by Liz Johnson
He quickly agreed. Setting the box on its back and wedging it securely between two tree roots, the buckle facing the sky, she shoved the tip of her shovel beneath the lip of the lid. Then she leaned on the handle.
Nothing happened.
She scowled and leaned harder, up on her tiptoes, hips wiggling and body shaking. Still nothing.
He wanted to laugh at her antics, but more than that, he wanted to know what was in that box. So he joined her, adding his weight to the pressure of the handle. The wood in their hands groaned, and he cringed, expecting it to splinter.
And then with no warning, the buckle popped and pieces flew at them. He ducked as his heart skipped a beat and the box clattered end over end.
They raced to it, kneeling on either side. He prayed this was what they’d been looking for, what they needed. He prayed that what they found would let him finally lay his mother’s sins to rest.
Millie reached for the lid, but her hand stilled just before opening it. She looked up through thick lashes, and he could read the question in her eyes. Was it going to be enough?
And maybe that was the real question. Could it ever be enough? There was only one way to know.
“Open it,” he said.
Squaring her shoulders and sucking in a quick breath, she gave a dip of her chin and popped the lid open.
His mind couldn’t make sense of what was inside. Sunlight sparkled off of a chain of silver like nothing he’d ever seen. And beside it sat a ring with a glowing red ruby the size of the moon. Gold necklaces had tangled together, and strings of pearls pooled in a corner. The missing brooch lay over it all, pink and green gemstones outlining the wings of a butterfly. It was everything Ruth had written about and so much more.
Millie gasped, but Ben didn’t have any air to do so. This was beyond what he could have imagined. And it was theirs. All theirs.
Or at least theirs to turn in to the authorities. And then, if unclaimed, unlooked for, unwanted, it could be theirs. Even a fraction. A finder’s fee, as Millie had put it, would change their lives. His mom’s debts could be paid. Every person he knew she’d swindled would be restored. Grandma Joy would receive the best care money could buy.
Because—for the first time in his life—money wasn’t the issue.
Millie squealed as she pressed her hands to her face, then threw her arms around his neck. “We found it! This is really it!” She pressed a wild kiss to his lips and then leaned back on her heels, hands covering her face. Her shoulders shook. He couldn’t tell if she was crying or laughing or both. It didn’t matter.
His cheeks ached from smiling so hard, and there was a lump in his chest that he couldn’t name. It was all so much.
Forcing himself to find out what filled the rest of the box, he pushed the glittering pieces to the side. Paper crinkled beneath his fingers, and his stomach did a full barrel roll, the pressure on his chest suddenly making it hard to breathe.
The stocks. Angelique’s final theft was right here with the other things she’d stolen.
He pulled the papers free and read the heading. Across the top in bold letters was a word he knew well. Coca-Cola.
A chuckle broke free. Then a full-on laugh. And then his shoulders hunched and his whole body shook with mirth.
“What’s so funny?” Millie asked.
It took him two tries to get the words out. “You know—that Georgia company—the one that Dawkins bought shares in?”
She nodded.
“It was Coca-Cola.”
“Are you serious?”
He showed her the documents, ten pages of them, all with the same company name emblazoned across the top.
“What are these worth?”
“I don’t know exactly. But if they’re real, millions.”
Her eyes welled with tears as laughter spilled out of her. And he could do nothing but hold her close.
“Can you even imagine? What would you do with this kind of money?” Millie couldn’t hold back another giggle as Ben pulled his car into a parking spot in front of the sheriff’s office. She hugged Angelique’s box to her chest, her head still spinning with the possibilities.
It wasn’t theirs yet. But maybe some of it would be.
He chuckled and seemed to think about it for a moment.
She didn’t have to. “Of course, I’d find the very best home for Grandma Joy, somewhere I could visit her all the time, and when I couldn’t be there, I’d be sure that they were taking the best care of her. I’d know she was happy and not scared when she forgot. I’d know it was clean and her sheets would get washed every week. And they’d never make her move again.”
“That’s a good dream. But nothing for you?”
“Oh, for me? I’d buy a car that always runs. I’d buy a house with real air-conditioning. No more of that useless window unit for me. And I’d buy myself a steak. A real steak—that someone else cooked. And I’d buy bookcases and fill them with books. Books that I owned!” She straightened in the passenger seat. “Definitely the books before the steak.”
Ben laughed, his gaze off somewhere beyond the brick building before them.
“What about you? What will you do with your half?”
His gaze dropped, and his eyes drooped at the corners. “I’d try to make things right.”
His words were vague, but they struck a memory in her, something that reminded her of all the times she’d thought he was holding back.
“Seriously, Ben. What would you do?”
“That’s what I’d do. I’d make things right.” He stared straight ahead, and his fingers gripped the steering wheel so hard that his knuckles turned pale.
“What things?”
Silence hung between them for so long that she thought he hadn’t heard her, until his chin fell to his chest. He took a deep breath and kept his gaze somewhere near his feet. “All of them. As many as I could.”
She pressed her hand against his arm. “What’s the first one?”
He looked at her out of the corner of his eye. “Who?”
“Who, what?” She squinted at him, but while his face was in focus, his words were as obtuse as ever.
“Cora Aguilar.”
She racked her brain for any memory of the name, but it didn’t fit in Ruth’s journals or their talk of treasure or anything that Ben had said to her. “Who’s Cora?”
“My mom’s first mark.” When he was silent for too long, she squeezed his shoulder to keep him going. “I wasn’t quite ten. I didn’t understand how life worked. I didn’t know where money came from. I just knew that the kids in my class sometimes made fun of me because my clothes had holes or my lunch was a can of sardines. And then one day there would be new shoes, the two-hundred-dollar ones that everyone wanted. I hadn’t had three meals a day in two weeks, and suddenly I was wearing brand-new clothes. There were packed lunches and cookies when I got home from school. And then a few days later we had to move, sometimes sleeping in our car until my mom could find us an apartment.”
Millie rubbed her eyes, which burned as he recounted his childhood. She hadn’t always had much, but she’d had Grandma Joy and Grandpa Zeke. She’d had a home she didn’t have to leave. “I’m sorry.”
But he didn’t seem to hear her. “I should have asked where the money was coming from.”
A fist tightened around her stomach.
“But I didn’t. If I wondered, I never asked. I couldn’t. Not when whatever money was coming in was the difference between sleeping in our car and having a roof over our heads and a real shower. And you know the worst thing about being a homeless twelve-year-old boy?”
She shook her head. There was no way she could get a word around the lump in her throat, the weight on her chest.
“The other kids always make fun of the smelly one.”
“Oh, Ben. I didn’t know.” She couldn’t fuse the image of the clean-cut man before her with the picture in her mind of a little boy in need of a simple shower.
“So I didn’t ask. I
didn’t question. I only wanted to survive. It wasn’t until I was a sophomore in high school and I had this history teacher. I was only at that school in Jacksonville for a semester, but this teacher, Mr. Cunningham, made me fall in love with history. He made it so interesting, and I wanted to be just like him—to make students care about the past because it informs our future.”
Whatever she’d felt for Ben before grew new blooms. She’d cared about him, really liked him. And now . . . well, she wasn’t sure what this was. But it was special. Different. And it swirled inside her, wiping out every doubt that might have stood between them.
“That was the first year I heard Cora’s name.”
Oh, right. There was more to Ben’s story, and she leaned into it, into him.
“One day my mom said that the money had run out. We had to move. She needed another mark, and she had a tip from a friend at a retirement home near Nashville.”
The twister inside picked up and took her stomach with it. “A tip?”
“I didn’t ask her. I couldn’t. I finally had a dream, and I wasn’t about to lose out on it because my mom might have been doing something underhanded. But I knew she was.”
Bile rose in the back of her throat, and she had to swallow convulsively to keep it down. She knew the type of person his mother was. She knew the damage that person could bring to a family. Damage it had brought to her family.
Ben let go of the wheel long enough to stab his fingers through his hair, rearranging the already wild style. “We were only there for a few months. But within weeks, money was rolling in. We had a new car, then two cars, one for each of us. It was luxury I had never known. I was in town long enough to get decent grades. I had a guidance counselor who convinced me I could go to college, so I weaseled away every dime I could. When Mom would leave me twenty bucks for pizza while she went out on the town with her boyfriend of the week, I would eat tuna sandwiches and tuck that twenty into a box under my bed.”
“And that’s how you paid for college? With other people’s money?” Her voice rose with each word, anger bubbling low inside her like a geyser searching for release.
He nodded. “And I regret it every day. Which is why I—”
“Which is why you want the money.”
Again he gave her a nod, but he still didn’t look in her direction. His shoulders slumped a little more with each word.
Everything inside her longed to fling open the car door and march into the sheriff’s office, turn in the treasure, and hear that they could keep even a fraction of what it was worth. But something inside her had to dig deeper. It demanded to know the rest of his story. He’d given her clues along the way—just like Ruth had—and now she knew she was missing a key piece of the puzzle.
“And now your mom is in prison?”
“Yeah.”
“How was she caught?”
His swallow filled the whole coupe. “About eight years ago she started a fake investment firm. She promised big returns on midsize investments, and she targeted retirees, mostly between here and the Florida state line.”
“And she took their money and ran?”
She didn’t really need to ask the question. The truth was right in front of her, and she could see it like it had been printed on the cover of a book.
And she was going to be sick.
He scrubbed his face with his palms. “When she was convicted, she was ordered to pay restitution, but her lawyers found a loophole. She filed for bankruptcy, and now she’ll never pay a dime.”
“So that’s what you’re doing? That’s why you’re working three jobs? To pay back those people?”
He looked at her then, his head still bent forward but a question in his eyes. Maybe her words should have been—if not pleased—at least accepting. But she couldn’t keep the venom from filling every syllable.
“I am. At least the ones who were named in the court case. As many names as I can find, I’ll make it right for them.”
“And what about the years that they’ve lost? What about the ones that were homeless because of her? What about the ones who lost everything, who lost all hope? What about the ones who wouldn’t have had to suffer at all if you’d just spoken up when you were a kid?”
He leaned his head back against his seat. “You think I don’t think about that? I wish I’d made another choice. But at the time, it didn’t feel like I had one. It was my mom or foster care. It was my mom or sleeping on the street. What kind of choice is that?”
Her fists shook in her lap so hard that the metal box rattled, and he looked from it to her face and back, his eyebrows raised with more questions.
But how could she explain? How could she tell him about the war inside her when it stole her breath? Every single thought was replaced with one word. When she closed her eyes, she saw it in the letterhead on her grandma’s table like it had been emblazoned across the sky.
Aspire.
Her throat constricted, and she doubled over as tears filled her eyes.
“Millie? I’m sorry.” He touched her back, but she couldn’t bear it. Flinching away, she hugged the door and the box to her chest.
“I should have told you,” he said. “I know it’s a lot to ask you—to ask any woman—to deal with.”
Yes. He should have told her. He should have told her when she offered him half of the treasure. He should have told her before she took him to see Grandma Joy. He should have told her before he kissed her.
He should have told her before he made her go and fall in love with him.
Stupid Ben.
Stupid Millie.
“Millie? Millie? What is it? I’m going to make it right. I’m doing everything I can to make up for it.”
“It’s not enough. It’ll never be enough.”
He blinked hard, jerking back in the tight confines. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
But she answered him with a question of her own. “What’s the name of the investment company that your mom set up?”
“What? Why?”
“What was it?”
Please, please, please. Let him say any other word. Let this all be a hoax, some sick joke. Let the ache in her stomach that threatened to tear her in half be from a misunderstanding.
Please, God. Let me be wrong. Let every coincidence be just that.
But she wasn’t wrong. And she knew it from the tips of her toes to the top of her head. She’d followed that case from the jump, and there was no way his mom wasn’t the woman she thought she was.
He frowned. “Aspire.”
She flung her door open and vomited on the ground. Her stomach rolled and rolled, and she hugged what had been her hope while her insides emptied.
“Millie?” Suddenly Ben was by her side, helping her up, but his touch burned, and she ripped herself out of his grasp.
“Stay. Away. From. Me.”
“What is going on?” He tossed up his hands and took a couple steps back. “I don’t understand why you’re so upset.”
“Because.” She walked away and then back to him and poked him in the chest. “Your mom. Your mom—who you could have stopped—she stole everything! She took every penny that Grandma Joy ever earned!”
His jaw dropped open, his eyes wider than she’d ever seen them. “Grandma Joy. But she’s not on my list. She’s not—she wasn’t named in the case.”
“She didn’t want to press charges. She said that justice was going to be done, and she didn’t need to have her name on that list. She said . . . she said she could forgive that woman.”
She spun and marched away, but she wasn’t done. Flinging herself back around, she wagged her finger at him again. “But I can’t. I won’t!”
“I don’t know what to say. I’m so sorry.”
She snorted at him, derision dripping from her every cell. “Like that could begin to help.” She pivoted and marched away, blind and uncertain where she was going.
“What about the money?”
“The money? Is that what yo
u care about? Then keep it!” She flung the box in his general direction, her vision blurred and her lips trembling. “Keep your stupid money. I don’t want it! I don’t want you!”
And then she ran.
twenty
You look like someone ran over your dog.”
Ben looked up from the keyboard at his desk with no idea how long he’d been staring at his motionless fingers. He was supposed to be responding to an online request for information. Instead he was stuck in a parking lot in front of the sheriff’s office, the weight of the box landing in his arms as Millie took off like an Olympic sprinter.
She hadn’t returned a single one of his phone calls. And there had been more than several.
He tried to smile at Carl’s remark, but it took far too much effort. He managed only to lift one corner of his mouth, and it dropped immediately back to the frown.
Carl pulled on a pair of white cotton gloves and began to open a journal twice as old as Ruth’s. “What’s wrong? Treasure hunt not going well?”
“No. I mean, it’s fine.” He shook his head, trying to focus on Carl and not on the image of Millie’s sweet lips as he saw them every time he closed his eyes.
One of Carl’s bushy eyebrows raised, clearly doubtful.
Ben blurted out the first thing he thought of. “I mean, we found it. We found the treasure.”
“Sure. That’s why you look like a kid that got left at Mount Rushmore.”
“Really.” Ben turned back to his computer screen, his back to Carl. But he could still feel the other man’s eyes on him. “We found it. It was south of the security wall—off the property.”
“You don’t say.” Carl abandoned his project and sidled up to Ben’s desk. “What’d you find?”
Ben shrugged, unable to muster any enthusiasm for their discovery. It didn’t matter that he’d invested a month in trying to locate the treasure. It didn’t matter what it contained.
None of it mattered without Millie.
“Well, it has to be better than sweet potato pie,” Carl prodded. “If not, no one would bother looking for it. And those treasure hunters are still calling. Fewer than before the Chateau beefed up its security, but still, they’re looking. So what was it? Worth the hubbub?”
