the string and begin to flip the ball at the end of the string into the cup. It hits my arm, my hand, and the cup’s rim, but it doesn’t go in. I pass it back to Sebastian. “Not my jam.”
He flips the ball into the cup the first time and grins at me. “It’s my jam, it would seem.”
I nudge him with my shoulder. “Show off.”
“I played with this exact one when I was young. It was my great grandfather’s, I think.”
I roll my eyes. “Of course it was. Everything in this place has history.”
“Which is why the task of clearing out is so hard.” He reaches back into the box and pulls out a bronze tin. Opening it, he says, “Look at these. I bet you they’re made of lead.” He holds up a toy soldier.
“Better put it back, then. You don’t want to poison us all.”
He places the soldier back in the tin and clips it closed. “Good point.”
“Now,” I say as I clap my hands together in an I mean business kind of way. “What’s next?”
“You could take that toy box up to the attic. It’s not too heavy. But first I’ll hold onto these.” He pulls the tin box with the lead soldiers out. “They can go in one of the display boxes in one of the bedrooms. I read that people love that kind of thing.”
“Gotcha.” I turn to leave when Jemima comes sailing in. Suddenly nervous to see her following my embarrassment of last night, I say, “Jemima. Hi.”
Her face lights up in a smile. “Thank you for helping with this.”
“Of course. I’m going be part of the family, after all. I want to do what I can.”
“Oh, you are sweet. I hope you’re okay following that incident last night. I thought maybe your bottom might be a little sore.”
I shake my head, my cheeks flaming. “All good. Just humiliated, that’s all.”
“Don’t be. It was nothing. I’m glad you’re okay,” she replies kindly, and if it wasn’t for the box in my arms, I’d hug her.
“Thank you. I’d better take this up to the attic.”
“Lovely,” she says to me as she turns her attention to her son. “Seb, I finally have that list of items my friend Joffrey from British Historicals said we should display.” She holds up a printed sheet.
“Wonderful. That will definitely save us some time.”
I make my way down the hallway to a flight of stairs that leads up to the attic. I clamber up, glad at least this box isn’t too heavy. When I reach the top of the stairs, I find Zara leafing through a photo album.
“Hey, Zara,” I say, embarrassed to be a little breathless after climbing the stairs with a light box.
She looks up at me, blinks, and dabs at her eyes. “Oh. Hi.”
“You okay?” I ask as I place the box with a stack of others on the floor by one of the angled walls.
“Yeah, I’m just looking at some old photos of us with Dad.”
“Can I see?”
“Of course you can. Come, sit.”
There are several photos of Sebastian Huntington-Ross Senior around the house, and of course a very large portrait of him hangs in the grand hallway, looking down on you as you walk by. Naturally. Haven’t we all got one of those in our grand hallways?
I sit down cross-legged on the floor next to her and look at the album. There are a bunch of family photos taken at Christmas one year when Sebastian must have been about ten or eleven. There are photos of them in the living room together, all dressed up in their Sunday best. I point at a particularly sweet one of Seb looking extremely cute in a shirt and tie tucked into a V-neck sweater. “He looks super proud there.”
“I bet it was something Dad said. Seb used to hang on his every word.”
“He did? I had no idea. He doesn’t talk about your dad all that much, really, only to say he was quite formal and standoffish.”
“Oh, he was that too. But if being a daddy’s boy is a thing, that would have totally been Seb. He would do anything to get our father’s attention. He studied hard and was always a bit of a Goody-Two-Shoes in my opinion. All for Daddy.” She turns the page, and I see another photo of the family together. Sebastian is gazing at his father with love in his eyes, and my heart squeezes for him—for the boy he was and the