Page 95 of Inheriting Miss Fortune

I wandered idly through each room, pulling open drawers and peeking in closets to check for overlooked items.

You’re stalling.

Katie had made a lot of good memories in this house, and I’d been there for many of them. It wasn’t easy to say goodbye to the place we’d binge-watchedGilmore GirlsandTed Lasso. The place we’d taken a plaster cast of her giant pregnancy belly and joked about taking a cast of my dick at the same time to share on Grindr. The kitchen we’d destroyed with our attempt at makingchicken tikka from scratch and where we’d interrogated Renata after her first date with her boyfriend.

The place I’d brought her home to from the hospital with a tiny little Lellie-shrimp curled up in her baby bucket car seat.

When I opened the small closet in Lellie’s nursery, part of me wanted to sit down inside it and close the door behind me. Wrap my arms around my knees and sob in the darkness for all the moments Katie had lost… and all the ones Dev might still lose.

Instead, I forced myself to close the door. And that’s when I saw the hairbrush on the floor behind the dresser.

When I got to the breakfast cafe, Susanna had already gotten us a table. Her brother was there with her.

“Hey,” she said, tilting her head at Tomas. “Thought I’d bring along another smart attorney to help us figure this out.”

I gave Tomas a hug. “Thanks, man. We could use the help.”

After taking a seat and asking the server for a cup of coffee, I turned back to Susanna. “I brought a brush with Lellie’s hair. Can’t they get a sample from that? We can find another lab.”

I knew I sounded desperate, but it’s because Iwas. And I didn’t know how else to help.

Susanna reached across the table and took my hand. “First of all, yes. We can definitely try that. But I…” She hesitated as if unsure how to proceed.

“Speak freely,” I said, trying not to sound annoyed by her caution.

“Brock Lois is shady as fuck,” Tomas said. “Susanna is trying to remain professional, but fuck that. The Scotts are represented by a snake, and I wouldn’t put it past him to have fucked with the results.”

I glanced at Susanna, who appeared to agree with him. “But that’s why we got a second set of samples,” I said. “Right? I mean, how could he have interfered with both labs when one was reporting directly to you?”

Susanna let out a breath. “I don’t know. But I’ve heard of two of his cases where similar stuff has happened. So I was thinking… Is there a way you could ask Orris?”

“What, just ask if he knows if Brock Lois, the guy he probably recommended to the Scotts, is a criminal co-conspirator? In what world would he admit it to me if he did?”

Tomas shook his head. “You’d have to be sneakier than that.”

We talked through how that kind of mix-up could possibly happen when it involved two different labs, and it was Susanna who finally said, “What if it was the witness?”

I remembered the quiet man in the brown suit. A young member of Brock’s team who’d been allowed to witness the sample collection. He’d been in the room, standing unobtrusively in the corner.

“But there’s no way…” I was getting ready to say he hadn’t gotten anywhere near the samples, had only stepped forward to view the signatures on the form, watch the sample collection, and sign the witness forms afterward.

But then I remembered there’d been that moment when Lellie had tried to escape into the hall. I was pretty sure that had happenedafterthe sample collection but before the samples had been sealed. For two critical seconds, Susanna had been out of the room, and Dev and I had been distracted. The lab tech must’ve been distracted, too, since he’d gotten a lollipop for Lellie from somewhere.

Could the witness have switched the samples? How the hell was that possible? Would he have created a distraction if Lellie hadn’t provided one? Would the Scotts truly sink to that level?

Maybe. But Brock Lois definitely would.

“Okay…” I said, trying to figure out how to get the truth out of a complete stranger who definitely wouldn’t want to lose his job. I attempted a lame joke. “Which one of us is going to try and seduce the third-party witness?”

Tomas was a criminal defense attorney. He was known as a shark. When he made eye contact with me, all traces of my flirty friend were gone, and only the sharp-toothed predator remained.

“If you really want to get to the bottom of this… you’re going to lie to your boss.”

After stopping at the gym to sweat out my anger and frustration, I let myself into the cool air-conditioning of my apartment. It was quiet and clean. The modern furniture was sleek and minimalist, the way I’d always liked it.

There were no sticky handprints on my coffee table or diaper supplies stashed in several convenient locations, and there were zero brightly colored plastic objects in sight.

And it was so sterile it felt like an operating room in the world’s most boring hospital.

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