“Sawyer.” J.D.’s hand closed around my forearm. “This isn’t the time or the place.” He might have said something else, but then his gaze caught on something behind me.
Someone.
I turned to see Ana Sofía Gutierrez standing in the doorway. I couldn’t believe she’d had the gall to come to the hospital, let alone Lily’s family-only room. I definitely couldn’t believe that the moment Lily’s father saw her, he stopped talking to me and crossed to take her hands in his and whisper something in her ear.
I stared at the two of them. For ten or fifteen seconds, I stood there, frozen, and then a strange, numb fury settled over my body, extremity by extremity and limb by limb. I’d spent months not acknowledging the truth of my relationship to the man, and now that I had?
He’d walked away.
I didn’t remember taking a single step toward the two of them, but the next thing I knew, I was within an arm’s length.
“I should go,” Ana was murmuring. I didn’t know why she’d come to the hospital in the first place, why she’d followed us out of the woods, in a way sure to inspire questions and start the rumor mill churning.
“I’ll be okay,” J.D. told her.
That was about all I could take. “Really don’t think whether or not you are going to be okay is the real issue here.”
“Hey,” Ana said, looking directly at me for the first time since she’d appeared in the doorway. “Ease up. We’re all worried about Lily.”
“You don’t even know Lily,” I snapped. “And clearly, she isn’t much of a priority to either one of you.”
“Sawyer,” Uncle J.D. said lowly. “Please.”
“Please what?” I retorted. “Please don’t make a scene?”
Before he could reply, a doctor appeared and pulled him aside, and the two of them began talking in muted tones. I wanted to hear what they were saying, but I couldn’t quite convince my body to turn my back on the woman opposite me.
The woman who was having some kind of affair with my aunt’s husband. The other participant in the pregnancy pact. A woman Campbell and I hadn’t been able to find a trace of.
“Everything is going to be fine,” she told me.
That snapped me out of it. “You don’t get to tell me that things are going to be fine,” I said, enunciating every word. “And you don’t get to ‘worry’ about Lily. You’re banging her father, who, as goes without saying, is a fetid piece of rotting—”
“I get it,” Ana interjected softly. She tucked her blond hair behind her ears, her dark brown eyes oozing understanding. “I do, honey, and I’m leaving. I just…I needed to make sure y’all got here okay.”
I should have let her go. I should have told her to get the hell away from me. But some ghosts can’t be banished that easily, and my mom’s past—my past—had been haunting me for months now. Campbell’s statement in the waiting room, her assertion that we should ask Ana about the baby, wouldn’t be banished.
Somehow, what ended up coming out of my mouth next was: “I know who you are. You’re Ana Sofía Gutierrez.”
If she was surprised that I knew her full name, she didn’t show it. “These days, I go by Olsson—my mother’s maiden name.”
I wondered how long she’d gone by a different name. I wondered if she’d made herself difficult to find on purpose.
“I’m Sawyer,” I told her. “Ellie’s Sawyer.”
For a moment, something like nostalgia crossed Ana’s features. “Ellie always said that’s what she was going to name you, even if you ended up being a boy.”
I breathed in and breathed out and then spoke again. “You always imagined having girls,” I said, the words coming out hoarse.
Emotion flickered over her features, but she washed her face clear of it a moment later.
“I know about the pact.” I waited for a response, but the only thing I got in return for the statement was silence. “Where have you been, all of these years?” I asked. “What are you doing here? Why would you sleep with him?”
Ana had been one of my mother’s closest friends. She had to have known who my father was. Didn’t she? Either way, she must have known that J.D. was married.
“It’s complicated, Sawyer.”
“Then uncomplicate it.”
Ana tried stepping past me again, but this time, I reached out and touched her arm. I didn’t grab her, but she ground to a stop like I had.
“Campbell Ames is in the waiting room,” I said. “She’s a friend of mine. And Lily’s. You know her father.” I let that sink in. Even though I felt like I’d swallowed cotton, I made my mouth form the question. “What happened to your baby?”
Three things occurred in the wake of that question. The first was that a nurse brought Lily back from her CT scan; the second was that Lillian and Aunt Olivia arrived.
And the third was that Ana Gutierrez placed a hand softly against my cheek, leaned forward, and whispered the answer to my question.
awyer? I just wiggled my feet! And my hands! And my temple!”
“Your temple? As in your head?”
“No. As in my lady temple.”
“Your lady…”
“Temple. Like how it says in the Bible that your body is a temple?”
“Oh, God. Can we just go back to the part where you were talking about your hands and feet?”
ong time no see, Sawyer Taft.” Walker greeted me the same way he had every time I’d seen him exiting Lily’s room for the past nine days.
Somehow, I’d found myself living in a strange alternate universe where Lily’s boyfriend was allowed to be in her bedroom with the door shut, and I wasn’t allowed in her room at all—the former by my grandmother’s edict and the latter by Lily’s. If Lily could have kicked me out of the house, she would have. Lillian was blaming it on the head injury, but she hadn’t seen the look on Lily’s face when she’d seen me standing there with her father’s mistress’s hand on my face.
“How is she today?” I asked Walker.
I wasn’t asking about the stitches or the concussion, and he knew it.
“She’s angry,” Walker said. “It’s a better look for her than sad.”
Lily didn’t, as a rule, let herself get truly angry. She didn’t lose her temper. Anything she could repress, she did. But this wasn’t the old Lily we were dealing with here. This Lily’s father had moved out. Her mother was insisting on pretending that he was just being considerate, and once the gossip blew over, everything would go back to normal.
I knew, the same as Lily did, that there was no normal now. And while she’d had Walker to lean on, I’d been left out in the cold. She wasn’t talking to me. Nick hadn’t returned any of my
texts.
“You know what the doctors said,” Walker told me.
“They said she might be irritable.” I parroted the interpretation Lillian had been trying to sell me. “They said she might behave in uncharacteristic ways.”
They’d said it was temporary—but they didn’t know what Lily had seen in the woods.
“If you ask me, it’s good that she’s feeling things this strongly,” Walker said. “You’re taking this personally, Sawyer, but it’s not you. It’s everyone and everything.”
“Except for you,” I replied.
Whatever problems Walker and Lily had been having, whatever issues and emotions he’d been dealing with since his father had been arrested—those had been put on hold. Now that Lily needed him, he was there.
“Give it time, Taft.” Walker looked like he was on the verge of saying something else, but then his phone rang. He looked down at caller ID and then dismissed the call.
“Campbell?” I asked. She’d been calling me almost every day. “Or your mama?”
“Neither,” Walker replied. “I should go before traffic hits.”
This time, my phone was the one that went off—not a call. A text. On the other side of Lily’s door, I heard her phone buzz as well. I expected the message to be from Sadie-Grace, who�
�d taken to sending both Lily and me random pictures of puppies four or five times a day, but as I went to check the message, three others arrived, back-to-back.
@) - -‘ - , - - -
~ ~ ~ ~ ~8<
Tonight.
Stay tuned.
illian’s preferred method of coping involved tending the garden, drinking wine, and continually drafting me into joining her at the former.
I would have preferred the latter—if tequila could have been substituted for the wine.
“Do you know what today is, Sawyer?” my grandmother asked me.
“Tuesday?” I replied dryly.
“The third of July.” Lillian leaned forward to prune a rose with the exact same sense of determination with which she was tending to our conversation. “The last time this family missed the Fourth of July celebration at Regal Lake was the year your grandfather got sick and passed on.” Trim. Trim. Trim. Clip. Clip. “I did what I could for the girls, but I was mourning, too. By the end of the summer, your aunt was gone and your mama had taken to dressing only in black.”
According to my mom, Aunt Olivia had run away for almost a year in the wake of their father’s death, and once she’d returned, my grandmother had refused to acknowledge that she’d ever gone missing.
Denial wasn’t just a stage of grief; it was practically a family tradition.
“Is that your way of asking me if I’m going to start dressing in all black?” I asked Lillian.
She put her gardening shears down, removed her gloves, and plucked her glass of wine from the deck. “Lily’s mourning, Sawyer. I cannot help but notice that you’re not.”
“I don’t get to be upset about this.” I set my jaw. When she didn’t reply, I elaborated. “They’re not my parents.”
Even with respect to Uncle J.D., that felt true now. What did it matter that I carried half his DNA? Just look what he’d done to the daughter he loved.
“You’re a part of this family, Sawyer Ann. If you want to play the part of the stoic, I’m hardly the one to stop you, but don’t you tell me that this doesn’t affect you.”
All things considered, I preferred our conversation the previous day, which had focused entirely on the way that my bangs were growing out. “Can we talk about something else?”
Lillian returned her attention to the roses. “Certainly.” She adopted a serene expression. “I’ve decided that it would be wrong to have your uncle killed. I’m still debating on the issue of kneecaps.”
I was 90 percent sure she was joking.
“Davis Ames seems like he might know some kneecap-busting types,” I volunteered. “Then again, Campbell said he won’t talk about anything related to Ana.”
I’d repeated to Campbell the single sentence Ana had given me back at the hospital. My baby deserved the world, and I deserved a chance to start over—alone. Cam and I took that to mean that the baby had been adopted, but for all that conversation with Ana had cost me, it hadn’t told me enough to know by whom.
“Incoming! Hostile at forty-four degrees! Duck, Mim! Sawyer—man down!” John David didn’t give me time to process whether that was supposed to be an order, a warning, or a threat before he army-crawled to my feet, swept them out from underneath me, and sent me flying.
“Man down,” I repeated, getting ready to give as good as I got.
“Oh, Sawyer,” my grandmother said indulgently. “He’s just having a bit of fun.”
John David wasn’t Lillian Taft’s grandson for nothing. He hopped to his feet and started blathering on a new topic in hopes of forestalling my revenge. “I love Fourth of July. It’s my favorite, isn’t it, Mim? This was going to be the year I won the golf cart parade and the pie-eating contest up at the lake. William Faulkner, too.”
“William Faulkner was going to win a pie-eating contest?” I asked.
Still channeling Lillian, John David gave me a look. “Don’t be ridiculous, Sawyer. There is no canine pie-eating contest. William Faulkner was going to win the costume contest, which is part of the parade.”
“I mean, sure,” I said, nodding. “Who doesn’t celebrate American independence with some kind of dog costume contest?”
“And parade.” John David could not have emphasized those words more.
“I know you miss your father,” Lillian told him. “And I know you’re missing how things usually are.”
“No one’s missing anything!” Aunt Olivia stepped onto the back porch, an honest-to-God apple pie in her hands and a stars-and-stripes apron tied neatly around her midsection. She looked like something out of either a Norman Rockwell painting or an Alfred Hitchcock movie, depending on how soon she snapped. “Now, what’s this nonsense about us skipping the Fourth of July festivities? I certainly never said a word about that.”
Lillian arched an eyebrow at her. “You’ve never been overly fond of the lake, Olivia.”
“Go on with you, Mama. I love the lake as much as anyone in this family. I just don’t care much for the heat or the humidity or actually going out on the water. But in any case, we’re going. To the lake. For Fourth of July.”
That was unexpected. My mind went immediately to the texts that Lily and I had received. There hadn’t been any details, just enough to know that the White Gloves had plans for tonight.
“Is Dad coming?” John David asked tentatively. I couldn’t remember if he’d ever called J.D. Daddy the way that Lily did, but either way, he said Dad like a word that had lost nine-tenths of its shine.
“I’m afraid he can’t make it, sweetheart.” Aunt Olivia brandished the pie like she expected that to soften the blow. “But guess who is joining us?”
“Who?” John David asked, inching toward the pie.
Aunt Olivia beamed at me in a way that made me think she definitely hadn’t forgotten—or forgiven—the moment she’d seen me with Ana.
“Sawyer’s mama!”
hat was all of the warning I got. Within three hours, we’d made it most of the way to the lake, all of us in one car. Including my mom. And Lily. And every ax Lily had to grind with me.
I’d never been claustrophobic, but ignoring my mother while Lily ignored me was suffocating. Think about something else, I told myself, and my brain obliged.
I thought about my hands in Nick’s hair.
I thought about leaving him at the gala.
I thought about the fact that he hadn’t replied to any of the texts I’d sent him since. Presumably, he still needed an in to polite society. He needed me. I’d seen My Fair Lady. I’d seen Pretty Woman. This wasn’t a one-off kind of thing. And if he still needed my help…
If he still wanted it…
Even if it meant nothing, at least it would distract me from everything else. As much as I wasn’t of the Campbell Ames school of thought on working out issues, the idea of touching Nick’s hair again—touching him again—wasn’t entirely without appeal.
I looked down at my phone. Headed to the lake. My fingers typed out the message. Let me know if you need an escort for Fourth of July. I hit send right before looking up and catching sight of my mom. She would have been thrilled to know that I was texting a boy.
The thought made me sick to my stomach.
How many men had I seen her fall for? My childhood was filled with optimistic starts, followed alternatingly by boredom and broken hearts. Texting and dancing and touching wasn’t for girls like me.
I put my phone away and my brain on lockdown. Fortunately, we arrived at the lake house before my memory could start torturing me with anything else.
“Ellie, why don’t you and Sawyer take the turret room?” Lillian deftly avoided allowing Lily to kick me out of our formerly shared room, as the lot of us exited the car.
“Lily can bunk in my room,” John David hollered, even though he was standing maybe four feet away from the rest of us. “I’ll mostly be in the garage, working on the golf cart. I’m going to need someone to take me to Walmart to get supplies. Lots of supplies. This parade won’t win itself, people
.”
“I’ll go,” I volunteered. Less time with Lily, less time with my mom.
“There’s no need to put yourself out, Sawyer,” Lily told me. “I’ll take John David.”
That was the first thing she’d said to me in two weeks, and the subtext hit me harder than an insult. There was no need to put myself out, because I wasn’t family.
Not her family.
Not anymore.
The view from the turret room hadn’t changed. Even though it
was the middle of the week, there was already plenty of traffic out on the water.
“There’ll be fireworks tomorrow.” My mom threw her bag on one of the beds. I heard her flop down beside it. “Hundreds of boats will be anchored in that cove to watch. I’m sure John David is looking forward to the F-16 flyover—or at least, that’s what he’ll be looking forward to after the golf cart parade.”
“And the pie-eating contest,” I said, turning away from the window. I spotted a rose sitting at the end of my bed and another one sitting at the end of Lily’s. There were envelopes attached.
Details about tonight, I thought. Considering that the last White Glove event had ended with Lily in the hospital and the one before that had led to the discovery of a human corpse, I wasn’t sure opening those envelopes was worth the risk.
“Do I want to know?” my mom asked, glancing at the roses.
The hopeful note in her voice told me she did want to know. She wanted me to talk to her. She wanted me to be her best friend and confidante and vice versa.
I wasn’t sure if Aunt Olivia had invited her here to punish me for the way I’d interacted with Ana, or if, in the wake of Uncle J.D.’s infidelity, my aunt had somehow decided it was time to bury other axes.
Ultimately, it didn’t really matter.
“Sawyer,” my mom said. “I’m trying here. Really trying. Just tell me what I can do.”
Go back in time, and tell me the truth. I couldn’t say those words. I couldn’t even think them without feeling guilty. That was the most impossible thing about this whole situation. No matter what she’d done or hadn’t done—what she did or didn’t do going forward—part of me would always feel like it was my job to make it better.
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