with me, confided in me.
I’d done things in my life I wasn’t proud of and made decisions I wished I could take back, but nothing came close to my regret at lying to Sterling.
“What are we going to do now?” I asked.
Sterling’s head turned in my direction, her eyes skating my way, then sliding back without ever making contact. “Follow my lead,” she said, picking up her purse from where she’d stashed it at her side and opening her door.
If I’d been here for the money, maybe the lack of information would have made me nervous. I wasn’t completely disinterested in the money. According to my mother, there had been a lot of it before my father died. Hundreds of millions of dollars, stashed in an investment account, inaccessible without my father to tell us where to look. By now, it could be a fortune beyond my comprehension.
Could be. Or it could be gone. It might never have existed. I didn’t know. The money wasn’t real to me. It was a myth. A fairy tale. I couldn’t get my head or my heart engaged in the idea of all that money when I was too distracted by the hope of winning back Sterling.
Unlike that money, Sterling was very real. I knew I could have a happy life without my father’s fortune. I couldn’t say the same about a life without Sterling Sawyer.
I left the car, locked it, and caught up to her, savoring the sound of her navy heels clicking on the sidewalk. I pushed open the door to the bank and stood back, allowing her to enter before me. I’d swear every head in the bank turned, the entire room holding its breath as she strode in, her golden hair shining under the lights, diamonds flashing at her ears and around her neck. I had a second to wonder about the jewelry—especially the ring on her finger—before she was approached by a handsome young banker in a suit.
“May I help you?” he asked, not sparing a glance for me, all his focus on Sterling. I didn’t blame him. It was for the best, anyway, since I had no idea what the plan was.
“We have a safe deposit box,” Sterling said, her voice smooth, cool, and filled with assurance.
“Oh, well, if you give me the number,” he began.
“Box 42001,” Sterling said, finishing with a slight curve of her lips.
The young man’s eyes widened, I thought at Sterling’s little smile. I soon realized I was wrong when he said, “Excuse me, I just need to check something. Why don’t you have a seat?” He pointed to a love seat awkwardly set in the middle of the lobby beside a table holding a cut crystal candy bowl.
“Of course. Thank you,” Sterling said, nudging me with her elbow. She turned and made herself comfortable on the loveseat, helping herself to a butterscotch. The banker’s response seemed to have confirmed something for her based on the slightly smug smile she wore.
“Were you expecting that?” I asked, wanting to know what was going on in that head of hers. She’d worked her way through my father’s code with equal parts excitement and frustration. Watching her face as she sucked on the butterscotch and smiled to herself, I wondered if she knew that she herself was a code, and I’d give anything for the key.
Sterling didn’t answer my question, but I thought I was right. She hadn’t expected to be led straight to the box, though she’d been expecting something. Maybe not the banker’s exact response, but something out of the ordinary. I was growing more curious by the second, but given her reaction to my questions earlier, I thought I’d get further if I kept my mouth shut for now.
We waited, the minutes ticking by. The young banker didn’t return, and no one approached. Finally, a woman appeared before us wearing a gray suit with a pink flower tucked in the pocket, her white hair in a precise bob, reading glasses perched on her nose.