was embarrassing. A person could probably buy a modest house with the money represented so frivolously in these boxes. But Billy took it all in with wide eyes and never offered any comment or judgment. The to be donated stack grew higher and higher.
There were boxes of technical books, business books, old files and papers belonging to my father, and some papers of my own. I immediately taped those up and moved them to a separate area to go over later, dreading questions from my curious gardener. But Billy never asked about them.
It wasn’t that I didn’t trust him. Though Emmanuel’s warnings never completely left my mind, they were only a faint whisper. It was more that . . . well . . . Billy liked me for me, not for being Sebastian Montgomery IV, Fortune 500 heir. I wanted to hold on to that anonymity for as long as I could.
“Football, huh?”
Billy had just opened a new box. I recognized its contents. Father must have packed it up from my old room years ago. I went over and sat beside Billy on the attic floor, a smile on my face. On the top was my high school football jersey. God, that had once been one of my proudest possessions. It was red and gold with the number 46 on the back. Next to it, face up, was a framed photo of me on the field in my uniform, in that classic footballer pose—kneeling on one knee with the other raised at a ninety-degree angle, foot on the ground, cupping a football. The cocky grin on my face said I had the world on a leash.
Guess I did. Only the world is an unpredictable place.
“Holy crap, you’re so young and handsome in this. If you’d gone to my high school, I would have been swooning over you like a Victorian damsel.”
“Yeah?” I asked, raising one eyebrow.
“Hell yeah.”
He reached for the photo, and I let him take it. Underneath was my all-state trophy and it had my name, Sebastian Montgomery, etched on it. I quickly took it out and put it to one side, face down. But Billy was still looking at the photo.
“You were a superstar, I take it.”
I flushed, then realized he just meant on the football field. I cleared my throat. “Yeah. I was pretty hardcore into sports in high school.”
“Where’d you go to high school?”
I hesitated. “A private school on Long Island.”
“Did you like it?”
I thought about that. “Sometimes. I liked playing sports there. But my dad and I traveled a lot, so I thought I was too mature for that school. I thought I was the shit.”
“That would be accurate,” Billy said, waving my football picture as if that were proof.
I dug around under my football jersey and found the framed photo I’d hoped was there. It was of me and my father after a game. He had his arm around my shoulder and we were both smiling at the camera. He looked so happy and proud.
“My father loved coming to my games. He was an incredibly busy man, but he never missed a single one.”
Billy got a kind of constipated look. “Is he . . . I mean . . . you sound so sad.”
“He died about two years ago,” I admitted. The words were easy enough to say, but hearing them out loud still hurt.
“Oh. That must have been so hard. I can’t imagine losing one of my parents.”
I frowned down at the picture. “I don’t actually remember it. It was one of the things that happened during my blank spot.”
“Your blank spot?”
I gripped the frame so hard, it was a wonder the glass didn’t crack. “I don’t remember my car accident. Or the three months before. The last memory I have is of my twenty-eighth birthday party. When I woke up from a coma in the hospital, I thought it was the day after my birthday. I couldn’t figure out what the hell was going on.”
Billy rubbed my back. It did help, grounding me in the here and now when my thoughts wanted to fly to those very dark times. “Oh, man. So you were still really injured when you found out about your dad? Talk about a double whammy.”
I sighed. Yeah, it had been brutal.
“They didn’t want to tell me at first. But I kept asking for my dad, because it was always him and me, you know? And I knew if I were in the hospital, he’d be there. So eventually