Adore You | ✔

Chapter 84

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Chapter 84

Maria III

The day of my family's summer dinner was when I realized Lia wasn't just my soulmate. She was my brother's too.

That was also the day that everything started to fall apart.

I woke up that day, missing my dad. It happened less and less these days, and that scared me. I called Lia and asked her to come to my family's dinner. I knew I could probably convince Lana to come, but I felt sad, and I wanted Lia around.

As the house staff got my house ready for dinner, I decided to sneak into my dad's study.

I went down the servant staircase and through the false wall like I usually did and tiptoed down the stairs to his desk. I crawled underneath and felt the floorboards for the loose one. Then used a bobby pin I had in my hair to pry it off the floor. I picked up the stack of pictures he had and leafed through them, my eyes watering as I did. Then I saw it, sticking out of the corner, hidden underneath some filing folders and a rusty safety deposit box—a journal.

'I thought I had gone through everything in here,' I thought to myself and bent over, sticking my hand into the hole in the floor. It was stuck. I wiggled it gently to try to coax it out. I didn't want to damage the leather cover. Finally, it came loose.

It looked like all of my dad's other journals. He had given me most of them when he was diagnosed. I put the floorboard back in its place, sat at his desk, opened it up, and started reading it.

It was strange. In this journal, my father talked a lot about the coffee business. Plans he apparently had for it—plans he never told us about. Then he spoke a lot about Robbie. I flipped through it, trying to find myself. I was so focused I didn't hear my brother open the door.

"What are you doing? How did you even get in here?" He asked, and my head snapped up. I closed the journal quickly.

"I was just reading."

"You were reading? Since when do you read?" he asked, incredulously.

"I like some books," I said, annoyed.

"Okay," He said slowly, not expecting me to respond so aggressively, "What book were you reading?"

He came up to me, and I shoved the journal onto my lap, hiding it beneath the desk.

I wasn't fast enough.

"Wait, is that one of Dad's journals? Where did you find that?" He asked. His green eyes narrowed.

"On a bookshelf," I lied.

"Liar," He said, frowning. "Well, let's read it together," he said, pulling up another chair.

"Aren't you with Abigail? It's rude to ignore your guests. What would Misses Manners say?" I asked.

"Abigail will be fine," he said dismissively. "Come on, we had fun reading the other ones; read it out loud."

I didn't want to. The whole journal sounded very much out of character; Dad spoke about the business as if it was our family's destiny. As if it was his life's opus.

It just seemed so—weird.

Dad hated the business. He would tell me all the time that I could give it a try when he was gone, but that if I didn't like it to just sell it and 'damn whatever your grandparents say.'