“Holy. Crap.” I read that paragraph three more times just to make sure I’m not dreaming. But it’s right there in black and white. The Drakes want me so far away from their precious son that I’m not allowed to contact him at all. “Invented in the future?” I sputter as my famous temper ignites. “Who knows what future ways there might be for me to get at your fortune! Robots? Attack drones?”

“Charli, don’t read it,” he begs.

But now I have to. I skim the whole damn thing, and it’s horrifying. “There’s a paragraph whereby I agree never to give a quote to a journalist about any member of the Drake family, living or dead. There’s one where I agree never to supply my likeness to any news organization for any purpose. So I guess if I win MVP this year, we can’t take a photo?”

Wow. That’s just mean.

On one level, I know this isn’t really about me. But it’s still cruel. These people want to write a fat check and then erase me from their son’s orbit. “This doesn’t even make sense. I could never comply with—” I wave the papers around. “—this atrocity. Do they even care that we work in the same building?”

“They don’t,” he says in a low voice. He parks his ass on the sofa, then plants his elbows on his knees and buries his forehead in his palms. “You know this isn’t personal, right?”

I make an angry noise. I do know what he’s saying, but this isn’t my first brush with crazy rich people. “They’re terrified of me,” I say, as the realization dawns.

I’m not sure how I feel about that. I spent my teenage years trying to become so fearsome that I could incinerate everyone who’d bullied me with a single glance. I learned how to fight. I learned how to support myself, even in some pretty grim ways.

I learned how never to take any bullshit from anyone. And definitely never to cry. I thought by now I knew a lot about how the world worked, and maybe I do.

But I’ve always been an outcast. The kid from the wrong side of the tracks who won a sports scholarship to the same prep school Neil’s sister and ex-girlfriend attended. The girl nobody ever brought home to meet the parents. I’d been cast in that role since I was fifteen, and after a while, it wears on a person.

“This is not about you,” Neil says quietly. “It’s actually about my mother.”

“Wait, what?” I’m totally lost. “Your mother?”

“Yup. It’s an old family rift. Uncle Harmon always thought my mother was a gold digger, and my father was an idiot for marrying her.”

I try to make sense of that. “Because she wasn’t rich, too?”

“Possibly. She was also twenty-five years younger than my father, and his second wife. My uncle doesn’t need reasons to dislike people, though. He doesn’t trust anyone. He never liked my mom, and ever since my father died, it’s worse.” He rubs his handsome chin. “He controls my mother’s inheritance. Hers and Paisley’s.”