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“My room’s untouched,” Izzy announces from behind me, startling me.
“Mine too,” I tell her. “It’s kind of anticlimactic, isn’t it?”
“Kind of, yeah.” She giggles. “At least we can get our stuff. Do you want me to help you pack? I got most of the stuff I wanted from my room before I moved out.”
“Sure,” I say, moving and grabbing my biggest suitcase from the back of the closet. “I don’t want most of the clothes, they were picked by her, but I want my underwear and pajamas and my laptop, that kind of stuff.”
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, Penelope, 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.”
“Want to 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?” Izzy asks.
“We found offshore bank accounts, a gun, some dodgy investments gone wrong, and what we think might be a sex tape.” Davis 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, almost 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 Izzy 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, revealing 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?”
“Twelve, eighteen, eighty-one.”
“That’s the day after they got married.”
“Yep, the day Mom officially got really rich,” she says with a scoff.
