In just another hour, Jillian Marcus was going to watch as a team of federal agents combed through her childhood bedroom and decided what everything was worth.  Her dad had used his business to steal a lot of money from a lot of people.  Now the things he’d bought with that money would go to pay them back.

Dad did this, she reminded herself.  He’s the one who put us in this position.  It’s nobody else’s fault.

The problem with that was that her father, one-time millionaire Gordon Marcus, had fled the long arm of the law.  Probably the country too, though no one could say for sure.  Jillian’s browser history was full of Google queries about which countries didn’t have extradition treaties with the U.S.  The Maldives and Morocco weren’t legally bound to return American criminals, so maybe there.  He liked warm weather.

Wherever he was, he wasn’t within shouting distance.  She couldn’t tearfully yell at him for what he’d done to her—their—family.  What did you do when the person you were really angry with had split?

So far she had:

* Researched whether or not it would be considered theft to raid the liquor cabinet when the better vintages might be seized as assets.

* Glared at her dad’s old rowing machine that he had never used, working up a complicated way in which it was a metaphor for his abandonment.

* Tried again to call her mom, who was on yet another Caribbean trip with yet another husband and not interested in Jillian’s problems.

* Located every spare box of tissues in the house for her stepmom, Tiffani, who was taking this hard.

Tiffani was why Jillian had come back home.  She suspected she was the only one who believed Tiffani when she said she hadn’t known anything about her husband’s crooked accounting practices and insider trading.  Everyone else took one look at Tiffani’s knockout wedding ring, dyed blonde hair, and dagger stilettos and figured her for a gold-digging trophy wife who wouldn’t have known a principle if it had bitten her on her perfectly heart-shaped ass.

Jillian knew better.  Tiffani had her airhead moments, but she was a good person with a good head on her shoulders.  She was doing her best to weather the storm, but it was taking a toll on her, one that showed in the dark circles under her eyes and the sharp decline in the bright-colored fun of her wardrobe.  She didn’t deserve the dragging she was getting in the press.  Jillian was determined to do whatever it would take to make sure Tiffani got through this intact.

That was why she was here, and she had to remember that.  She hadn’t come all the way back to Sterling to cry over her raggedy old teddy bear.  And unless Mr. Bear had several ounces of gold dust stitched up with his stuffing, the Marshals wouldn’t care about him anyway.  She needed to get a grip.

Poor little rich girl, she scolded herself.  You work day in and day out with kids who sometimes don’t even have enough to eat, and you’re tearing up because you might have to watch stuff you already left behind get tossed for good?  Or because Dad turned out to be everything you always worried he was?  Time to deal.

Dealing, for lack of a better word, was arguably what she did best.  At the community center where she was a youth coordinator—“This is a classy way of saying you’re probably going to have to scrub graffiti off a bathroom wall at some point,” her boss had said when Jillian had first been hired—Jillian had a reputation for being able to stretch a dollar to its breaking point and being willing to roll up her sleeves and dive into a mess, no matter how depressing or intimidating.  There were plenty of nights when she went home and drank herself through episodes of HGTV just to watch people fixing stuff that was actually fixable, plenty more nights where she just ate mac and cheese out of the pot while staring off into space, trying in vain to decompress.  Sure, she could use a vacation, and sure, this didn’t count.  But if this didn’t count as a vacation, then it was work.  And if it was work, she could deal.

She took a deep breath.  By the time she’d finished letting it out, she felt a little better.  She went to go find Tiffani.

Tiffani, she saw with grim amusement, was adopting the mac-and-cheese-and-stare approach, only, in typical Tiffani fashion, she was doing it with Wheat Thins.  At least when she saw Jillian, a little more animation popped into her face.

“Tiff,” Jillian said, “you can’t binge on Wheat Thins.  Oreos, Netflix, sure, but not Wheat Thins.”

Tiffani bit into a cracker with a vicious snap.  “We barely have any food left in the house.  I couldn’t see what the point was of ordering more groceries when today’s my last day here, so it was either Wheat Thins or cottage cheese.”  She was trying to keep up a light tone, but her smile was crumpling a little at the edges.  She tugged the nearest box of tissues over to her.  “When do you think they’ll get here?”

“It’s not ten yet,” Jillian pointed out.  “Hopefully they’ll be here when they said they’d be here and we can just get it over with.”  She stole one of the Wheat Thins and tried to look on the bright side.  “At least it’s not like they’re plumbers and they gave you a four-hour window.”

“They could have given me a fifteen-minute window and I still wouldn’t be able to handle this without you,” Tiffani said.  She suddenly wrapped her arms around Jillian and hugged her tightly.  She’d always had a powerhouse hug, more like a real mom than a woman just nine years older than Jillian herself.  More like a real mom than anyone else Jillian had ever had.  “I’m really glad you’re here, Jilly.  It means a lot.”

“Only a complete jerk would let you go through all this alone,” Jillian said firmly.  Did that mean her dad was a complete jerk?  Probably.  Certainly the people whose retirement accounts would never be the same would say so, and she had no real ammunition to argue with them.  “We’re family.  We take care of each other.”

Tiffani stood up straighter.  “You’re right.  We take care of each other.  Do you know what I’m going to do?  I’m going to make cookies.”

With some alarm, Jillian remembered the last time Tiffani had gotten into a domestic mood.  The fire department had been very sweet about the whole thing, but...

Then she remembered the depleted pantry.  “Unless you’re going to make them out of Wheat Thins and cottage cheese—and please don’t—”

But Tiffani was already striding across the kitchen to grab the stylish ivory trenchcoat she’d left thrown over a chair.  “I’ll buy ingredients.”  She said the word like she wasn’t entirely sure what it would, in this case, mean, but that didn’t stop her from tying the jacket’s belt in a firm, decisive knot.  “And if there’s anything left over, I’ll take them to my new apartment.”

Jillian had helped her pick that out a month ago, in her first trip back, in the shaky days when it had only just become clear that there was no going back to the life they’d had before.  It was a cozy one bedroom made more spacious by its huge windows.  If it was a comedown from the Marcus mansion—and it had to be—at least it was still homey.  And Tiffani had been a hairdresser when she had met Jillian’s dad, so she wouldn’t have any of the problems silver spoon Jillian had had adjusting to the real world of budgeting and scraping the frost out of your own freezer.  She knew what she was doing.  Maybe not when it came to cooking, but at this point, it couldn’t hurt to try.  The Marshals wouldn’t let her burn the house down when they were looking forward to selling it, after all.

Tiffani swept off, leaving Jillian wanting to do something similarly productive and distracting.  She was too practical to dive headfirst into baking with an asset investigation just an hour away, but surely there would be something she could do to help.  She needed a mission.  Being there for Tiffani could only keep her mind off The Situation if Tiffani was actually there.

Should she start boxing up her things?  No, probably not.  Even if the Marshals wouldn’t care about her old toys and pinned-up movie tickets, they might care about anything they thought some wily heiress was trying to squirrel away.  Fine, then.  She wouldn’t box things up, she would just bring things out.  That would at least show that she bore them no ill will, that she intended to cooperate as fully as she could.

“First things first,” she said aloud to the cavernous emptiness of the house.  She swore she could hear her voice echo.  “I’m going to get all those damn nutcrackers.”

Her dad had adored the little wooden Christmas soldiers, even though Jillian had never in her life seen him shell and eat a nut himself.  The nutcrackers served no purpose but were scattered all over the house anyway, cluttering up every shelf and mantel.  Sometimes, with a suspiciously and, in retrospect, forebodingly wicked sense of humor, her dad had even hidden them away like Easter eggs so unsuspecting guests would open a medicine cabinet looking for aspirin and find a six-inch mini-nutcracker staring back at them instead.

Some of Jillian’s coworkers complained about the hassle of dealing with the Elf on the Shelf fad, and it always made Jillian feel like the hard-bitten veteran in some old war movie: Kid, you wouldn’t believe the shit I’ve seen.

Blue-coated nutcrackers.  Red-coated nutcrackers.  Darth Vader nutcrackers.  Jaws nutcrackers.  More nutcrackers than a ballet company.  She was amazed he’d been able to leave them behind.

Of everything in the house, they were the most unilaterally his.  Jillian, her mom, Tiffani, a parade of girlfriends and mistresses and “secretaries”... none of them had ever been able to bring themselves to do more than tolerate the toys, and most of them had actively pled for their removal.  If any assets were going to be seized because of the poisoned well of her dad’s money, the nutcrackers, in Jillian’s humble opinion, should be the first in the firing line.

So she went from room to room, gathering them up in armfuls, not even wanting to stop for a box to make the job easier.  Maybe she didn’t want it to be easy.  There was something cathartic about actually breaking a sweat hauling them around and up and down the stairs.  By the time the Marshals came, Jillian would be able to show them that at least one Marcus knew the meaning of hard work.

She was still lining them up in military-precise rows on the gold-streaked marble floor of the foyer when Tiffani came back with a bag full of groceries and slightly runny mascara.  Jillian knew without asking that she hadn’t escaped the public eye even in that short trip out, and her stomach ached with the unfairness of it.  Poor Tiff.

Tiffani went straight for the tissues, blew her nose, and then said, “What are you doing?”

Jillian wiped sweat off her brow.  “Cooperating with a federal investigation.”

“You think they’ll want those?”

“Some of them might be collectibles,” Jillian said doubtfully.  Most of what her dad had bought, he had bought because of the price tag, but for some reason, when it came to the creepy nutcracker collection, his heart had been pure.  He had bought them up with an innocent enthusiasm rather than an antique-dealer’s cunning eye.  “Mostly it just makes me feel better to be doing something.  And if they’re going to have to count and collect everything, why not make it easy for them to get Dad’s stuff first?”

Tiffani smiled.  Despite the still-red edges of her eyes, it looked genuine.  “I like the way you think.  You always know what to do.”

Did she?  It didn’t feel like it.

Jillian had spent her whole life making decisions by the WWDND method: What Would Dad Not Do?  He had dedicated his life to grabbing every dollar he could?  She would dedicate hers to non-profits devoted to helping out the underprivileged his tactics screwed over.  He’d had a string of loveless relationships?  She would wait to get serious until she found someone she unquestionably couldn’t live without.  He ran when things got tough?  She would stick it out no matter what.  He’d been selfish?  She’d be selfless... well, she’d try.

Now she could add one more thing.  He got indicted for too many white-collar crimes to count?  She would do everything she could to make things easy for law enforcement to get some of that stolen money back into the hands of the people who’d lost it.

She just wished she felt half as sure of herself as Tiffani always thought she should.  Confidence was something she had always struggled with.  As much as she didn’t want to be her father’s daughter, it had always left her wrong-footed to be such a complete alien in her own family.

Even physically!  Her dad was one of those chiseled, flinty-eyed men who looked, even in his sixties, like he should have been captaining a yacht, and he had married and dated a string of glamorous, model-slim women with sleek hair and flawless fashion sense.  Jillian didn’t look anything like any of them, not even her mother.  Where they were gazelles, she was... she couldn’t think of a flattering animal.

They were delicate and doll-like, and Jillian had always been anything but.  Her body was all generous curves—arguably too generous.  Years of self-defense training—the women’s shelter she volunteered for required its regulars to attend five sessions, and Jillian had just kept on going—had made her strong and honed beneath the soft roundedness.  But nothing, seemingly, could take away her voluptuousness.  Her mom had always clucked her tongue at Jillian whenever she saw her; had always moved the bread basket away from her hand at restaurants.

She’d never forget what her mom had said to her when the divorce proceedings first started.  Lila Marcus had come over with her Louis Vuitton luggage and loaded up what was important to her.  Even as young as she’d been, Jillian had known that didn’t include her, but she’d trailed her mom from room to room anyway, hopeful of some kind of acknowledgment or sentimentality.

For a moment, she’d thought she was getting it.  Her mom had found her honeymoon gift earrings, these delicate silver spirals threaded with pearls, and held them up.

“These,” she’d said, “were from back when your father knew how to give gifts, back when he still gave a damn what people thought of him.  Custom-made, Jillian, from my own drawings, and he did it as a surprise.  His second wife will never get that effort out of him.  But I can afford to leave them.  Bryce will buy me something better.”

She’d laid them back in the jewelry box just as Jillian said, “Then can I have them?  They’ll always remind me of you.”

“Oh, honey,” her mom had said.  “I just think they won’t look right with that chubby little face of yours.”  She’d pinched Jillian’s cheek.  “But maybe you can slim into them one day.”

Not a great recipe for self-esteem.

It had taken years, but Jillian liked herself.  She liked her body.  She liked her ethics.  She liked her choices.  Defining herself against her parents had made her into someone she could respect.

But here she was, twenty-six years old, with no more parents around to push against and with only Tiffani to support her.  She felt adrift.  A little bit more of that about-to-cry feeling started to tighten up her throat.  Nope.  Not going to happen.

She was saved by the scent of baking cookies drifting out of the kitchen.  Huh.  Tiffani’s baking was actually working out.  Maybe there was hope for them after all.

Okay.  She could do this.  She just had to take it one nutcracker at a time.