“And the money?” Rose asked.
“Long gone, Mom. They’ll never know there was any.”
The money.
I want to tell you I stayed calm, but the floor seemed to tilt. I pieced the rest together over the following weeks, with a lawyer and a lot of documents, but standing in that hallway I already understood the shape of it.
Our biological father had died when Simon and I were babies. He had not left us with nothing. He’d left a trust — a substantial one — for his two sons, to be administered by our legal guardian until we came of age.
Beatrice and Kenneth hadn’t adopted two little boys out of love. Or — Kenneth had, I’ll come back to him, because Kenneth is the one piece of this that still lets me sleep. But Beatrice had adopted a trust fund that happened to come with two children attached. We were the burden; the money was the point. That was why she resented us, fed us, clothed us, and never once warmed to us: we were an expense between her and an inheritance that was never hers.
