My job to love her.
“Did Aunt Olivia tell you her husband is having an affair?” I asked, managing to keep my voice even and not betray the emotions churning inside me, threatening to erupt.
“She did, in fact,” my mom said. I could see her bracing herself for me to say something to the effect that this wasn’t the first time.
I didn’t. I was so tired of being angry. I didn’t want to hurt her any more than I wanted loving her to hurt.
So instead, I let my fingers curl around the windowsill for a moment, and then turned back to her. “Did Aunt Olivia tell you the person he’s having an affair with is Ana Gutierrez?”
na gave her baby up?” Of everything I’d told my mom in the past hour, that was what surprised her the most. “Why would she do that? Did her parents make her? Did she…”
“Did she what?” I asked when my mom trailed off.
“I don’t know.” My mom looked younger than she had at the beginning of this conversation, and a little lost. “It was one thing when Greer had a miscarriage.” Still sitting on Lily’s bed, she pulled her knees up and tucked them close to her body. “But Ana just deciding to give her baby away? That wasn’t the plan.”
I remembered the pictures I’d seen of the three of them, white ribbons tied around their wrists or wound through their hair. That wasn’t the pact.
“You left after your fight with Lillian,” I pointed out. “And Greer had hung both of you out to dry.”
“I tried to get in touch with Ana on my way out of town,” my mom said defensively. Then she wilted. “Maybe I didn’t try hard enough. I felt like she’d abandoned me. This whole time, what if she’s felt the same?”
I shouldn’t have felt for her, not about this. Maybe I wouldn’t have, if Lily and I were still speaking. Greer and Ana were Mom’s people, and then they were gone.
“I still don’t understand why she didn’t look for me,” my mom continued. “Maybe someone threatened her. The baby’s father or his father or his wife…”
Before my mom could continue to speculate, there was a knock at the door. I recognized it immediately: light, crisp, three taps.
My stomach twisted.
“Lily,” I told my mom, assuming that she’d know that meant that we should stop tossing around words like baby and pact and, most of all, Ana.
The last thing I needed was to throw gasoline on that particular fire.
“Come in,” my mom called.
Lily opened the door. She looked thinner than she had two weeks ago. Her hair clearly hadn’t been conditioned in a while. Her entire face was makeup-free, and though her skin had tanned early in the summer, right now, she looked wan.
“May I speak with Sawyer?” she asked my mom. “Alone?”
An hour earlier, if you’d told me that Lily wanted to talk to me, I would have felt a mix of trepidation and hope. But after a one-on-one with my mom, I couldn’t afford either. If you don’t expect anything of anyone, people can’t disappoint you.
When my mom left, Lily sat in the exact spot she had just vacated. “It’s John David,” she said without preamble.
That was all it took to snap me out of my head and into the moment. “What’s wrong with John David?”
“Picture this,” Lily told me, her gaze focused on her own hands. “We’re in Walmart with an overflowing cart of supplies. My brother is elbow-deep in streamers and trying to convince me that he needs a minimum of two thousand sparklers to truly bring his golf cart vision to life. And then, out of nowhere, he says, ‘Hey, Lily? You know how Mama says little pots have big ears?’ And I say yes. And then he says, ‘And you know how she also says that eavesdroppers never hear any good of themselves?’ And I say yes, and then he continues with ‘And how Mama always says that this is a one-party consent state with respect to audio recordings, so it’s completely legal to record any conversation you’re a party to?’”
“Pretty sure Aunt Olivia has never said that last one,” I opined.
“Even if she had,” Lily replied, “John David’s version of being ‘party’ to a conversation apparently doesn’t involve being a participant in that conversation, so much as eavesdropping while eating cake and/or pie to fulfill the ‘party’ quotient.”
I read between the lines there. “Aunt Olivia has been grief-baking a lot lately.”
“Not just lately,” Lily replied quietly. She held up a phone. I recognized immediately that it wasn’t hers. Lily’s phone didn’t have a camouflage cover. “He’s been spying on my parents and recording their conversations. For more than a month.”
More than a month. As in, since before we discovered the affair?
“Sawyer?” Lily held the phone out to me. “You have to listen to this.”
With no further ado, she played the audio files for me—not all of them, but three in particular.
“Could you grab the other end of the sheet?” Aunt Olivia’s request on the tape sounded absolutely ordinary. She waited a second, and then added, “I think I’ve figured out why we’re having so much trouble finding the money to finish the remodel.”
She still sounded pleasant enough, but before this summer, the one argument I’d ever heard them have was on this topic.
“I told you,” J.D. said on the recording, “we’re fine, Olivia. It’s going to be fine. Our assets—”
“Just aren’t liquid right now. So you’ve said, repeatedly. But I had a bit of time between projects with the girls, and I took a peek at the books—ours and your company’s.”
On the bed, Lily sat perfectly still. I knew this wasn’t her first time hearing these recordings, but she was listening the way a starving person ate.
“Leave my job out of this,” Uncle J.D. snapped.
“Certain filings are a matter of public record. You know that.”
“Stop telling me what I know, Olivia.”
“You’ve exercised a lot of stock options in the past six years.” Aunt Olivia’s voice had taken on just the slightest hint of an edge.
“We agreed that was the right call. We used my trust—from my family—to do it.”
“At first,” Aunt Olivia said firmly.
There was a long pause. “No matter where the money came from, we agreed about buying the stock, Olivia.”
“That’s the thing, John. We agreed about exercising your options, but when I compared the public filings to our balance transfers, every single time you convinced me to fund a stock buy, you took a little off the top. And by a little, I mean a very large sum.”
“I’m not talking about this.”
“Yes, you are.” Now, Aunt Olivia didn’t sound pleasant at all. Her voice was low enough that I wondered if John David had been hiding under the bed in order to get audio as good as he had. Either that, or he’d purchased some pretty high-tech spy equipment off the internet. “It’s one thing for you to have your fun between the sheets, though I confess that I’ve always found your choice of paramour rather…odd.”
“Don’t you dare talk to me about Ana.”
My gaze darted from the phone back up to Lily. Her dark brown eyes were intent and smoldering. She wouldn’t—maybe couldn’t—look at me.
“You’ve been giving her money. And I’m stupid—so stupid—that I didn’t know it until now.”
“You’re very, very stupid,” J.D. said, his voice every bit as low as his wife’s. “And you don’t get to say a word to me about any money that I might or might not have given to Ana.”
After that, the audio cut out. Lily still wouldn’t look at me. I sat down beside her on the bed, my own mind reeling.
“She knew, Sawyer.” Lily shook her head, like that might make what she was saying less true, like she was waiting for me to tell her that she was jumping to conclusions, when she very clearly wasn’t. “Mama already knew about Ana, and she didn’t care.”
How much of the anguish Lily had been through in the past two weeks was out of guilt, for what we’d discovered? For the fact that because of us, he
r mother had learned the truth, too?
“She cared that he was paying her.” I said that so that Lily didn’t have to.
“I thought…” Lily didn’t finish that sentence. Instead, she scrolled through the audio files and selected another one to play.
“I want a divorce.” This time, there were no clues on the tape about where the conversation was taking place—or where John David might have been hidden when his father issued that statement.
“Of course you do.” Aunt Olivia didn’t sound particularly fussed. “But, J.D., honey, we can’t always get what we want. Some of us take our commitments seriously. Some of us don’t make promises unless we’re dead set on keeping them.”
I had a feeling—a very vague one—that there might have been more than one meaning to those words. Her husband’s next statement did nothing to weaken that particular bit of intuition.
“Let me go. Olivia, please…”
“Nice manners from a man who’s cheating on his wife.” She’d taken the gloves off more quickly this time.
The second she did, he lost it, at low volume. “You blackmailed me into marrying you in the first place!”
“What?” I said out loud to Lily. She didn’t act like she’d heard me at all.
“I was young,” her father continued on the tape, “and I was scared, and I let you.”
“But now you’re done? Suddenly, you don’t care if the truth comes out?”
“For God’s sake, it was an accident!”
I managed not to say What was an accident? out loud, but only just.
“You won’t tell anyone what happened,” J.D. was saying now. “You have as much to lose as I do if the truth about that body comes out.”
The mention of the body sent an electric chill down my spine. I told myself that I must have misheard.
“Did you ever even try to love me?” Aunt Olivia asked on the recording, her voice quiet and rawer than I’d ever heard it. “I have been nothing but a good wife to you and a wonderful mother to Lily and John David. Even you have to give me that.”
“You love our children. If I had any doubts whatsoever on that score, I wouldn’t have kept up this charade for as long as I have.”
The admission didn’t seem to calm her. If anything, it had the opposite effect. “That’s all it ever was to you? A charade? When are you going to understand that I’m better for you than she ever was?”
“Say her name.”
“Excuse me?” Aunt Olivia was retreating to form—manners, manners, manners.
“Just once. Say. Her. Name.”
“You’re being ridiculous, John.”
“Liv—”
All of a sudden, their voices were blocked by the sound of a familiar—and very deep—bark. Then there was a series of noises that told me some major tussling was going on in the background, and then I heard John David yelp, “William Faulkner, this was not a part of the mission!” and the recording cut off.
I tried to process what I’d just heard, but the parameters would not compute. “What was that?” I asked Lily. She didn’t even try to form an answer in reply. “He said that she blackmailed him into marrying her.” Repeating that didn’t make it sound any more plausible. “He mentioned…”
“A body.” Lily finished my sentence for me.
You have as much to lose as I do if the truth about that body comes out. That statement rang in my ears. Before Ana had shown up, alive and well, it had seemed, if not plausible, at least possible that the body at Falling Springs was hers. I’d already let myself come far too close to jumping to conclusions once.
And yet, I had to ask: “Do you think this has something to do with the Lady of the Lake?”
Lily’s only response was to play a third recording. It was significantly shorter than either of the others.
Lily’s father said, “You’re not going to tell anyone the truth, Olivia. You might have, once. But now? I don’t think so.”
Aunt Olivia replied, “Maybe you’re right. And maybe you should consider that I don’t have to tell anyone your oldest, darkest secret to ruin your life. All I have to do to destroy your world is tell Lily the truth about Sawyer.”
n the grand scheme of things, the final recording wasn’t as shocking or significant as the ones that had come before. But somehow, hearing Aunt Olivia say my name—knowing that Lily had heard it—dulled the cacophony of other questions in my mind.
“I got mad at you,” Lily stated quietly. “Back when I found that old photo of your mama’s, and you told me that you thought my daddy might be yours.”
I felt like I’d swallowed sandpaper and was in danger of throwing it back up. “Lily…”
“And I got mad at you again when I saw you talking to that woman…” She swallowed and corrected herself: “Ana.”
One second I was standing by the bed, and the next, I was sitting beside her. I wanted to make this better for her. I wanted to fix it.
“And none of that,” Lily continued, her voice trembling, “none of it was your fault.”
I’d been waiting for the guillotine to fall for months. I’d set the ball rolling myself when I’d told her that Sterling Ames was not my father. If she hadn’t spent the past two weeks ignoring me, this moment—and the question she was on the verge of asking—might have come long before now.
I’ve been punishing myself. I’ve been letting her punish me—because of this.
“You heard Mama on that tape.” Lily swallowed. “She threatened to tell me the truth…about you.”
Aunt Olivia knows. I’d been so focused on what Lily had heard on the recordings that I hadn’t really processed the fact that her mother was the one who’d implied the truth. How long has she known that her husband slept with her sister?
How long has she known that he’s my father?
“You’re my sister,” Lily said quietly. “Aren’t you?”
Answering that question shouldn’t have been this hard. “I wanted to tell you.”
“My daddy…” Lily pressed her lips into a thin line, her brown eyes flashing. “My father—he slept with your mama when she was in high school.”
This time, all I could manage was yes.
“You knew.” Lily’s lips folded inward this time, like she was blotting her lipstick or biting the inside of her mouth. “That’s why you’ve been so weird the past couple of months.”
“That’s part of it.” This was all so much more messed up than she knew. Hell, given what we’d just heard on those recordings, there was a good chance that this situation—and this family—were way more messed up than I had previously thought, too.
“Who else knows that my father is also yours?” Lily asked quietly. “You didn’t tell me. You didn’t feel like you could. Who did you tell?”
I’d only told one person.
“Nick,” I said. Before the gala, before he’d called in any favors, back when I could count the total number of times we’d had anything resembling a conversation on one hand, I’d told him something that no one outside of this family had any business knowing.
“Are you two…” Lily trailed off, then course-corrected. Right now, what Nick and I were—or more accurately, given his radio silence, what we obviously weren’t—was beside the point. “He’s the only one who knows?” Lily asked instead.
I pressed my lips together and shook my head. “Lillian knows, too, but I didn’t tell her.”
Lily brought a hand to cover her mouth, like she could take whatever she was feeling and snuff it out. After several seconds, she lowered her hand. “And Campbell? You two have been thick as thieves this summer, whispering every chance you get.”
I hadn’t realized that she’d noticed—or cared. “I told Cam that her father wasn’t mine. That’s all.”
“Okay. Tell me everything,” Lily said, her voice hollow and her eyes strangely bright. “And, Sawyer? Don’t you dare leave a damn thing out.”
xplaining the circumstances surrounding my conception took a while. But
once Lily seemed to have wrapped her mind around the abbreviated version of Sawyer’s Messed-Up Origins 101—the pact, Greer’s involvement, exactly what I’d been talking to Ana about at the hospital—the decision to go back through the recordings with a fine-tooth comb didn’t take us long.
We started back at the beginning—not just the three recordings Lily had played for me, but every conversation John David had caught. The rest of them were fairly run-of-the-mill—no mention of bodies or blackmail or how and when Aunt Olivia had discovered that her husband was my father.
“I can’t stay here,” Lily told me once we’d finished. “I just…I can’t be in this house right now, Sawyer.”
I let my gaze travel to the roses the White Gloves had left us—and the envelopes.
“I’m with you,” I told Lily. “Let’s get the hell out of Dodge.”
King’s Island. 10 p.m. That was all our invitations said. Once we ascertained that John David was occupied with decorating his golf cart—and once we had promised to return in time to put the finishing touches on it in the morning—we did get the hell out of Dodge, via Jet Skis.
Riding separately from Lily, I leaned into the wind as we cut across the main channel. As far as we can, as fast as we can. I’d missed Lily these past weeks. I’d missed being us. Whatever she needed from me, I’d give her.
Anywhere she ran, I’d run, too.
Water sprayed the right side of my body as Lily sped past me. We wove in and out of a larger boat’s wake. Farther. Faster. I could feel the sun on my face and forearms and the tops of my feet.
But no matter how loud the roar of the engine beneath me was, no matter how free I should have felt, I still couldn’t outrun the realizations of the past hour: that Aunt Olivia had known about her husband’s mistress—not to mention the truth about my paternity—for an indeterminate amount of time; that Uncle J.D. had apparently been giving Ana money; that years ago, long before either Lily or I had been conceived, Aunt Olivia had blackmailed her husband into marriage.
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