Page 33 of Ghostlighted
“Helaughedat me?”
“No! I didn’t— That wasn’t—” Avi pushed his glasses up and rubbed his eyes. “He said he could do better than a university. He actually had somebody he wanted tobenefit. A cousin.” He kept trying to catch my gaze, but I kept slipping the hook. “Second cousin once removed.”
That hit me square in the solar plexus. “My mom. Not me. He left everything to my mom.”
“If her name was Laura Brandon, then yes. Your last name is different, so I didn’t realize at first that you were her son.”
“She didn’t change her name when she married my dad.” The sound I made might qualify as a laugh if you’d never heard one before. “He always joked that he thought about changing his, but having two Lauras in the family would be too confusing.”
“Oren said she was the only person in their entire family who didn’t revile him when he came out, so he wanted to thank her.He left her a small bequest originally, too, although he said it had more sentimental value. Something from their childhoods, I think.”
The roaring in my ears intensified, and I had to brace my hands on my knees. I’d seen Oren’s will. Taryn showed it to me when we were finalizing probate. My mom’s name wasn’t on it.
Mine was.
I was so overwhelmed at the time, it hadn’t occurred to me what that meant, but now I connected those dots: Oren had altered the will after she died, which meant he’d known of her death, known about me, but had never reached out.
Yeah, he was suffering his own debilitating loss. But we could havehelpedeach other.Why?Why had he left me alone?
Maybe someday, if Avi’s dreams came true and Oren joined him here in ghostly communion, I could pose that question to him. While I sincerely hoped that day would come for Avi’s sake, I wasn’t all that eager for it to arrive for my own.
It was probably a good thing that ghosts weren’t punchable. At least not yet.
“Maz?” Avi’s tone was tentative. “Are you okay?”
Honestly? No. But what Oren did or did not do wasn’t Avi’s fault, particularly since he’d died three years before my parents. So I pushed myself upright and shook my hair back.
“Let’s keep going.”
We finished the circuit of our property. Avi didn’t glitch at all, although he didn’t say much. Neither did I, for that matter. It wasn’t exactly a night for cheerful banter.
By the time we reached the street again, my emotions had more or less leveled out. I pulled out my phone, just in case I’d missed a text from Ricky when I’d been having my little existential breakdown, but there was nothing.
I really wished there had been something.
“Okay.” I tucked my phone away. “It looks like you’ve got the full run of the house and yard.” I gestured to Sofia’s house. “I need to lock up next door. Want to see if you can visit the neighbors, too? You were friends with Sofia, weren’t you?”
He scoffed. “Everybodywas friends with Sofia. Or I suppose it’s more accurate to say that Sofia was friends with everybody. Her warmth was irresistible.”
“Is.”
“What?”
“Her warmthisirresistible.”
“Ah. Right.” He gazed up at the second-floor window nearest my house, which I now knew was Liam’s suite. “The only people who could resist her charm were her son’s in-laws.”
“Liam’s mother’s family, you mean? The Frosts?”
“Yes. They were… very White, if you get my drift. I was actually surprised that Susanne bucked her family’s pressure enough to marry Lorenzo.”
“She had a backbone, eh?”
“Not really. I think she was used to always getting her way, her parents were used to letting her have it, and Lorenzo was… very handsome. Then Lorenzo proved he had more business savvy than his father-in-law and took the company to whole other level.” He smiled wryly. “Apparently, for his ability to generate buckets of cash, they were able to overlook his ethnicity, although they refused to call him anything butLawrenceuntil the end.”
“I thought the company closed.”
“It did. But that was after Lorenzo died.” Avi chewed on his lower lip as he gazed up at Sofia’s house. “He had a bad heart, too. If Sofia?—”
