CHAPTER 54: GRAYSON

After discovering the photographs and withdrawal slips in Savannah’s safe-deposit box, Grayson tries to focus only on the slips and avoid processing what Sheffield Grayson’s lifelong surveillance might mean. When a bank employee says the box must be returned before its owner can leave, Grayson arranges for a briefcase and exits the bank with the contents.

The hotel valets deliver the Ferrari, and Grayson sits in the bank parking lot with the briefcase out of reach. Grayson knows he should have left the photographs behind, but the thought that Sheffield watched him his whole life breaks through his control.

Grayson drives onto the highway and is tempted to push the Ferrari past a hundred miles per hour. Memories of Tobias Hawthorne’s expectations and the lie that Grayson was destined to be heir intensify Grayson’s anger, because Tobias had already written the family out of the will before Grayson was born. Grayson wants to silence those thoughts and act recklessly, but his conditioning and sense of responsibility stop him.

Grayson pulls onto the shoulder and struggles to breathe until Nan calls. Nan immediately knows something is wrong because Grayson answers differently than usual. Grayson denies it, then asks whether Skye took pictures of him as a child or could have sent any to Sheffield; Nan says Skye only took pictures when it suited her and doubts Skye sent them to Grayson’s biological father.

Nan tells Grayson to come home, but the conversation shifts when Grayson mentions Nash’s ring. Nan then reveals the real reason for her call: Xander asked her to search Tobias’s files from the List. Nan has found the file Grayson needs, tied to a man named Thomas Thomas, whose only patent Tobias bought a minority stake in. The file also contains a receipt for flowers sent to Thomas Thomas’s funeral, and Grayson suspects the name may be code as he asks whether the file mentions a daughter.