Billionaire's Second Chance (Billionaires #16) - Jennifer Hartley Page 0,29

giant voids in their souls. I may have been one of the most neglected and uncared about kids in town, but I was also the most spoiled with “stuff.” I guess my parents thought that if they just bought me everything, it would absolve them of the guilt of being shit parents and would also look good to the neighbors. All of my life, from my early childhood up until my senior year in high school, when I was finally able to leave, I had everything that I wanted—except love.

“Wow,” Clara whispered as she looked around. “There’s a lot of stuff in here to go through.”

She was right. The huge house had more contents than a department store.

“Here’s the thing,” I said. “I don’t want any of this crap. So all I need to do is box it up and call a junkyard or charity to come to pick it all up.”

“Are you sure that you don’t need to sort through any of it?” she asked.

I guess that I did maybe want to look back up in my old bedroom real quick. When I left home, I remembered having literally run out of the house the minute the clock dinged midnight on my eighteenth birthday. That was the moment that I was finally free from my parents and the night that I took a bus as close as I could get to the Wiley’s farm and then walked the rest of the way there. I remembered showing up at their farmhouse at two o’clock in the morning and knocking on the door with a smile on my face. Scott had been expecting me, and we spent the night drinking beer and talking about what we were going to do with our lives until his parents woke up in the morning and told us to get some sleep. I didn’t take anything from my house with me that night. I just wanted to get away.

But now that I stood there, thinking about it, I did remember a few things that I had left behind, things from my childhood that had helped me survive those years of cowering in my room and waiting for my parents to sober up.

Clara and I walked upstairs, and when we walked into my old bedroom, I was shocked to see that everything in there was just as I had left it as well. I thought for sure that my parents would have gotten rid of all my stuff and turned the room into an office or something. But no—it looked exactly like it had the night that I had left. I walked over to my bed and reached down to pick up the stuffed dog that I had slept with every single night. He was worn and raggedy, but I didn’t care. I held him up to my chest and closed my eyes, and breathed in his familiar old scent. I was sure Clara was probably staring at me like I was nuts.

“See?” her gentle voice said just before I opened my eyes again. “Aren’t you glad we came upstairs to look?”

I smiled at her and tucked the dog under my arm. “I guess it wouldn’t hurt to sort through a few of the rooms,” I conceded. “But then I’ll call the junk company and schedule a pickup for tomorrow.”

The estate attorney had given me a key, and there was a lockbox on the front door now, too, so I could leave it in there for the junk company. When we left here tonight, I could finally know that it was the last time I would ever set foot in this place.

We took our time slowly going through things in my bedroom, and then we went into my parents’ bedroom to sort through things there, too. I hadn’t wanted to even walk into that room, but Clara convinced me that most people kept their most important possessions in the bedrooms of their house, so if we were only going to sort through one other room, the bedroom would be the place to do it. We sat in the middle of the floor together with piles of things around us that she had dragged out of the closets. All of this stuff was disgusting to me. Even being inside of this room was disgusting to me. So many terrible memories came flooding back into my head. This was the room that my parents had spent most of their time in. I guessed they figured that since it