The Heiress

by Rachel Hawkins

There should be some kind of warning when your life is about to change forever. I don’t need a siren or bloodred skies or anything, but I still think there should be just the littlest bit of … I don’t know, a frisson. A feeling under your skin and inside your bones when something fundamental shifts, when the ground underneath your feet grows suddenly unstable.

You don’t expect to meet the love of your life at 25 Cent Wing Night at a college bar. Or hell, maybe you’re more optimistic than I am, and so you go to every “BOGO Beer Wednesday” and “No Cover Charge For 36C and Up This Weekend!” special that’s advertised assuming you’re going to meet the One. Me, I just really wanted some cheap wings.

you can put miles and mountains between you and home, but eventually, home will call you back.

Personally, I couldn’t give a shit if tourists came to look—isn’t that why people build places like this, anyway?—but I agreed with Ruby that we shouldn’t make the road smooth. Let all these bumps and jostles and the fear of a blown tire serve as a warning of what they’d find at the top of this mountain. A haunted house where the ghosts hadn’t had the courtesy to die yet.

It made me feel shitty, sitting there with champagne bubbles in my veins while he seemed to sink further and further into misery, but I couldn’t help it.

What is the motive?

If Howell wasn’t already dead, I’d kill him myself just for that. For deciding that if he couldn’t change Ruby’s mind about her will, he’d do whatever it took to make sure his family wouldn’t be cut out of it. Including sending his teenage daughter into my room to seduce me.

!!!!!!!!