I turned and walked back to the party. I was halfway up the stairs when I realized he was following me. As I reached the door to the ballroom, he placed one hand on it to prevent me from opening it.
“Miss Taft,” he said softly. “My son got a girl—a young girl—pregnant years ago.”
I know. I know this. I—
“But that girl,” he continued, “was not your mother.”
I whirled around to face him. He couldn’t really expect me to believe that, could he?
“Her name,” he said, “was Ana.”
f the old man hadn’t mentioned Ana by name, I wouldn’t have believed him. But the fact that he had had made me consider the possibility that he was telling the truth.
The senator didn’t knock up my mother. He knocked up her friend. If Davis Ames had spoken truly, then the man I’d helped set up tonight bore no relationship to me at all. But…
My mom had said that he was my father. The senator’s own wife had certainly seemed to believe that he was. And when I’d confronted him, he hadn’t denied it. Sterling Ames knew exactly who I was. He knew that my mother was Eleanor Taft.
If he wasn’t my father, then why in God’s name would my presence—my existence—have been seen as a threat?
I tried to think back to my conversation with the senator. I’d said that I’d been talking to my mother. I’d said that she’d told me what had happened. I’d told him that it would be a shame if a reporter found out that he’d knocked up a teenage girl.
I never actually specified which girl. That was a ridiculous thought. Why would the senator have assumed that I was talking about Ana, instead of my mom? Even if Ana was the one he’d gotten pregnant, what did that have to do with my mom or me?
Seated between Lily and Boone at dinner, I stared across the table at my mother. She was sitting to my grandmother’s left. Aunt Olivia and Uncle J.D. were to her right.
The last thing I was in the mood for right now was a formal dinner. I couldn’t stop thinking about the album I’d found from my mom’s Deb year. Ana had disappeared from the Symphony Ball pictures around the same time as my mother.
“Smoked salmon with fromage blanc and watercress.” A waiter appeared to my left and set an appetizer plate down in front of me. “Enjoy.”
Across the table, I saw a waitress doing the same.
Ana disappeared from the pictures. Ana was pregnant. I wondered if it had been a scandal. I wondered if word had gotten around, the way it had about my mother—or if, with Davis Ames interfering, Ana had simply faded away from society, with no one the wiser.
What were the chances of two teenage girls—friends—ending up pregnant at the exact same time?
I don’t even know Ana’s last name.
“You had the vegetarian option, sir?” I barely heard the waitress over the sound of my own thoughts. “Parmesan crisp with cucumber and zucchini summer salsa.”
I blinked and managed to focus just in time to see the waitress setting the plate down in front of Uncle J.D.
“I didn’t know your dad was vegetarian,” Boone told Lily, loading up his fork with a good third of his salmon.
“He’s not,” Lily replied. My ears were ringing so loudly, I barely heard her continue. “But he hates salmon.”
Hates salmon. Hates salmon. Hates salmon. Across the table, my mom said something to her sister’s husband. Uncle J.D. smiled—an easy smile, a familiar one.
My entire life, up until this year, my mother had only told me three things about my father.
She’d only slept with him once.
He hated fish.
He wasn’t looking for a scandal.
When my mom excused herself to go to the ladies’ room, I followed. Withholding information I expected, but it wasn’t like her to lie to me.
Just like it isn’t like Lillian to have turned out her own daughter. Even temporarily, even in a moment of temper.
Girls can be… complicated. Lillian’s words echoed in my mind. Family, more so. If your mother and Olivia had been closer… She hadn’t finished that thought. And months later: Olivia has a way of landing on her feet. I should have worried less about her growing up. And more about your mama.
My mom had let me think the senator was my father. She hadn’t corrected Charlotte Ames’s assumption. I could only assume the senator’s wife knew that there was a pregnancy… a young girl… and since everyone knew about my mother’s scandal…
She assumed I was the result.
I made it to the powder room door all of three seconds after it had closed behind my mom. I wasn’t even sure what I was going to say to her—what I could say to her—but as it turned out, I didn’t get to say anything at all.
My mom wasn’t the only one in the room.
Greer was standing in front of a mirror, adjusting her stomach. She must not have heard my mom come in, but she heard me. She whirled, adopting a serene Madonna with Child expression, but it was too late.
Her belly was crooked.
“Well, this is rich,” my mom said. I wasn’t sure she realized that I was in the room. I wasn’t certain that it would have mattered if she had.
“Ellie, I would prefer we keep things civil this evening, wouldn’t you?” Greer made at attempt at steering the conversation, but my mom wasn’t one to be easily steered.
“It’s ironic, is all,” my mom said lightly. “That you’ve spent this Debutante season pretending to be pregnant, and you spent ours pretending that you weren’t.”
What?
Greer adopted an expression of concern. “Are you feeling all right?” She turned to me, barreling on. “I do believe your mama might not be feeling well, Sawyer. Perhaps you should fetch—”
My mom turned around the moment she realized I was there. She must have seen something in my face, because when she met my gaze, the emotion in her own eyes shifted. We’d just made up, just cleared the air. “Sawyer…”
“Don’t mind me,” I said, feeling like I’d stumbled into some kind of twisted Debutante wonderland. “You two were just having a conversation about Greer’s fake pregnancy.”
“Why, I never!”
I humored Greer’s outrage and offered her a response. “Pardon me. It’s not Greer. It’s Mrs. Waters.” Before she could reply, I channeled my grandmother and continued. “There just never was a good time to tell you that Sadie-Grace knows you’re not pregnant.”
Greer’s poised, controlled expression never faltered. It deepened.
“Oh, give it up, G,” my mom said. “Nobody cares what kind of con you’re pulling on your poor husband.”
I cleared my throat. “Well, Sadie-Grace might.”
Greer collected herself and attempted to push past us. “I will not lower myself to your level.”
“What did my mom mean?” I asked when she was nearly to the door, “about your Debutante year?”
There was no answer—from either of them.
I turned to my mother. “Sterling Ames is not my father.” I still expected—fully expected—my mom to tell me that I was wrong, that he was, that there was an explanation.
She didn’t.
“What happened to Ana?” I said.
The name sent a virtual shock wave through the room.
“What happened to her baby?” I asked. And then I turned to Sadie-Grace’s stepmother, thinking back to what I’d just overheard. “If you were pregnant, what happened to yours?”
Three Debutantes, together in nearly every picture. White ribbons tied on their wrists, woven through their hair.
Three Debutantes.
Three pregnancies…
“Greer lost her baby,” my mom said. “Right around Christmas.”
“Ellie.” Greer let loose of my mom’s name, like it had been ripped from her throat by force.
“It was her idea, you know,” my mom said softly. She wasn’t facing me, and she wasn’t facing Greer. It was almost like she was talking to herself. “The pact.”
“Pact?” I
repeated.
Three Debutantes. Three pregnancies. The white ribbons. Senator Ames considering any truth that my mother had told me about my conception to be a threat, even though I apparently wasn’t his daughter.
“Pact,” I said again. My heart stopped beating. I wasn’t sure it would ever start up again. “I was the result of a pregnancy pact?”
left the ball and didn’t return to Lillian’s until the next morning. I spent most of the night at a bar on the outskirts of town that reminded me a bit of The Holler. If anyone thought I looked out of place in a white ball gown, they seemed to know better than to comment on it—after the first guy.
By dawn, I still hadn’t wrapped my mind around the reason that Sadie-Grace’s stepmother hadn’t wanted me asking anyone questions about my mom and the events leading up to my conception. The reason she’d insisted they barely knew each other.
She was pregnant, too.
From what I’d gathered in the chaos that had followed my mom’s revelation, the pact had been Greer’s idea—one she’d come up with after she got knocked up herself. Instead of averting her own scandal, she’d chosen to diffuse it. She’d found two other girls—girls who came from prominent families, but were a little lost, a little vulnerable.
Lonely.
Three girls. Three pregnancies. An inseparable bond. Until Christmas, when Greer had lost her baby and hung her friends out to dry.
I wasn’t an accident. Despite everything I was trying to wrap my mind around, that little tidbit might have been the hardest. My mom slept with her sister’s husband, and she got pregnant on purpose.
I’d asked my mom to tell me the truth, and this time, she had. Lily’s dad was my dad.
I’d thought that I understood who my mom was, warts and all. I’d thought I understood why she’d reacted the way she had when I’d come back here—but, no.
Now that I knew the truth, she hadn’t even tried to defend herself.
My mom slept with her sister’s husband, and she got pregnant on purpose. No matter how many times a person thought those words, they didn’t get any less twisted. I tried again as I parked my car on Camellia Court, and once more as I let myself in.
Lillian was waiting for me, wearing a robe, sitting on the porch with two cups of coffee.
I sat down next to her. In addition to her nightgown, she was wearing the infamous pearls.
She caught me looking at them and lifted the coffee mug to her lips. “Apparently, the police found them in the possession of Sterling Ames’s mistress. A present, she said. I hear he even wrote her a note.”
Campbell, on top of everything else, was an excellent forger.
“Davis Ames got the pearls back?” I asked.
She allowed her fingertips to linger on them for a moment. “Since his security obviously leaves something to be desired, he’s given them to me. For safekeeping, you understand.”
I nodded. I waited for the questions to come—about where I’d been, why I’d disappeared, how I’d managed to smudge my dress with such a unique shade of grime.
Instead, Lillian took another sip of her coffee. “Davis wanted me to tell you that his son has entered a plea.”
We’d hoped for a trial. A scandal. Maybe a conviction. Probably not. But a plea?
“Davis,” Lillian said softly, “is very good at getting what he wants.”
Translation: he’d made his son take a plea deal. Hell, he’d probably dragged the DA away from his house in the middle of the night to make it happen.
“He also mentioned something,” Lillian continued mildly, “about Sterling Ames not being your father.”
My eyes whipped up to hers—not because I was surprised she’d gone there, or because I hadn’t expected the Ames patriarch to tell her, but because I had to know for certain. “You knew.”
Maybe not about the pact. But about my real father.
“Ellie…” Lillian searched for the right words. “She was so angry after your grandfather died—with the world, with me, with her sister. Grief looks different on different people. My Liv grieved intensely, but she decided to do so alone, and when she came back from wherever it was she went that year… she was fine.” My grandmother paused. “She seemed fine, anyway. Ellie and Olivia never got along after that.” She pressed her lips together. “I should have paid attention.” Another slight, incriminating pause. “Your uncle did. He always had time for Ellie, treated her like a little sister, ran interference when Olivia or I would criticize her. It was obvious she had a crush, but I assumed it was harmless.”
“It wasn’t.” I stated the obvious, and I wasn’t just talking about my mom’s role in this. J.D. had been an adult, and she’d been seventeen years old. Like a little sister to him.
“Did you know?” I asked Lillian. I needed to hear her say it. “Did you know who my father was?” I swallowed. “Did you know my mom got pregnant on purpose?”
Silence stretched out between us.
“Not at first,” Lillian said finally. “As soon as Ellie told me she was expecting, I went into crisis management mode. There would have been a scandal, of course, but nothing we couldn’t have handled.”
I thought back to the night of the Christmas party, when my mom had told me how Lillian had planned to handle things.
“You suggested that Olivia and J.D. raise me.”
“Ellie flew off the handle.” Lillian paused, but forced herself to continue. “She said that I acted like Olivia was so perfect, and then she asked me who I thought the father was. She told me she’d gotten pregnant on purpose, and she walked right up to the edge of telling me by whom.”
“You told her to get out.”
“I couldn’t let her say it,” Lillian said. “God forgive me, I couldn’t let her say it.”
So you kicked her out before she could.
“I should have kicked him out, of course.” Lillian sounded so matter-of-fact. “But even before she’d tried to tell me who the father was, Ellie was so clear that she’d initiated. She wanted me to know that this was her doing. That you were hers.”
I wondered if that was how Greer had sold the pact to my mom, to Ana. That if they got pregnant, if they had babies, they would have someone. Someone who would love them unconditionally.
Someone who would be theirs.
“You and Lily are only two months apart, you know.” Lillian’s voice broke for the first time. “Right before Ellie came to me, defiant and triumphant and daring me to even try to take you away from her—Olivia had come to me, too.”
“She was pregnant,” I said.
Two daughters, both pregnant by the same man.
“Did J.D. know?” I couldn’t bring myself to call him Uncle now. “About me?”
“He must have,” Lillian replied in a muted voice. “But he’s never given even the slightest indication of it.”
What kind of man does that make him?
“Why did you bring me back here?” I asked. “You practically dared me to find out the truth. If you knew, if you even suspected—why would you do that?”
Lillian sat her coffee mug down. Her posture was perfect: her spine straight, her chin held just so. In profile, she looked like she was sitting for a portrait. “You’re eighteen,” my grandmother said. “Your mama kept you from me for eighteen years, and maybe that was my penance. Maybe that was what I deserved for willful ignorance, for sticking my head in the sand. But you deserved better—and so did she.”
I thought about the way that Lillian had paid Trick to hold my mom’s job. The way she’d been paying him for years.
“I needed,” Lillian said, “to make this right.”
“What about Lily?” I shot back. “And John David and—”
“I don’t know.” It was terrifying to hear the formidable Lillian Taft say those words. “If you want to leave, if you feel about me the way your mama did—I wouldn’t blame you, Sawyer. I got nine months. I got to watch you flourish here. I understand that’s likely more than I deserve.”
When I’d negotiated for an advance on my trust, Lillian had negotiated for more time. Summers, to be exact, starting with this one and extending through college. But if I walked out the door right now, I deeply suspected that my grandmother would still give me the money. Contract or no contract, amendment or no amendment, I could leave half a million dollars richer. Free.
Alone.
Maybe that would have been the right choice—not just for me, but also for Lily. Thinking my cousin’s name—she’s not just my cousin, she was never just my cousin—made me remember every moment we’d spent together, every secret we’d shared, every scandal we’d averted, every felony we’d co-committed. I thought about Walker and Campbell, about Sadie-Grace and Boone and the fact that as downright insane as the past nine months had been—I hadn’t gone through any of it alone.
“I won’t hold you to my terms, Sawyer.” Lillian forced herself to spell that out. If I wanted to leave, I could leave.
But for better or worse, I had people here. Family. I also had questions—about Ana. She was just a girl in a picture, a ghost from the past. She was the situation that Davis Ames had handled. I didn’t even know her last name. I didn’t know if she’d had the baby. I didn’t know what had happened to it if she had.
But if I stayed here, I could.
“Sawyer?” My grandmother must have seen a shift in my expression.
“A lady,” I said, “always honors her contracts.”
Lillian bowed her head. Her shoulders trembled, but when she looked up again, she’d gathered her composure. She reached across and put her hand over mine. “Bless your heart.”
his book owes a great debt to the incredible team of publishing professionals who brought it to life. Kieran Viola, editor extraordinaire, is the best advocate, sounding board, first reader, and provider of feedback a person could ask for. I am also extremely grateful to Emily Meehan, whose enthusiasm for this project from day one has been invaluable, and to the entire team at Freeform—especially Cassie McGinty, Dina Sherman, Holly Nagel, Maddie Hughes, Elke Villa, Frank Bumbalo, and Mary Mudd—for their support. A special thank-you goes out to Marci Senders, who designed the beautiful cover, and Jamie Alloy, who designed the interior art.
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