Page 17 of Day Break

I knew that my grandfather wouldn’t have the private conversation we needed with the two police officers sitting behind us. I’d only met him at the diner to try once more to convince him to hire someone to look out for him.

His house was massive and now that he was living there all alone, I worried. Especially since the reason he’d been forced to move was because of the small stroke that he’d had the year before.

My family didn’t deal with medical problems well. Not after my grandmother’s fight with cancer. They deemed it below them to watch someone in the family suffer. It was like they thought that if they didn’t see it, they themselves wouldn’t be affected in the future.

It hadn’t taken long for my uncle Robert and his wife Reba to move into my grandfather’s home in the city. They’d basically taken over the property within days of moving my grandfather into the summer home on Whidbey Island.

My uncle was a congressman, but he would have done whatever was necessary to beat out the rest of my family and take over the home. At last look, the place had an estimated worth of more than ten million dollars.

Still, I knew for a fact that the property in the city wouldn’t be going to my uncle, father, or aunt after my grandfather’s death, which was a huge relief. I was the only one in the family who knew this information, and I kept it to myself.

It had surprised me when my grandfather had contacted me last year and hired me to oversee his financial accounts. I’d heard a few stories about how he’d made the choice after a nasty fight between his three kids about something trivial. I hadn’t heard any more details, but the three siblings were still not on talking terms.

The responsibility of updating my grandfather’s accounts had put a target squarely on my back for the rest of the family to aim at. In that first month after he’d hired me as his estate lawyer, I’d been contacted by each of my family members, some I had never even met before.

I handled everything except his will, due to the conflict of interest. One of my coworkers in the firm handled that instead. I trusted Lee Steinbeck and apparently so did my grandfather. He’d hired him more than twenty years back, which was the reason I’d looked at working for the firm after graduating from law school.

All of my family members had tried to pry information out of me about my grandfather’s wishes and financial status. Some had even tried to convince me to go to the courts and claim that my grandfather wasn’t fit to care for himself any longer.

Most of them just called to bitch that I was involved in the matter instead of them.

My grandfather had been an ass for most of his life. Up until that strange phone call last year when he’d hired me out of the blue.

On the call, weeks after his stroke, he’d mentioned that he’d made a huge mistake. He wanted to make things right but didn’t know how.

When he’d come into my offices downtown for our first meeting, we’d had the first real conversation I could remember in my entire life.

Since then, we’d had plenty of others. The more I had met with him, the more I’d seen the changes he’d made.

If I wasn’t careful, I’d actually start looking up to the man soon.

“Did you get my last changes?” he asked me as he finished off his coffee.

“I did.” I turned slightly to run my eyes over him. He’d opened a new account and had closed several others, moving the money from accounts in the city to the smaller bank on the island. Others in our family had found out he’d moved the funds. I knew this because they had called me about it.

Even though he was old, he was still a damned good-looking man. All of the Robinsons were. It was the jawline. I pushed my empty plate aside.

“Are you sure about this?” I asked him.

“I am.” Grandpa nodded. “It’s easier to get cash now.” He laughed. “Besides, now they won’t get their hands on my money so easily. They’ve somehow had access to it for years. They don’t deserve a dime of mine.” He looked sad.

I’d sat in on the last meeting between my grandfather and Lee, the one where my grandfather had struck every last family member out of his will with the exception of three people—including me.

“But leaving everyone out,” I started, but he cleared his throat, a sign that he didn’t want to talk about this in public. I lowered my voice. “They could contest it.”

He laughed, a loud booming sound that had me smiling.

“Let them.” His eyes met mine. “You and Lee will represent my estate and my wishes. Besides, that’s why we moved everything into a trust.”

“Trusts can still be contested,” I pointed out.

“It’ll just be more money for you and your firm to make when they do. Smart people have always made money on the stupidity of others.”

I nodded and then decided to change the subject.

“Have you thought about my request to hire someone to come in and lend a hand?” I asked.

“I have and my answer is still no,” he said clearly. Then he surprised me by laying his hand over mine. The frailness of it shocked me. His skin was thin and had many freckles on it, no doubt from all the summers he spent out on the water. “I can take care of myself.”