Page 69 of Truthfinder’s Promise

Meredith stood under the arbor and watched Serenity walk away, somehow certain the woman had gotten the upper hand in what Meredith had not intended to be a contest. The next time she needed to extend a metaphorical olive branch to someone, she made a mental note to have Siren do it on her behalf.

Clearly, Meredith’s forte was in playing roles and manipulating people, not winning them over with sincerity.

Midnight came and went, followed by one a.m., then one-thirty. Jensen slept through every single time Meredith checked her phone, his arm slung over her waist. She stayed in bed longer than she ordinarily would have simply because she liked the feel of his weight on her, liked listening to the rhythmic rise and fall of his chest.

She’d wondered where he would go that night—her room, or an empty one on the second floor. They hadn’t exactly been avoiding each other prior to turning in, but he’d been on the Shifter floor. She’d been on the first, checking in with Siren and Val.

Only once she’d walked into her room and found him waiting for her did she realize how much she’d wanted him to be there. The relief had hit her so hard she’d kissed him before either of them could screw anything up with words. A kiss had turned into more, and after they were both satisfied he’d pulled her against him, his warm body curled around hers, and he’d fallen asleep.

She wished she could do the same, but her brain wouldn’t shut up. If Serenity’s taunting words weren’t running through it, Meredith’s anxiety about everything else was. After the twentieth time she tried to count sheep or think of relaxing waterfalls, she gave up and slid carefully from underneath Jensen’s arm. She grabbed her phone, slid on her bedside shoes, and crept downstairs.

She made a pot of coffee—decaf, because she and caffeine had been having racing heart problems of late—and took a cup down the hall to her mother’s old office. Jensen’s query about whether her mother had owned any other property kept nagging at her, so she dug out the file that contained the records concerning her mother’s death.

Savannah hadn’t made a will, which could have simply been lack of foresight, but which Meredith figured was more likely arrogant disbelief that she could ever die. The only final request her mother bothered to put in writing was to be buried in her mausoleum, but even that hadn’t been done in a legally binding fashion. She’d just written it out, like she expected no one would dare contradict her wishes. Meredith had taken great joy in doing just that. Cremating Savannah Townsend was the most spitefully pleasant thing she’d ever done.

She flipped through the legal papers, looking for anything useful. But everything was as she remembered. Financial information mostly, the transfer of the bank and brokerage accounts, the deed to the house and the titles on the cars. A lengthy list of charitable organizations Meredith had ignored once she’d determined they weren’t fronts for nefarious activities.

She still got letters from them all the time, reminding her of what a generous woman Savannah Townsend was, a true paragon of virtue and philanthropy, blah, blah, blah, and didn’t Meredith want to follow in her mother’s footsteps and put her fortune to good use?

She drummed her fingers on the desktop. She probably should do something with her mother’s money. No, she decided, it was her father’s money. He’d been the one to earn it and she felt less…wrong when she thought of it as his.

Money itself wasn’t good or evil. She knew that. It was what people did with money that determined the morality, but it sure as hell felt a lot less tainted when she thought of it as her dad’s. She opened her planning app and made a vague reminder for next month that read: Do something useful with excessive wealth.

There. Project Become a Better Human was at least in the planning stages. Now, if she could just pull something brilliant out of the mess of papers in front of her. She took a sip of coffee, made a face at the cold remnants, and went to get a fresh cup. She was three-quarters of the way through the hot coffee when she hit the last piece of paper in the stack and realized she was an idiot.

It was the deed for the funeral plot her mother’s mausoleum rested on. She remembered finding it hilarious when Random had gone over that with her. That it was often cheap to die, and always expensive to be dead. Really, that you had to buy a plot of land for your corpse to decompose in was bizarre.

But you did. Which meant her mother had owned more than one property. The second one had just never been intended for the living.