The Price of Inheritance Read Online Free PDF Page A

under his coffee table.
    I was about to wrap it around myself when my phone started to buzz in my pocket. I reached into my coat and smiled when I saw Jane Dalby’s name on my screen. Of course she was the first to call and congratulate me, because the Dalbys were first at everything.
    During my childhood in Newport, the Dalby family lived in the much larger house, the parent house to my family’s carriage house, on Bellevue Avenue, Newport’s most famous street. “Dalby in miniature,” my grandmother used to say of our house, but it was more like Dalby in minuscule. Like most of Newport, they spent much of the year outside of Rhode Island (in the Dalbys’ case it was in Boston, overlooking the Charles), but from June to August and many weekends on either end, they were in Newport. There were two Dalby girls, very pretty and smart, with thick brown hair with blond streaks framing their faces and Irish Catholic roots. I went to Princeton with Jane, though she was a year above me, and her sister, Brittan, was a freshman when I was a junior. I told my parents I went to Princeton because they were alumni, but it was really because Jane was there. I could leave Rhode Island, but there was no way I was leaving the Dalbys.
    I pressed accept on my phone and Jane’s voice pulled me out of my reminiscing.
    â€œYou did it, Carolyn! I just heard!” Jane screamed into the phone from her palatial house in Newport. This year, she was spending the winter there with her husband, Carter, and a partially blind Labrador who won best in breed at Westminster a decade ago.
    â€œYou were so worried, but I was right, of course.”
    I smiled. She was right. Just like she’d been right when she said I should dump that prick Chris Walters at Princeton because he was cheating on me with a slutty cross-country runner who ate breakfast in a sports bra and when she said I shouldn’t dye my hair red because I would look like a lost Irish dancer.
    â€œAre you thrilled? You better be.”
    â€œI am happy,” I said, laughing. And I was.
    â€œWhat did Alex say?” Jane asked. She had gone to high school with us, too, and we’d boarded in the same dorm for the three years we had overlapped at St. George’s. I was one of two kids who lived in Newport year-round who boarded. Alex was the other.
    â€œI haven’t told him yet,” I admitted, not disclosing that I was currently doing snow angels on his rug.
    â€œBut I did have a big celebratory dinner with my colleagues and I even got a text from my mom that was three whole sentences long.”
    â€œAmazing!” said Jane, knowing full well that from my mother, not exactly a verbose or supportive woman, that was equivalent to a ten-page letter, salty tears, and a dozen roses.
    â€œNow go wake up Alex and tell him the news. He’ll flip. Love you, and congrats,” Jane said before hanging up the phone. I missed having a house full of Dalbys next door.
    I put my phone and keys on the table, took my blazer off, hung it in the hall closet, and walked over to the bedroom. Alex was covered in blankets and I could only see a few strands of hair sticking up from under the quilt, refusing to be hidden with the rest of him.
    I took my clothes off, folded them, put them on the leather armchair next to the bed, and got in next to him. He didn’t budge. It wasn’t until I put my arms around him and started tugging at his thick chest hair that he woke up.
    â€œAlex. Alex . . . ,” I whispered, trying to get him to look at me. “It sold for twelve million five hundred thousand dollars. We broke the record for a single piece of American furniture. I’m so relieved. I can’t even explain it. I can finally take a deep breath again. There is oxygen left despite what I kept telling you about fraudulent science and our impending doom. All those nights chewing my nails—my hands really—until my fingers