“Are you implying that time spent with me is a punishment, John?” Aunt Olivia only called him by his first name when she was annoyed.
“They’re eighteen, Liv. Almost nineteen.”
“I’m always Liv when you want something,” Aunt Olivia said quietly.
“God forbid I try to talk to you like—”
“Like I’m her?”
I’d only heard them fight once before, about some kind of money problem.
Like I’m her. Like I’m her. Like I’m her. Aunt Olivia’s words repeated on a loop in my head. Who was she talking about? Did she think he was having some kind of affair? Or worse, had she found out what he’d done with my mother?
“Keep your voice down, Olivia.” J.D. followed his own advice, lowering his volume so much that I had to strain to hear him, even though they were standing right next to the window now.
“So I’m Olivia again?”
The question was met with silence—and then the sound of footsteps.
“Where are you going?” she called after him.
This time, my “uncle” actually answered his wife’s question, his words shot through with an emotion I couldn’t quite peg. “I’m going to the lake. If you’re going to keep the family home, someone has to check on the boats.”
.D. still wasn’t back the next morning when Aunt Olivia, Lily, and I left for Greer’s shower.
“Smile, Sawyer,” Aunt Olivia instructed me as she rang the doorbell. “You’re such a pretty girl when you smile.”
“She’s right,” a voice said from the bushes. “You are.”
I jumped and turned to see Campbell’s cousin—and Sadie-Grace’s boyfriend—three-quarters covered in shrubbery.
“Boone Mason,” Aunt Olivia exclaimed. “Is that you?”
That was clearly a rhetorical question, but Boone didn’t let that stop him. “Yes, ma’am.”
“What are you doing in the bushes?” Lily asked, putting a finer point on her mama’s question.
“Moral support,” Boone replied solemnly. “No men allowed inside, but the bushes are more of a gray area.”
“Go on with you,” Aunt Olivia told him, but she was smiling.
Before I could tell Boone that nobody considered the landscaping a “gray area,” Sadie-Grace opened the front door. She greeted us, sounding like a mix between a robot and a pageant girl. “Hello! We’re so happy you could make it. Please come in.”
“Don’t mind me,” Boone stage-whispered. “I’ll just be out here, moral-supporting.”
Sadie-Grace’s feet settled themselves into fifth position, and I considered the fact that she might actually need Boone here—bushes and all. “Please,” she repeated, maniacally cheerful. “Come in!”
I’d never been to a baby shower before, but based on what I’d seen in movies, I’d assumed there would be finger foods and an overuse of pastels. What I got was a trained waitstaff serving petits fours and champagne. They offered the latter mixed with “just a smidgen of peach nectar” for those in the mood for a Bellini, or with a “healthy helping of white-peach punch” for those of us too young to drink.
And those of us faking pregnancies.
Greer made a show of taking a teeny, tiny sip from her crystal flute as she mingled. “Olivia, it’s so good to see you. Lily, honey, that dress is just darling.”
I could not help but notice that Sadie-Grace’s stepmother didn’t comment on my dress. Perhaps her ironclad sense of self-preservation was warning her that the only thing keeping me from blowing this whole charade to smithereens was discretion, which she probably suspected—correctly—was not my forte.
“Miss Olivia.” Campbell approached us and greeted my aunt with her sweetest smile. “We’ve been missing y’all up at the lake.”
Campbell and I had talked exactly once in the past two weeks. I’d caught her up on Ana’s relation to Victoria and the fact that Ana had been estranged from their family for years. Based on the texts Cam had sent me since then, I was fairly certain she’d spent most of her free time trying to track Ana Sofía Gutierrez down online.
To no avail.
“Campbell.” Aunt Olivia gave her a side hug. “Is your mama here, sweetie?”
“Mama sends her regrets,” Campbell lied smoothly. She turned to Sadie-Grace. “I’d just love to see the nursery.” She gave me a look so pointed it could have pierced ears. “Wouldn’t you, Sawyer?”
She knows something, I thought.
“We’d all love to see the nursery,” Lily said before I could reply. Given that she hadn’t figured out the roof trick yet, I could only assume that she was dying to get away from her mama.
“After I show y’all the nursery,” Sadie-Grace said as she led us through the party and up the stairs, “you three can help me practice my toast. I’m the hostess. I have to toast Greer and the baby.”
“The baby,” I emphasized, “who does not exist.”
Right on cue, we came to the threshold of the nursery. I’d thought the situation with Greer’s “pregnancy” had already reached maximum ridiculousness, but as I took in the infant wonderland spread out before me, I could only conclude that I’d been wrong.
“It looks like Pottery Barn Kids threw up in here.” Campbell was, as ever, a sensitive soul.
“It’s lovely,” Lily corrected. And it was. The room was fully furnished, complete with an antique rocking horse, a mobile, window treatments, and framed pictures above the crib. The walls had been painted a very pale blue. The changing table was already outfitted with supplies.
“Greer does know she’s not actually having a baby, right?” I said.
Sadie-Grace rose to the tips of her toes, a sure sign her anxiety levels were rising, too. “Maybe?”
I could sense a rond de jambe coming on.
“You need to tell your father the truth,” Lily told her yet again.
“But he’s so happy about the baby….”
“Forget Greer.” Campbell had clearly expended the sum total of her ability to pretend to care about the nursery, the “baby,” or Sadie-Grace’s family drama. “Who wants to know what I found out about the Lady of Regal Lake?”
That wasn’t what I’d expected when Campbell had suggested we’d come up here.
“The who?” Lily responded.
“That’s what people are calling the body we found. The Lady of the Lake. She’s female, obviously.” Campbell stepped into the nursery and turned back to face us, like a player on a stage. “The authorities think the storms we’ve been having dredged her up. I heard they dated the remains back a couple of decades.” Campbell met my eyes. “Female,” she reiterated. “Dead around twenty years.”
It took me a moment to realize what she was getting at. Twenty years ago, Ana Gutierrez left town. Her family hasn’t heard from her. There’s not a trace of her online.
“Am I missing something here?” Lily asked, looking between Campbell and me.
“What could you possibly be missing?” Campbell asked innocently, knowing quite well that her tone would stoke Lily’s interest more than quell it. “Aside from my brother, who I’m pretty sure has only been to visit you twice in the past two weeks.”
“Where did you hear about the body?” I asked Campbell, saving Lily the trouble of trying to come up with a retort.
Cam toyed with the ends of her hair. “The local sheriff’s department is trying to keep a tight lid on the investigation, but they’re a total podunk operation, and since my family has been exiled to living at Regal full-time, I’ve taken the opportunity to make some friends. Deputy-type friends.”
I waited for Lily to realize that Campbell might have a reason beyond having discovered the body to want an inside look at the investigation, but that didn’t seem to register. Without another word to Campbell, Lily turned her back on the conversation and walked over to get a closer look at one of the window treatments.
Cam’s comment about Walker must have really gotten to her.
“Nice fabric,” Lily co
mmented, touching the curtains. “What’s the nursery theme?” In true Taft-woman style, she answered her own question. “Geometric shapes. It’s understated, as themes go.”
“I wanted elephants,” Sadie-Grace replied. “And possibly giraffes, but Greer said—”
“That her entire pregnancy is a hoax?” I suggested.
“Is that really your biggest concern right now?” Campbell stepped up behind me and whispered directly into the back of my head, her voice too low for the other two to hear. “Not the fact that the body we found could be the girl my dad knocked up?”
Ana’s family hasn’t heard from her, I thought. That doesn’t mean she’s missing. But still, the muscles in my stomach tightened, and a ball of nausea rose in the back of my throat. What if Campbell was right?
Female, dead twenty years.
“Sawyer.” Lily was staring out the window. She turned to face me, looking a bit like she’d just taken a rapier to the gut. “Do you know who I just saw walking up the sidewalk?” Another question to which I was quite certain she would supply her own answer.
Lily didn’t disappoint. “Your mama.”
ore than once since the night of my debutante ball, I’d thought that if my mom had been up front with me, I could have gotten past the choices she’d made when she was my age, regardless of how messed up those choices were. But she’d lied to me about it. It was hard not to feel like that made me just one more person Ellie Taft was willing to manipulate and mislead and use.
I don’t want to talk to her, I thought, staring down at the sidewalk below. I don’t want to see her.
So why did I bolt from the nursery and head for the stairs? The doorbell chimed. Greer went to open it just as I arrived. She froze when she saw who was on the other side.
“Greer,” my mom drawled. “You look fantastic. Why, you’ve barely put on a pound. If it weren’t for that baby bump, I’d swear you weren’t pregnant at all.”
Subtle, Mom. Real subtle.
As if she’d heard my thoughts, my mom turned to look at me. I could see her wanting to say something, on the verge of saying something—but she didn’t get the chance.
“Ellie.” Greer’s grip on the door tightened, but she didn’t shut it.
One did not slam the door in the face of one of Lillian Taft’s daughters—in front of witnesses.
My mom had grown up in this world. She knew how the game was played, but as she maneuvered her way through the room, chitchatting with other guests, she kept at least half of her attention on me. When the party moved to what the Waters family referred to as “the Great Room,” she fell in beside me and spoke. “You look good, Sawyer. Happy.”
Happy? She thought I looked happy? Happy that you’re here? Happy that you slept with Uncle J.D.? Happy to have recently discovered a decades-old corpse?
I couldn’t even muster a proper response.
The Great Room furniture had been removed and replaced with a cluster of eight-top tables, each set with different china. I only half heard Greer telling people that this set was her mother’s, and that set was her grandmother’s, and oh, that one belonged to Great-Grandmother Waters.
Why are you here, Mom? What do you want?
My mother took a seat at the table with the Waters china and stared up at me expectantly. Before I could decide whether to join her or back away, Aunt Olivia appeared beside me and steered me into a seat, placing herself squarely between my mom and me.
She must have sensed that this could go to hell in a handbasket—fast.
A woman I recognized took a seat across from Aunt Olivia. “It’s been an age,” Julia Ames—Boone’s mother—declared. “How have you been, Liv?”
“She goes by Olivia now.” My mom could weaponize smiles with the best of them. She’d told me once that after their father had died, Aunt Olivia had run away. Back then, she’d gone by Liv. When she’d come back, she was Olivia, practically perfect in every way and not interested in sharing her sister’s grief in the least.
She abandoned you, so you slept with her husband. If my mom was here to give me excuses, I didn’t want to hear them.
Campbell took the seat on my left. “You’re not happy to see her,” she murmured. “I get it. Believe me, I do, Sawyer. But you have to talk to your mama.”
Campbell Ames was the last person in the world I expected to be brokering parent-child reunions—especially given that she knew my mom had lied to me.
And then Campbell made her reasoning apparent. “See if she knows anything about Ana.”
There’s no logical reason to think that the Lady of the Lake is Ana Gutierrez. I got why Campbell had gone there—Ana had been pregnant with Sterling Ames’s child, and we all knew Cam’s dad wasn’t exactly a trustworthy guy. The fact that his teenage mistress had seemingly disappeared didn’t look particularly good.
But the past year had taught me to look before I leaped.
“I don’t know how Boone broke his pinkie finger!” Sadie-Grace’s perky statement snapped me back into the moment. She appeared to be addressing Boone’s mother. “I’m sure whatever he was doing at the time, it was totally PG.”
“Sawyer.” My mom cleared her throat. “Could I borrow you for a minute?”
Brunch was just being served. Mini muffins, mini cinnamon rolls, mini quiches, and mini cucumber sandwiches. So many tiny foods, so many reasons not to talk to my mother.
“Please.”
A flash of vulnerability crossed her face, and my chest tightened. Campbell gave me a look, and I stood. I couldn’t undo a lifetime of loving the only parent I’d ever had—and for better or worse, I couldn’t ignore her forever.
ell?” I said. I’d gone outside. My mom had followed. Now the two of us were standing in the backyard. The only sound, other than my question, was the tinkling of water over the infinity edge in the pool. “Why are you here?” I asked.
My mom caught my gaze and held it. “You’re not allowed to hate me.” She softened the declaration with a small, lopsided smile. “I’ve thought about it, and I’ve decided. I love you too much. You’re not allowed to hate me.”
She’d never had any trouble telling me that she loved me. Even when she was barely more than a kid herself, even when our little family was struggling—I had always known that I was loved.
“Am I allowed to be upset that you lied to me?” I asked. I didn’t want to feel like my throat had turned to sandpaper. I didn’t trust the sting in my eyes.
“You could be,” my mom offered. “You could be extremely upset with me—or you could forget about that for a minute and tell me what happened at Regal Lake.”
That brought me up short, and for a moment, I let myself really wonder if Campbell was onto something. If the body was Ana.
“You heard about the body?” I asked.
“I’ve been calling Lillian every week. To check on you.” My mom and Lillian had issues. I had the sense I was supposed to take those phone calls as some kind of grand gesture, but it fell flat.
“Lillian said you girls were the ones who found the body.” My mom reached out to touch my shoulder. “That couldn’t have been fun, Sawyer.”
I stepped back from her touch. “Campbell thinks it might be Ana.”
Whatever she’d been expecting from me, it wasn’t that. She stared at me. When her response did come, it was only two words. “My Ana?”
I hadn’t realized until that second that as ill-conceived and ridiculous as the pact was, it meant something to her. Ana meant something to her. Once upon a time, Greer had, too.
“Her family hasn’t heard from her in twenty years,” I said, feeling the weight of that more strongly now than I had when Victoria had told me.
“If she wasn’t with her family…” My mom looked like I’d hit her. “If she didn’t leave town with them, why didn’t she come to me?”
“Did she know where you were?” I asked. “Where you went when you got kicked out?”
“No.” My mom’s hand went to her stomach, like s
he was pregnant still. “I had to leave town so fast—but she had my number. When Greer lost her baby, Ana and I agreed to tell our parents we were pregnant. We picked a night. I told Lillian. You know how that went.” She shook her head. “I called Ana afterward, but her phone was disconnected. I went by her house—her entire family was gone. They just…moved. Her grandfather was some big deal in Dallas. I always assumed Ana’s parents went back home. Ana, too.”
Not Ana.
“She never got in touch with me, Sawyer.” My mom pressed her lips together. “Why would you think that body is hers?”
I don’t think that, I told myself. Campbell does.
“Davis Ames knew Ana was pregnant,” I said out loud. I swallowed. “He told me that he handled the situation.” Looking back, that conversation sounded even worse.
“Not the kind of thing he’d tell anyone if he’d killed her,” my mom pointed out, sounding incredulous and overwrought and, somehow, like she was about to start cracking jokes.
“That wasn’t what I thought he meant, either,” I said.
My mom got very quiet. “Ana wouldn’t have gotten an abortion, if that’s what you’re implying. She wanted that baby. She loved her.”
The way you loved me. I couldn’t keep that from hurting, but I didn’t let myself dwell on it. “Ana’s baby was a girl?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” my mom admitted. “I was further along than she was. It took Ana longer to get pregnant.”
I wondered how many times she’d slept with Campbell’s father. I wondered if she’d loved him. But my mom was still talking, so I didn’t ask.
“Ana didn’t know she was having a girl. The baby could have been a boy, I suppose.” There was something almost wistful in her expression. “We just always imagined having girls.”
I had to turn away, then, from the reminder that my mom had wanted me. She’d imagined me. Hell, she’d practically willed me into being. She’d imagined me being a girl. She’d imagined having a person who would always love her, no matter what.
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