“Ana,” Victoria told Lily, “is my niece—and a friend of Sawyer’s mother, and yes, my father really is that old.”
Though we’d left our closest pursuers in the dust, I could hear at least two more carts nearby. I steered us away from the noise.
“Your turn,” Victoria told me. “Truth. You don’t have secrets from your cousin, do you?”
She’d boxed me into a corner, and she knew it. If I didn’t answer her question, that would only make Lily more suspicious.
“Ana was my mother’s friend,” I reiterated, “and I wanted to know what happened to her, because last anyone heard of her, twenty years ago, she was pregnant.”
I couldn’t risk looking away from the “road” long enough to ascertain which one of them had the more marked reaction to that statement, but Victoria was the one who recovered first.
“That explains some things. Knowing all six of my much-older brothers, not to mention my father, if the family knew she was pregnant, there was probably a lot of blustering about convents—they’re very fond of hypothetical convents.”
“Are they fond of kicking people out of the family?” I asked pointedly.
“Your mama had a friend who was pregnant twenty years ago?” Lily grabbed my arm, then seemed to realize I was still driving and let go of it.
“Yes,” I said.
Victoria countered that question with one of her own. “Back at the gala, why did you step outside alone with Davis Ames?”
“I thought we were playing Truth or Dare,” I said pointedly. “Doesn’t that mean it’s my turn now?”
“If we were taking turns,” Victoria said, her voice low and silky, “I’d pick dare. There’s nothing I won’t do, with proper motivation.”
I wanted to ask her what she was doing with Walker—what her father’s motivation in approaching Davis Ames had been. But she hadn’t chosen truth, and even if she had, Lily was right beside me.
“What if I dared you to jump off this cart?” I threw out the question, allowing the pedal to creep back to the floor.
“Is that a hypothetical dare…or a real one?” Victoria asked.
“Sawyer!” Lily yelled beside me.
I realized too late that we were going too fast. The cart hit what I thought was a bump, but when we went airborne, I realized that it wasn’t a bump.
It was a ledge.
verything hurt.
The cart must have flipped. That was my first thought. It felt immediate, like less than a second had passed since we’d gone over the ledge, but that couldn’t have been true, because, somehow, I was lying on muddy, damp grass, sticks and rocks digging into the flesh bared by my vintage dress.
“Lily?” That was my second thought as I pushed up to my elbows, my entire body objecting. The lights on the golf cart had gone out. I couldn’t see either of my companions. “Lily, are you okay?”
That question was greeted by a moan. I crawled toward the sound until I hit a figure lying prone. Not Lily, I realized belatedly. Victoria.
“I’m fine,” she said before I could ask.
I wanted to tell her that she wasn’t fine, that she was an idiot, that we all were, because what did we expect to happen, off-roading in a vehicle that wasn’t meant for off-roading with limited visibility and unpredictable terrain?
I heard Victoria sit up before my eyes could process what little movement I was able to see. There was a shuffling sound, and then there was light. “Let’s hear it for dresses with pockets,” she said, brandishing her phone.
Flashlight mode let me see just far enough that I was able to spot Lily. She’d landed much farther from Victoria and me than either one of us had been from the other. My brain said that didn’t make sense. Lily had been sitting right beside me. Victoria was the one who’d been in the back.
As I crawled carefully toward Lily, I let my thoughts race, let my brain outline all the reasons that if I was in one piece, Lily had to be, too.
“Lily.” I reached her. “Are you okay?”
Unlike Victoria, she didn’t moan. I told myself that it was because Lily was too much of a stickler for manners, and she found moaning uncouth.
“Lil—”
“Sawyer.”
For a fraction of a second, I was terrified that Victoria was the one who’d said my name, even though it had come from Lily’s direction, even though I was close enough to her body now to practically feel the words on my face.
“You’re okay?” I said.
Lily let out a long and wobbly breath. “I’m in significantly better condition than my dress.”
Leave it to her to be thinking about our clothing at a time like this.
“Victoria?” Lily asked.
“I’m fine.” Victoria punctuated that statement by flooding us with light—not from her phone this time. She’d managed to find the cart. The roof had been knocked clean off, and two of the four bars that had been holding it up were demolished.
At least the lights still worked.
“You’re bleeding,” Victoria stated. I thought she was talking to me, but she quickly corrected that misapprehension. “Not you. Her.” She jerked her head toward Lily, who was still lying on the ground, and who, I could see now, had blood smeared across her face and temple.
“I shall choose to believe,” Lily said, forcing herself into a sitting position, “that her is Victoria’s version of an affectionate nickname.”
I reached out. “Your head.”
Lily swatted my hand away. “Head wounds bleed. It’s what they do. I’m okay.”
“What’s your name?” I asked her. “What’s today’s date? Who’s the president?”
“As long as we’re asking questions,” Victoria said beside me, “Sawyer could enlighten us as to why she and Davis Ames felt the need to step outside back at the gala.”
“What is your deal with the Ames family?” I said at the exact same moment that Lily attempted to climb to her feet and deal with Victoria herself.
“Sawyer has her reasons,” she said, unsteady on her feet. “She and Mr. Ames have…a lot in common.”
The vise around my chest loosened slightly. If Lily was with it enough to infer that the reason I’d stepped outside with Davis Ames was because—as far as she knew—he was my grandfather, her cognitive capacities were clearly intact.
The fear that her condition was serious gave way to guilt more intense than any I’d felt in the past few weeks. “Lily,” I said. “Don’t.”
Don’t defend me. Don’t remind me that I’m a liar.
Lily pursed her lips. “Sawyer, you’ve been acting…” Even with a head wound, Lily couldn’t bring herself to use a descriptor as ill-mannered as weird or strange. “…at odds with yourself for weeks. What is going on with you?”
I looked toward Victoria—and the demolished golf cart. “We need to get the cart upright and get out of here. If someone else comes over that drop, we’re toast—or they are.”
Victoria handed Lily a strip of fabric. “Press this to your head and try to stop the bleeding. Sawyer, help me with the cart—and answer the damn question. Mine or your cousin’s, I’m not bothered much as to which.”
Getting the cart upright again was the easier task. I could have ignored Victoria’s instruction. I could have told Lily that I was fine, but I just kept thinking of the seconds when I hadn’t been sure I’d ever be able to talk to her again.
Up until now, I’d been keeping secrets from Lily, but I hadn’t lied to her.
Campbell knows that her father isn’t mine. She’s not going to keep it from Walker forever. One way or another, that much of my secret was coming out.
Better that Lily heard it from me.
“I was talking to Davis Ames,” I said, the cuts and scrapes on my legs, arms, and chest throbbing as Victoria and I coordinated our movements and got the cart back on its wheels, “because his son was the father of Ana’s baby.” I glanced at Victoria. “I’m guessing your father knows that, and his takeover attempt earlie
r this summer was somehow related.”
“My niece was pregnant by Campbell’s father?” Victoria asked, eyebrows jetting up.
“The senator—” Lily stopped, then tried again. “Sterling Ames,” she corrected herself, and then she finally just said, “Two?”
As in: He got two teenagers pregnant?
“What do you mean, two?” Victoria asked.
I directed my answer to my cousin. “Not two, Lily. My mom, what she told me that night at the Christmas party about Sterling Ames, it’s not true.”
“She lied to you?” Lily said. “But Campbell’s mama as good as confirmed it.”
“A case of mistaken identity,” I explained. “Wrong pregnant teenage girl.”
“And it’s just a coincidence that your mother and her friend both got pregnant?” Victoria asked.
I walked around to the back of the golf cart. “Help me push this,” I said. “It’s either that, or we leave it here.”
For a moment, I thought Victoria would press for answers, but she didn’t. “We need the light.” The White Glove was remarkably calm under pressure—and far more logical than I would have anticipated. “Phones don’t get a signal out here, so we’re on our own for getting back to the party. The headlights do a hell of a lot more than a cell in flashlight function.”
I listened but couldn’t hear even a trace of the other groups. How far into the woods had we gone? How big were they?
“Push,” Victoria told me. “Lily, if you need to ride…”
“I can push.”
Somehow, I had a feeling that after Victoria saw this side of my very proper cousin, getting an invitation to the next White Glove event wouldn’t be a problem for Lily.
We’ll be lucky if the next one doesn’t kill us.
“Do we even know which direction we’re going?” Lily asked five minutes later.
I was on the verge of responding, but Victoria beat me to it. “I always know exactly where I am. It’s a family trait.”
“Stop,” I said suddenly. They complied. “Listen,” I told them. The silence had given way, and in the distance, I could hear something—people. Talking. Laughing.
“Over here!” Victoria yelled. Lily and I added our voices, to no effect.
“We could go in that direction,” I said, eyeing what I could see of the terrain. “But we’d have to leave the cart behind. The brush is too dense, and the trees are too close together. We’ll never make it through that way pushing.”
We fell into silence and, again, heard laughter. It was faint, but it was there.
Victoria turned her phone back to flashlight mode. “I guess this will have to do.”
Lily and I followed closely on her heels. Eventually, the sounds of the others grew louder, and when there was finally a break in the trees, I could make out the outline of a golf cart ahead. It took until we got much closer for me to realize it was parked—and empty.
A second later, I heard the voices again and realized, with a start, that one of them was male. I looked to the key, still in the golf cart we’d found. Closer inspection showed that it had a key chain, but not one of ours.
No snake, no rose.
Victoria shone her flashlight on the key, and I saw that the key chain was a Mercedes.
A stick snapped up ahead of us. Victoria pivoted, and so did the light. One second, I spotted clothing slung carefully over a low-hanging limb on a nearby tree, and the next second, a naked man stepped into view and turned in the direction from which he’d just emerged.
Beside me, Lily let out a strangled whisper. “Daddy.”
I’d thought, in passing, that Lily’s father might be having an affair, but there was a difference between thinking something in the abstract and seeing it in the flesh. Literally.
I briefly entertained the ridiculous idea that maybe Aunt Olivia was out here with him, but the next second, a woman stepped into view. She saw the flashlight, even though Uncle J.D. was too involved in what he was doing—and her—to notice.
“J.D.,” the woman said softly.
I stared at her, trying to process what I was seeing. The woman reaching to grab her clothing off the tree had blond hair, but her features and skin-tone bore a striking resemblance to Victoria’s.
I know that woman. I told myself I was being ridiculous, that there was no way, but the next word out of Uncle J.D.’s mouth put a nail in that coffin.
That word, which he murmured into her neck, was: “Ana.”
ily made a mewling sound. Her father saw her, saw us. There was frenzied movement as he pulled on his pants, then a string of stammered explanations, none of them worth a damn thing. Questions, cursing, demands—and all I could think, through all of it, was that the woman standing next to Lily’s father, the very naked woman he was having an affair with, looked so much like she had as a teenager.
Ana Sofía Gutierrez. She wasn’t dead. She wasn’t missing. She was here, pulling a dress over her head. She was looking at Lily and at Victoria and at me.
“Lily’s bleeding.” Victoria somehow managed to sound, if not calm, then at least somewhat in control of the situation. “We crashed. She hit her head. Hard.”
“Lily…” Uncle J.D. choked on her name. “Sweetheart, what—”
“No.” Lily’s voice wasn’t quiet, exactly, but I had to strain to hear it.
“No,” J.D. repeated. “You didn’t hit your head?”
“Stay away from me.” Lily took a step back. Her entire body was shaking. “Don’t talk to me. Don’t touch me.”
I crossed in front of her, between them. I had about a million questions, but right now, it didn’t matter that the woman was Ana—or that Campbell and I had been looking for her. It mattered that Lily was bleeding, figuratively and literally.
It mattered that she was shattered.
“Sawyer.” J.D. turned his attention to me. “What happened?”
I hated him for doing this to her, the way I hadn’t ever quite been able to hate him for myself.
Behind me, Lily gripped my arm. At first, I thought she was using me as a shield.
And then she went down.
Lily regained consciousness just as we made it out of the woods. She didn’t say anything—not when the other White Gloves mobbed us, not when Campbell and Sadie-Grace got close enough to ask us what was going on, not when Ana emerged from the forest, too, and the whispers started.
Lily was silent on the way to the car.
Silent on the way to the hospital.
I stayed with her, even though that meant staying with J.D. Campbell texted that she and Sadie-Grace were going to follow. I called Lillian. What else was I supposed to do? In the ER, the doctors sent Lily for a CT scan, just as Campbell and Sadie-Grace arrived.
“Is Lily okay?” Campbell asked, and then, because she couldn’t be caught caring too much, she continued, “Inconveniencing others with an unruly head injury is awfully impolite for Miss Manners.”
“Lily isn’t okay,” I said. Campbell did me the favor of not asking if I was.
“Is Lily…dead?” Sadie-Grace asked, horrified.
“She’s getting a CT scan,” I clarified.
A second or two passed before the next question came, and in that time, it took everything I had not to look back at Uncle J.D., who was filling out forms.
“What happened?” Campbell said. “Who was that woman?”
I realized then that I’d never shown her the pictures I had of Ana. Now that Lily was out of earshot, now that the emergency was under control and there was nothing more I could do for her, the enormity and ridiculousness of the situation hit me.
“That,” I told Campbell, “was Ana Gutierrez.”
“I’m not one to throw stones, but…”
Campbell’s disclaimer was a clear and direct indication that stone throwing was imminent.
Since this situation was more messed up than she even knew, I saved her the trouble. “But Ana seems to have a type?”
“Tall men with thic
k hair and side parts?” Sadie-Grace suggested guilelessly.
Married men, I thought, but I didn’t say it, and neither did Campbell.
“We should talk to her,” Campbell told me. “Ask her if she had the baby.”
Even thinking about talking to my uncle’s mistress made me feel sick and disloyal to Lily. This was such a mess.
I reached for my phone. I looked down the screen—no new texts, no missed calls. Nothing from Nick. It was easier, for once, to think about him than it was to think about anything else. My whole life felt like it was imploding, but the fact that I’d ditched him before he’d walked out on me was simple.
Of course he hadn’t been waiting on me when I got back. I could text him. To apologize.
“Sawyer?” Campbell prompted. “Don’t you want to talk to Ana?”
I did, and I didn’t. Nothing about this was okay. I wasn’t okay. So I sent the text to Nick, and then I waited.
The hospital had a room for Lily. The nurse showed us back as we waited for her to finish the CT scan—family only. We left Campbell and Sadie-Grace in the waiting area and I found myself alone with Lily’s father.
Our father.
“How long?” I asked him, my voice devoid of all emotion.
He looked at me, no more disheveled than if he’d just stepped off the golf course or out of a boardroom. “They’ll bring her back as soon as they—”
“How long have you been sleeping with Ana?”
“We’re not discussing this, Sawyer,” J.D. said.
“Would you rather not discuss the affair you’re having now,” I asked him, eyes narrowed, “or the one you had approximately nine months before I was born?”
The implication underlying my question landed like a punch.
“You…”
“I know,” I said. “I know that you slept with my mother. I know that you got her pregnant. I know that you’re the kind of person who could pretend, all this time, that I was just your niece.”
“Does Lily—”
I didn’t let him finish the question. “You are aware that Ana was a friend of my mom’s, right? Did you know that they got pregnant together? That they planned it?”
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