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Nodding, she opens the dresser and pulls handfuls of stuff out, dropping it into the waiting case as I do the same. It doesn’t take us long to get everything I want and before I know it, I’m zipping up the full case and scanning the room for anything I might have missed.
“Is that it?” she asks.
“I think so. It’s kind of pathetic isn’t it, that one case is all I want to keep?”
“Maybe, but our childhood wasn’t all kittens and bedtime stories was it?”
“True,” I say, crossing to my bookcase and pulling out the photo album I’d forgotten was on there.
“What’s that?” she asks.
“Photos of us as kids,” I tell her, sitting down on the edge of the bed and opening the book.
“We were so cute,” she coos, as I flick through the pages. “Notice anything though?”
“What?”
“Mom and Dad aren’t in any of them. We don’t need them, Carrigan, we never did. We have each other now and the guys, we don’t need anything from them.”
Pulling in a slow, reaffirming breath I smile. “You’re right, we don’t. I’m just sorry it took me so long to figure it out.”
“Wanna help me pick pre plastic surgery pictures to leak to the papers?” she asks me with a smirk.
“I really do,” I gush, closing the photo album. Grabbing my case, I pull it out of my room and take one final glance before closing the door behind me.
Abandoning the heavy case at the top of the stairs, we make our way to Dad’s office and find the guys looking through paperwork and his laptop while drinking his whiskey.
“Find anything useful?” Tally asks.
“We found offshore bank accounts, a gun, some dodgy investments gone wrong, and what we think might be a sex tape,” Wats grins.
“Nice,” my sister laughs. “We’re going to find post-surgery pictures,” she announces, grabbing me and towing me down the hallway to Mom’s sitting room.
The room is unfamiliar to me, despite it having been here all my life, it was her private space and not somewhere we were ever allowed in as kids, or welcomed into in more recent years. Soft cream furnishings, mixed with pale oak and gold give the room a homely, sort of cottagey feel that I’m surprised my mom would pick, given her fondness for bold intense colors in her wardrobe.
“I’ve never been in this room,” I say, tentatively following Tally inside and watching as she confidently crosses to Mom’s desk and begins rooting through the drawers.
“She has a safe hidden in the floor beneath the rug by the window,” she says, her head bent as she pulls out a pile of small albums and begins flicking through them.
“How do you know that?”
“I’m nosy and I spent a lot of time here alone the last few years,” she says nonchalantly.
Crossing to the window, I get down onto my knees and pull back the edge of the rug to reveal a black, metal, circular safe sunk into the floor, with a digital display and number pad concealed beneath a clear cover. “Do you know the combination?”
“12, 18, 81.”
“That’s the day after they got married.”
“Yep, the day Mom officially got really rich,” she says with a scoff.
Lifting the cover, I type in the code, jumping when the safe emits a loud beep and then an audible click as the lock disengages. Opening the lid, I pull out the contents and lay them on the floor next to me. There’s a couple of jewelry boxes, some paperwork, and a couple of portable USB stick drives. Opening one of the jewelry boxes I’m surprised to find a simple solitaire diamond pendent nestled in the black velvet, it’s not particularly big or flashy, hardly something worth putting in a safe when she has so many more ostentatious and expensive pieces of jewelry up in her bedroom.
Placing it down by my side, I open the next box and find a matching diamond pendant. Weird. Placing that with the other necklace on the floor, I lift the paperwork and start to scan it. There’s some stocks and shares bonds, details of bank statements with a hell of a lot of money in it, and an envelope that has both mine and Tallulah’s birth certificates, as well as our passports and a few other pieces of paper that I set aside to look at later.
Lifting up the two pen drives I twirl them around in my fingers. “What would Mom have on a pen drive that’s worth hiding in a safe?” I say to myself.
“Sex tape?” Tally answers from right behind me, making me jump and shriek. “Woah, sorry, I thought you knew I was here,” she chuckles, a handful of photos in her hand.
