The Will

The Reading IV

Dally POV

I didn't understand why Mr. Ashwood picked me.

That was the thought that kept circling my head while the others sat there looking shocked.

Not because I wasn't shocked. Hell, I could barely keep up with half the words coming out of that screen.

Assets. Subsidiaries. Intellectual property. Liquid capital.

Sounded important.

Didn't mean much to me.

What I understood was simple.

Mr. Ashwood was dead. Somebody killed him. And somehow, for reasons I couldn't begin to explain, he thought I could figure out who.

Me.

The guy who never finished high school. The guy who still counted on his fingers when nobody was looking. The guy whose whole life fit inside a one-bedroom cottage behind the greenhouse.

Mom used to tell me not to ask questions.

Limítate a hacer tu trabajo, mijo.

Just do your job.

People like us didn't need to know everything. We planted the flowers. Trimmed the hedges. Fixed what broke. Asked no questions.

Questions got people in trouble. Questions got people fired. Questions reminded rich people you were there.

I looked around the ballroom.

The blonde woman wrote notes like she was preparing for an exam. The guy in the suit sat perfectly still, staring at the screen. The girl beside me looked like she might cry.

Nobody looked like a killer. Then again, what the hell did I know?

Mi mamí had spent years teaching me how to care for roses. How to prune fruit trees. How to winterize the gardens.

She never taught me how to solve a murder.

The number hit me a few seconds late. Four hundred and twenty billion dollars. Split four ways.

I tried to picture that much money and couldn't. A hundred dollars, sure. Maybe thousand. Probably not a million.

But a billion?

That wasn't money anymore. That was something else. Something people like me weren't supposed to have.

My mind skipped somewhere practical instead.

Mr. Ashwood owned the estate. The estate paid my wages. So if he was dead... Who signed my paychecks? Did I still have a job? Would they shut the place down? Sell it?

The thought hit me harder than the inheritance. The gardens needed tending. The roses wouldn't survive winter without preparation. Mom's roses.

My chest tightened. Then another thought crashed into the first.

Dally, idiota.

If this thing was real, if any of what Mr. Ashwood said was true, I wouldn't need somebody else to sign my paychecks. I'd sign them myself.

The idea felt ridiculous.

Like imagining the moon deciding to fall out of the sky.

I looked down at my hands. Scratches covered my knuckles from the thorns out front. Dirt still sat beneath my fingernails no matter how hard I'd scrubbed. The hands of a groundskeeper.

Not the hands of a billionaire.

I glanced back at the screen.

Mr. Ashwood's face filled the ballroom. Calm. Certain.

Like he knew exactly what he was doing. Maybe he did.

I wished Mom were sitting beside me. She always knew what to do when life stopped making sense.

And right now, nothing made sense at all.