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observant. “What did she think?”
    Adam looked Liam’s way. “She guessed that any relative who would use her ward’s college money to buy designer clothes for her own daughter probably wasn’t very nice to Avery. Avery got married very young. Barely eighteen. She was trying to escape.”
    “Her husband was a kid from her high school. Brandon Charles,” Eve continued.
    “How was her trust set up?” Ian asked.
    Eve passed Ian a copy of the file. “It came to Avery at the age of twenty-five or if she got married. Otherwise her aunt had full control and use of the fund to raise Avery.”
    So she hadn’t married for love. She’d married to get her trust fund. Calculating. Liam would do well to remember that. “So she marries on her eighteenth birthday. I wonder if she made a deal with this Brandon kid.”
    “If she did then it involved consummation of the marriage. She had Madison Rachelle Charles eight months after they’d eloped. At that point there was roughly one million dollars left in a trust fund that should have been in the fifteen million range.” Eve shook her head. “I would have tried to save it, too. I would have found the first guy willing to marry me and run with it. The trust wasn’t very well set up, but then Avery’s aunt was a lawyer. She knew how to work the system.”
    “So the aunt sets up the trust fund in a way that she gets to use it free and clear?” That didn’t sound particularly fair. “Why would her parents do that?”
    “Her father was the last of an old-money line. He preferred his charity work over everything else. By the time the money came to him, the industry that had created the money was gone. He wasn’t a particularly good caretaker. He spent millions on various charity projects,” Alex explained. “And when it came to lawyers, he likely figured his sister-in-law was family and wouldn’t harm him. As far as I can tell, this whole group is very naïve.”
    “Tell me about the accident. The car accident,” Ian corrected. “Is there any way the aunt was involved? She had to be mad she’d lost the money.”
    They were getting off topic. Liam needed to steer it back to the case at hand. “They were driving home late one night and got into a high-speed collision with a sixteen-year-old. Brandon died instantly. The baby died a few days later. They were both on the passenger side. Avery was driving. Her spine was damaged in the accident. She was in a coma for several months. The sixteen-year-old was put on trial, but the case got tossed out over some tainted evidence.”
    She’d woken up one day and her world was gone. Liam knew how that felt. Did she wonder where they were? Did she wonder sometimes if it had all been a terrible mistake and they were out there somewhere in the world wondering why she didn’t look for them? Liam knew what it meant to not have an inch of closure in the death of a loved one.
    “Rough.” Ian leaned forward, looking at the file Adam had prepared. “So this was ten years ago? How long before she walked again?”
    Eve frowned. “She was in and out of hospitals for years. She would spend time with Brandon’s mother in the beginning, but something happened and the Charles family seems to have cut off all communications with her by the time she was twenty. I haven’t figured out why yet. She still sends flowers on her mother-in-law’s birthday, but they get sent back.”
    Avery had no one in the whole world. How had that isolation affected her? Had it turned her bitter under that seemingly sweet exterior?
    “She met Thomas Molina’s brother in her last rehab hospital,” Eve continued. “She underwent an experimental surgery two years ago after being accepted into a medical research study the year before. She was lucky. She was walking again within eight months of the surgery. She met Brian Molina last year. He was rehabbing a knee replacement at the same facility she was at. They formed a friendship.”
    “Sleeping together?”