Waiting to see if I would go public.
He hadn’t even tried to approach me, but apparently had no qualms whatsoever about throwing Nick under the bus, just in case.
“Maybe they arrest me again, maybe they don’t. Either way, it’s none of your concern, Miss Ames.”
“You need to listen to me,” Campbell insisted.
He was already brushing past her.
“I know why you’re here,” Campbell called after him.
Nick turned, annoyed. “I’m here because you sent me a note suggesting that my brother’s continued care was contingent on me coming.”
That was the first confirmation I’d gotten that Campbell was the anonymous donor paying for Colt Ryan’s treatment. Did you sell the pearls to pay for it? Or just natter away to your grandfather and ask him for a favor?
Our grandfather.
“I’m not talking about why you’re here tonight,” Campbell—my sister—said down below. “I know why you got a job at the club, why you pursued a relationship with me in the first place.”
There was a beat of heavy silence.
“You don’t know anything.”
“I know that the police never found the car that hit your brother. I know there was an event at Northern Ridge that night. I know that a lot of people weren’t in any shape to drive.”
The implications of what Campbell was saying sank in slowly. She’s implying that the person who put Nick’s brother in a coma was coming from Northern Ridge.
“I know,” Campbell continued softly, “that your brother used to have a dog named Sophie.”
hich one what?” Mackie felt ridiculous even saying the words, but he persevered, squared his shoulders, and shot the boys a very hard look.
“Which sister,” Nick clarified helpfully. “I understand Walker has two of them.”
The newcomer presumably named Walker ignored both Nick and Mackie and turned to the holding cell. His gaze flitted briefly over three of the girls, then lingered on the fourth. The well-mannered one.
“I got your note, Lily.”
“What note?” Mackie pressed in the silence that followed.
“You four sent him a note, too?” That question—from Nick—was aimed at the one he’d come to see. Sawyer.
“I am going to need to see these notes,” Mackie insisted.
Walker turned toward Mackie, who noticed for the first time that one of the boy’s eyes was black-and-blue. It looked like he’d gone to some effort to cover the bruising, but it was visible if you looked.
Mackie’s instincts buzzed. Notes. Bruises. Hadn’t one of the girls said something earlier about accomplices?
“I’m going to need to see some ID,” Mackie told the visitors gruffly.
“And I,” Walker replied, “am going to need to place a call to the family attorney.”
o arrests. No news. No sudden realizations. In the month since Casino Night, every morning had started exactly the same way. I checked the news for mention of Nick’s name—and the names of every single member of the Ames family.
Excluding my own.
I hadn’t gone back to volunteering when the senator’s office had reopened in the new year. I’d barely seen Walker or Campbell. Most days, instead of thinking about them, I found myself thinking about Nick, about what the Ames family—my family—had done to him.
Campbell had framed him. The senator had pressured the DA to reopen the case. Was that all?
Enter my new obsession. In addition to going back over the conversation I’d overhead between Campbell and Nick a thousand times, I’d started a new volunteering gig. Three days a week, I worked at the last nursing home we’d visited during Food, Coats, Comfort, and Company.
Colt Ryan was still a patient. If his brother had been to see him, it hadn’t been when I was volunteering. Yet.
“What did you bring me?” Estelle—she of the fondness for the good stuff in romance novels—was my self-appointed greeter when I walked in the front door. “Valentine’s Day is coming up. Chocolate?”
I shook my head. I’d come empty-handed today. Estelle found that a matter of some concern.
“Pretty girl like you,” she said, “you should have the boys knocking down your door and drowning you in chocolate. A beau or two never hurt anyone.”
I tried to decide how to best and most diplomatically say finding out exactly what kind of man my biological father is has only confirmed my belief that anyone interested in hooking up with a teenage girl is supremely not worth hooking up with. Also: the last time someone tried to kiss me, it turned out he was my half-brother.
I settled for “I should probably put out more.”
Estelle chortled gleefully, the way I’d known she would. I was fairly certain she’d played the high-society game with the best of them in her time, but she’d clearly given up proprieties a few years back.
“I’m going to hold you to that,” she swore. “Starting now.” For an old woman, she moved surprisingly quickly.
One second I was facing Estelle, and the next she’d turned me forty-five degrees, placed both hands on the small of my back, and shoved. I got a face full of gray T-shirt before I realized that the person wearing the T-shirt was Nick.
He reached out to catch me automatically, and my mind went immediately to the first time we’d met, when I’d nailed him with the car door and reached out to steady him.
I was wearing my own clothes today—non-Lillian-approved ones—and it took a second for recognition to hit him.
If you knew who I really was, who I’m related to, you’d toss me right out that door.
He dropped his hands to his sides, and I cleared my throat. “Can we talk?”
“Talking. That’s what we called it back in my day, too,” Estelle said knowingly. “You treat her right, young man.” She waggled her finger at Nick. “And next time,” she called after us, “I want chocolate!”
I assumed the two of us would end up in his brother’s room, but Nick led me outside to the stone garden instead.
“What?” he said simply.
The last time I’d seen him, he’d asked me to keep my mouth shut. I had. He didn’t know I’d overheard his conversation with Campbell. From his perspective, we were essentially strangers. What could I possibly have to talk to him about?
“Is silent staring what passes for polite conversation for you high-society types these days?” Nick asked.
I responded by removing from my pocket an object that I’d carried with me for the past month: a heart-shaped tag that said Sophie.
“Where did you get this?” Nick’s voice wasn’t neutral anymore. His face wasn’t, either. “Did Campbell put you up to this?”
“Campbell doesn’t know I’m here. She also doesn’t know that I’m her illegitimate half-sister.” I hadn’t planned to let him in on that little secret—just like I hadn’t told Walker or Campbell—but I needed him to listen. When in doubt, take ’em off guard. “And in answer to your question: I stole that tag from Campbell’s locker at the club months ago. I had no idea what it meant.”
“But you do now?”
No. I knew it had something to do with his brother. I knew that when Campbell had mentioned Sophie’s name a month ago, he’d responded with shock, and once he’d gotten over the shock, he’d gotten in her face and demanded that she “tell him.”
He hadn’t specified what.
“I know that it matters,” I said. I could see the muscles in his shoulders tensing.
“Why can’t your family leave me the hell alone?”
I would never get used to the Ames family being referred to as mine.
“I’m the reason the senator wanted to open the case back up, Nick.” Confession was supposedly good for the soul. “I’m the reason he’s desperate to control the narrative in the press. If you’ve ever wondered what a scandal in human form looks like—it’s me.”
I wasn’t just the product of an affair. I was the product of an adult man’s affair with a teena
ge girl. After six weeks of silence on my part, the senator had to suspect that I planned on keeping my mouth shut, but he couldn’t have been sure.
I still wasn’t sure.
“I don’t know what’s going on with you and Campbell,” I admitted, scanning Nick’s face, “but I know it has something to do with what put your brother in that coma.”
Nick took a step toward me, then hesitated. I waited, knowing that he didn’t owe me anything. If anything, I owed him.
“Not what put my brother in the coma, Ms. Scandal,” Nick said finally, his voice low. “Who.”
hen I got back to Lillian’s house, I did something that I hadn’t done once since the night of the masquerade. I pulled up the Secrets on My Skin website. The most recent entry—Campbell’s—stared back at me.
He made me hurt you.
He as in the senator? You as in Nick? The story the latter had told me fresh in my mind, I scrolled back to the very first Secrets post and looked at the date.
“One does not wish to question your life choices,” Lily said from behind me. “However…”
“However,” I suggested, “this one involves you?”
In the photo I’d just pulled up, my cousin was wearing nothing but a threadbare towel. The words inscribed on her chest, just under her collarbone and above the edge of the towel, were: I am broken inside.
“How long after Walker broke up with you did you post this?” I asked. I had a theory about why Lily had started this blog—why she’d needed to.
Lily ran one finger lightly over the picture. “One week.”
I reverse engineered the timeline in my mind: A week before Lily had posted this entry, Walker Ames had broken up with her. He’d dropped out of college. He’d started going out of his way to make sure that people didn’t see the golden boy when they looked at him.
Two days before that, an unidentified car had plowed into Colt Ryan.
The details Nick had given me were bare-bones: His brother had gotten ill and left work early. He’d had to walk from the club to the bus stop.
Almost the entire two-mile stretch was owned by Northern Ridge.
I know there was an event at Northern Ridge that night, Campbell had said. I know that a lot of people weren’t in any shape to drive.
Nick had taken over his brother’s job because he’d believed the person responsible for the accident was coming from that party. He’d wanted to find the SOB who’d left his brother, half-broken, on the side of the road.
He’d believed that the police couldn’t be trusted to do it.
When Campbell had flirted with him, he’d responded with the hope of gleaning some information about the party that night.
“Two days before Walker broke up with you…” I forced myself to focus on the here and now, on Lily. “Did you go to an event at the club?”
“What is going on with you?” Lily frowned.
“Just think,” I told her. “Two days before Walker broke up with you.”
Lily didn’t have to think very hard. “The wedding.”
“What wedding?” I could feel my pulse start to tick upward.
“Sadie-Grace’s father’s,” Lily said.
Greer’s, my mind amended. I tried to fit this information into what I already knew—and what I didn’t.
“Was Walker at the wedding?” I asked. “Was Campbell?”
The questions must have seemed random to Lily, but she answered—in the affirmative.
Lots of people were there that night, I told myself—but lots of people hadn’t begun a downward spiral almost immediately thereafter. Lots of people hadn’t leapt into a physical relationship with the hit-and-run victim’s brother—and then framed him for theft.
Lots of people weren’t paying for Colt Ryan’s care.
“Tell me what you’re thinking, Sawyer Ann.”
I met my cousin’s deep brown eyes. I told her what Nick had told me—and then I spelled out exactly what I was thinking.
“I’m guessing that either Campbell or Walker was driving that car.”
“You’re jumping to conclusions,” Lily said immediately.
“Colt Ryan had a dog named Sophie,” I responded. “Nick said that her collar broke that morning. Colt took it to work to fix it.” I held Lily’s gaze in my own. “After the hit and run, the collar was nowhere to be found, but somehow, the tag ended up in Campbell’s locker.”
Maybe that was a coincidence. Maybe Walker’s downward spiral was nothing more than a pre-college meltdown.
“Sawyer.” Lily stared down at her hands.
“What?”
Lily took long enough to reply that I wasn’t sure she was going to. “When Campbell started blackmailing me,” she said faintly, “I wondered how she figured out I was the one behind Secrets. Why she cared who was posting.”
“What does that have to do—” I started to ask, but I cut off when Lily left the room.
When she returned, she was holding the tablet she’d used for Secrets tight with both hands. She sat down beside me, then quietly pulled up the queue—the posts she hadn’t gotten around to publishing.
“What if the reason Campbell wanted to figure out who was behind Secrets was because there was a secret she didn’t want to get out?” Lily pressed her lips together. “I remember all of the submissions I got. Every one.” She pulled up a picture in the queue and turned the tablet toward me.
In this particular shot, she was lying prone, her back arched and her hands digging into what appeared to be sand. Her head was thrown back and chopped out of the shot. The message was vertical, starting on one arm and continuing on the other.
I was driving.
In isolation, that sentence seemed benign. But knowing what we knew…
“You think Campbell sent this secret in and then regretted it?” I asked Lily. “Or do you think…”
Do you think it was Walker?
“I don’t know,” Lily said quietly. She straightened, her chin jutting out. “I do know that we can’t sit here all day asking questions we have no way of answering.”
“Wanna bet?”
“I’m sure you haven’t forgotten what this afternoon is,” Lily replied, which, of course, meant that she was sure I had. “We have our second-to-last Deb event, excepting the ball.”
My first instinct was to tell her where she could shove that reminder—and the event—but my next instinct was more mathematical. Deb event = mandatory attendance. Mandatory attendance = Campbell’s presence.
Campbell’s presence = answers.
“I can honestly say,” I told Lily, “that I’ve never found myself so motivated to attend a party in my life.”
“Not a party.” Lily wasn’t a person who smirked, but she came very, very close.
I didn’t trust that expression. “What are we doing?”
She rose to her feet and turned before answering. I could only make out one word, and that word…
Was spa.
f there was a phrase more perfectly designed to drive fear into my heart than Spa Day, I hadn’t heard it yet. Fifteen minutes in, I wasn’t sure which was more horrific: the fact that this particular event was set to last all afternoon and well into evening, or the fact that I was going to be spending a disturbing amount of that time sans clothing.
“Relax your face.” The order came accompanied with pressure from the thumbs of the “specialist” under both of my eyes. “You are carrying too much stress.”
I was naked, my legs were wrapped in seaweed, and the concoction this woman was about to apply to my face was bubbling. I would have been stressed without having phrases like hit and run, cover-up, and coma bouncing around my head.
I was driving.
“Blink!”
The exclamation mark on the end of that order seemed to suggest that I was supposed to blink with a vengeance.
“Open!”
I opened my eyes. The next thing I knew, steady hands were working themselves like five-legged spiders down my cheekbo
nes. Another girl might have found this experience relaxing.
“Close!”
“Have you ever heard,” I asked the specialist through gritted teeth, “of a medieval torture device known as the pear of anguish?”
My oh-so-charming conversational skills did not get me out of the facial. They also did not get me my clothes back. I did, however, earn a trip to the hot rock sauna. Since this was supposed to be a bonding activity—a Debutante-only “girls’ day” in advance of our “big day”—the sauna wasn’t private.
I recognized the Debs sitting there when I arrived, but didn’t know them well enough to even consider shedding the towel. I kept half an ear tuned to their conversation as I forced myself to sit and allowed my brain to cycle back to the information playing in my memory in a solid loop.
Somebody was driving the car that hit Colt Ryan. Somebody submitted that secret. Somebody—most likely Campbell, unless she lied to get Nick to meet with her—is paying for Colt’s care. Campbell got Sophie’s tag somewhere. She kept it for a reason.
Just like Campbell had stolen my grandmother’s necklace for a reason. Just like she’d blackmailed Lily and framed Nick for a reason…
The door to the sauna opened. I half expected it to be Sister Dearest herself, but instead, Sadie-Grace stuck her head in. She smiled when she saw me, then took up a position to my left.
“Saunas make me nervous.”
I glanced sideways at the other girls. I could sit here, waiting for answers to come to me—or I could look for them myself.
“How would you like to go on a mission?” I asked Sadie-Grace.
She frowned. “The kind where you convert people?”
“Not exactly.”
There were six semiprivate saunas at Omega Wellness and Spa. We found Campbell in the fifth. Lily was already in there with her. I shot a brief look at my cousin, and she gave a subtle shake of her head.
She hadn’t started the interrogation yet.
There were two other Debs sitting nearby. “There’s room for you,” I told them, “in sauna two.”
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