Chapter 3 Clarke #2
I turned to face Leith and started racking my brain about what to tell him. It seemed important to Wilder, but it didn’t look like he’d stuck around to support me in whatever the hell I was going to tell his son. The least he could’ve done was wish me luck.
“Your house is nice,” Leith said. “It’s very…you.”
“Because you know me so well?” I asked.
“Does it irk you that I think so?”
“No,” I said quickly. “It doesn’t have any bearing on me.”
Leith tilted his head, and he looked like he was trying not to smile. “Not a single bearing?” he asked. God, he was pretty, though.
“Your socks don’t match,” I pointed out—looking at his one taupe and one navy blue sock.
“Bill,” Leith puffed, “went through a pretty severe chewing phase. It’s better now, but most of my socks didn’t make it out alive. Did Pearl ever do that?” He walked over to my couch and sat down. He stretched his arm over the back of my sofa like he owned the place.
“I rescued Pearl when she was probably five or six,” I said. “I’m grateful all my socks and furniture are intact.” I remembered that Brady Cooper had to reupholster a chair for Leith because of Bill’s chewing. “Do you want anything to drink?” I asked.
Leith shook his head. “We won’t be here very long. I just want to know why you said I needed to look at my dad’s will.” Well, straight to the point. I had to appreciate that.
I sat in the armchair that faced the couch and tucked my legs up under my chin. “Honestly,” I said, sighing. “I don’t know. It was just a feeling.”
“Just a feeling?” Leith asked. “Are you a psychic or something?” God, if only it were that simple.
“I’ve just been hyperobsessed with legal stuff lately,” I said.
I wasn’t as good of a liar as Collins, but I could dish a little fib with the best of them.
“A developer tried to buy Toades a few months ago and almost got it based on some fine print. We’re still not out of the woods.
So now I feel like I’m going to be worried about the fine print for the rest of my life. ” The best fibs had a little truth.
“I heard about that,” Leith said. “Brady told me to be careful if that company—Sullivan something, I think—came sniffing around the farm.”
“Good advice,” I said. “It’s been hard on my family.” That’s right, Clarke. The pity card always works. Make him feel bad for you, and then maybe he’ll leave it alone. “And I just don’t want something like that to happen to you.”
“Why?” Leith asked.
“Um, why?” I parroted. I didn’t expect him to ask why. I didn’t have an answer.
“Yeah, why do you care if something like that happened to me?” Leith was looking at me intently.
“Your family’s farm supplies over half of Sweetwater Peak’s produce,” I said after a few seconds. It was a logical answer.
Leith nodded. “So it’s not about me,” he said. For some reason, I felt like I was tiptoeing on something I didn’t quite understand, so I just nodded.
“Got it,” Leith said. He sounded disappointed. I didn’t know if it was directed at me, my answer, or something bigger than both those things. But I immediately felt bad.
“U-um…” I started to say without any clear map of where I was headed. I was good at talking. I just had to hope it would come to me. “I have a legacy, too—Toades, you know—and I get what it’s like to worry whether it’s going to end with you.”
Leith sighed. “I think you and I have different feelings about our legacies.” That was confusing to me, but I didn’t have time to pry because Leith kept talking. “So, you think I need to actually see that will?”
I took a deep breath. I had no idea what was in it, or what the consequences would be, but if it was something that put the farm, and by association Sweetwater Peak, in a precarious situation, I would never forgive myself.
After everything that happened with Toades, I had developed a bad habit of jumping to the worst-case scenario.
“Yeah,” I said on a deep breath—might as well be truthful at this point. “I do.”
“So do I,” Leith agreed.
I gave him a funny look. “Then why did you come berate me at my home on a Friday night if you were going to see it anyway?”
“Okay,” he said. “First of all, if you think this is berating, then you have lived a very cushy life; second of all, because I’ve already tried to see it, and I haven’t been able to.”
“What do you mean ‘haven’t been able to’?
“Ron keeps telling me he’ll get to it, but he hasn’t, so I feel like he’s hiding something from me.”
“Yeah, well, Ron sucks.” Ron was the lawyer for nearly half of Sweetwater Peak, which was definitely some sort of conflict of interest considering that most of the legal problems people had in this town had to do with one another.
“But isn’t it, like…required for him to keep you informed of anything and everything having to do with your father’s estate? ”
“You would think,” Leith said. “But nothing is actually in my name yet.”
Alarm bells went off in my head. “Your dad died four years ago.”
“Almost five,” Leith said. “I just…never got around to it.”
“But the farm goes to you, right?”
“I mean, I think so. That’s what I’ve been told my whole life.”
“Have you talked to your mom about it?” I asked.
Leith shook his head. “It never feels like the right time. She’s either doing so well, or her grief appears in full force, and I don’t want to bring my dad up in either of those situations. She’s also really thrown herself into her social calendar and into Lainey.”
“So what are you going to do?”
“I’m going to get my own copy of the will and any estate documents. You have the keys to Coop’s Upholstery, right?”
I nodded slowly—Brady and Collins left them with me before they left Sweetwater Peak.
“All right, good.” Leith stood from the chair. “Let’s go.”
“Go where?”
“To Coop’s,” he said. “All the storefronts on that side of the road are connected one way or another.”
Ron’s office was the last storefront. The pieces fell into place. “You’re going to break into Ron’s office?”
“No,” Leith said, and I was relieved until he followed up with: “We’re going to break into Ron’s office.”