After more than a month of radio silence from the White Gloves, they’d gotten in touch. Three texts. The rose, the snake, a message: The Candidates are many. The Chosen are few. You have been chosen. Tonight, King’s Island, midnight.
A fourth text came through while I was standing there, one word: Initiation.
“Each White Glove chooses her own replacement,” Lily said. “I’m betting Victoria chose you—or maybe Hope did. One of them probably chose Campbell, and I think Nessa’s halfway in love with Sadie-Grace.”
I didn’t ask whether Lily had gotten a text. I didn’t have to.
“It’s stupid,” Lily said softly. “That I wanted this so badly.” She swallowed. “Even when I stopped wanting anything else.”
“It doesn’t matter,” I told her. “I won’t go tonight.”
“It does,” she replied as she began taking clothes off the hangers. “And you will.”
Over the course of the summer, I’d never once unpacked my lake bag. I just swapped in clean clothes for the dirty ones and kept everything else—swimsuits, flip-flops, toiletries—packed. Lily, on the other hand, unpacked her bag every weekend.
And now she was packing. “Stop that,” I told her.
“My mama ran away when she was a year younger than we are now.” Lily addressed the words as much toward her paisley bag as to me. “Did you know that, Sawyer? I didn’t, until your mama let that slip to me over Fourth of July. When my mama was seventeen, she left home, society, all of it, for more than half a year. And when she came back, it was like she was a different person.”
“So?” I asked.
Lily zipped her bag. “I’m ready to be a different person, Sawyer.”
I reached for my own, already-packed lake bag. “I’ll go with you. Forget the White Gloves. We can have a secret society of two.”
Lily was quiet for a long time, then managed five words. “That’s not what I want.”
I felt like she’d hit me, the way she’d punched her fist into the wall of what remained of the King’s Island house.
“Don’t do this,” I told her.
“If I stay,” Lily replied, her voice low, “I’m going to do something I’ll regret.”
To say that Aunt Olivia wasn’t pleased when she discovered Lily’s absence would have been an understatement. She demanded that I tell her where Lily went, but I didn’t know. Lillian got involved.
I still didn’t know.
“Do you know when she’ll be back?” Aunt Olivia pressed. “You must. Lily tells you everything.”
That hurt. Clearly, she doesn’t. Not anymore. “She took a bag with her,” I said. “That’s all I know.”
Aunt Olivia glared at me. “Don’t be ridiculous, Sawyer. That can’t possibly be—”
“Ease up, Olivia,” my grandmother cut in.
“Excuse me?” Aunt Olivia whipped around to face Lillian. If they hadn’t been wearing lake attire, I would have termed it the Battle of the Twin Sets.
“Leave Sawyer be,” Lillian ordered my aunt. “I’ve been expecting this. Lily needs—”
“Tell me what my daughter needs, Mama.” Aunt Olivia wasn’t smiling. Aunt Olivia always smiled, but she wasn’t now.
“Lily needs what she needs,” Lillian said evenly. “And I think we both know that she’s old enough to decide what that is for herself. Think of yourself at her age. You knew exactly who you wanted to be, Olivia.”
I heard the emphasis on Aunt Olivia’s name but didn’t know quite what to read into it, other than the fact that Lillian meant business. And when Lillian Taft meant business, the rest of this family listened.
Myself excluded. That was what I found myself thinking half an hour later, after Aunt Olivia had reluctantly—and temporarily, I was sure—stopped badgering me about Lily. Weeks earlier, my grandmother had as good as told me to stay away from Two Arrows. She had strongly implied that it could be dangerous for me to go there, to get mixed up with Ellen and whatever her business was.
Now that Aunt Olivia was occupied with Lily’s disappearing act, she wasn’t so focused on keeping me within eyesight, and that meant I finally had a chance to do the thing I’d been thinking about for the past two days.
Ever since Uncle J.D. had mentioned the small town where Ana had gone while she was pregnant—right before she gave the baby away and started traveling the world.
Moving quickly and silently, I went back upstairs to get my cell phone. The texts from the White Gloves were still pulled up. I dismissed them. For a moment, I thought about calling Nick. I remembered the way he’d jumped over the bar when that drunken frat boy had gotten physical. I hadn’t needed his help, but he’d been there, beside me, in a flash.
Once someone starts a bar fight in my establishment and offers pointers on my tossing-out-dirtbags technique, I could hear him saying, we’re pretty much on a first-name basis by default.
If he knew where I was going and what I was doing, if he knew about the gun I’d found pressed to my back the last time I’d gone to Two Arrows…would he come?
Would he even pick up the phone?
I could have called. I could have found out. But when Nick had accused me of being a runner, he’d gotten at least one thing right. I was better at leaving than being left.
Don’t come back.
I began composing a text. Not to Nick. To Campbell and Sadie-Grace. “Lily’s gone,” I said under my breath, talking as I typed in the words. “Not sure for how long. I need to go to Two Arrows.”
Campbell didn’t reply, but Sadie-Grace did. All her message said was I’ll drive!
s it turned out, Trina was a good sport. The kind of good sport who had six brothers and could tread water all day long. Charlotte could see the instant Liv decided the new girl was interesting.
I don’t care if she’s interesting, Charlotte thought as the minutes turned to hours. I’m your best friend. She glanced at Julia. Second-best.
“Don’t look so glum.” Sterling wrapped a towel around Charlotte’s shoulders.
They’d all jumped multiple times. When Trina was finally allowed back onshore, there was drinking.
A campfire.
Another trip over the ledge, in the dark.
And now this. Charlotte let her body lean against his. He knew how she felt about him. He had to. But this was the first hint she’d gotten that he could see it, too.
What the two of them could be, together.
“Want to know a secret?” Sterling asked her, nodding toward the ledge, where Liv sat side by side with the townie girl. “I brought her here to make you jealous.”
“Want to know a secret?” Charlotte murmured back. “It didn’t work.”
Shortly thereafter, Liv volunteered to drive the local girl home.
here were days when I thought Sadie-Grace was the living, breathing embodiment of an exclamation mark. Today was not one of them.
“I’m tired,” she told me, practically wilting in the driver’s seat as we made our way back to the belly of the beast. “Audie is adorable, but he stopped sleeping. At night. Did you know babies can do that? They can stop sleeping. At night.”
All I could think in response was that Audubon Charles Richard Waters might not be the first baby that Lillian’s twin sister had given someone, in exchange for money.
Don’t get ahead of yourself. All you know is that Ana spent some time in a small town near the lake, after which she was baby-free and able to travel the world. You know that Ana says she gave the baby up.
You don’t know anything other than that.
That wasn’t quite accurate, I realized as Sadie-Grace pulled the car off onto the main road in Two Arrows. I also know that Ana has a history of asking people for money. My mom had adapted to life on a budget, more or less. I wasn’t sure that Ana had.
And if she did come to Two Arrows, if she left with no baby and money to travel…
I didn’t let myself finish the thought.
“Am I allowed to ask where Lily went?” Sadie-Grace asked me
.
I was getting ready to tell her that I didn’t know, and then I saw Lily’s car. I wondered if she’d planned, when she left, to come here, to meet Ellen.
I wondered if Lily had even realized this was where she was coming.
This time, there was no welcoming committee. No guns. Sadie-Grace and I stood on the front porch of the house where we’d met Ellen—the house where Ellen’s granddaughter Beth had given birth to baby Audie.
The bell was cracked and broken, so I lifted my hand to knock.
The girl who answered the door couldn’t have been older than eleven or so. Her hair was tangled, her ponytail lopsided. The dirt on her knees made me think that she’d worked for every tangle and knocked the ponytail off center on purpose.
“We’re looking for…” I was going to say that we were looking for Ellen, but before I could get that out, I caught sight of Lily. She was standing just outside what I assumed was the kitchen. After a second or two, she turned toward us.
If she was surprised to see me there, she didn’t show it.
“You followed me?” There was a flicker of discernible emotion in her eyes, like I’d told her she didn’t get to leave me, and she’d responded, As of right now, I get to do whatever the hell I want.
“I had no idea you’d be here,” I said.
Lily didn’t enlighten me as to why she’d come. Instead, she turned back toward the kitchen. “You have guests,” she called.
I heard a harrumph. The sound of a chair scraping against linoleum floor came next, and a few seconds later, my grandmother’s twin stepped into the hallway behind Lily.
“Funny,” she said, in a tone that suggested it really wasn’t. “I don’t remember inviting you.” She swiveled her head pointedly toward Lily. “Any of you.”
“Thank you,” Lily told her, sounding more like herself than she had in an age. “For the conversation.”
What conversation?
Ellen didn’t reply—but she didn’t harrumph again, either.
Lily turned back to us. Wordlessly, she walked down to the doorway to stand beside the little girl. “This is Makayla,” she told us. “She’s our second cousin.”
“That means our mamas are cousins,” Makayla informed me.
Ellen has six children, I thought. Who knows how many children they have.
“It was nice to meet you,” Lily told Makayla, with all the pomp and circumstance of someone thanking the queen for her hospitality. “But I think it’s time for me to go.”
Lily flicked her gaze from me to Sadie-Grace. “Did you hear from the White Gloves?”
As tired as she was, Sadie-Grace still managed a smile as she nodded. “You too?” she asked. “This is going to be so much fun!”
Sadie-Grace was delighted. Lily was not. Not delighted, I thought. But not hurt. Not anymore. I wasn’t sure what exactly to read into that.
“I want you to promise you’ll go to initiation tonight,” Lily told Sadie-Grace, before shifting her gaze to me. “Both of you.”
If you’re leaving, why do you care? I bit back the question, and after Sadie-Grace promised, I offered Lily the barest nod.
“You should try the lemonade,” Lily told Sadie-Grace, falling back on idle chitchat. “It’s not too sweet.” There was a beat of silence, and then Lily turned back to me. “See you around, Sawyer.”
I watched her go. It took me until she made it to the bottom of the drive to remember where I was—and why I’d come here.
“What did Lily want?” I asked Ellen.
“A little family history.” Ellen let her arms dangle loose at her side. “What do you want?”
That wasn’t my great-aunt making conversation. That was a challenge.
“We have some questions.”
“We?” Ellen looked from me to Sadie-Grace, then back again. “I do something on your last trip to make you think I’m the type of person who likes questions?”
Sadie-Grace—even a tired Sadie-Grace—didn’t know when not to be optimistic.
“You gave us Audie,” she pointed out cheerfully. “We named the baby Audubon. Daddy is almost as fond of bird-watching as he is of bugs, and Greer told him no bug names. Would you like to see a pic—”
“No.” Ellen cut her off. “That’s not how this works, girl. You’re not meant to come back here.”
“We’re not here about the baby,” I said. I let that sink in. “Or at least, we’re not here about that baby.”
t became quickly apparent that little Makayla was damn near expert at knowing when to make herself scarce. I had the distinct sense that Ellen wanted nothing more than to send us trotting after Lily, but instead, she disappeared back into the kitchen.
“Are you coming, or ain’t ya?”
I came. In other circumstances, I might have wondered at the fact that her accent had thickened halfway through that sentence, but right now, I had to focus.
“Almost twenty years ago, a girl named Ana Gutierrez got pregnant.” I cut straight to it.
Ellen displayed no reaction whatsoever to Ana’s name. “Sit,” she ordered.
Sadie-Grace, cowed by Ellen’s tone, went to plop down where she was standing, but I grabbed her elbow and steered her toward the kitchen table. It was made of a light-colored wood, and stained with years of use, rings burned and etched into its surface.
To me, it almost felt like home.
I sat down in a chair that put my back to the wall. Sadie-Grace sat down with her back to the door. Behind her, I could see a fraction of the hallway. To my left, I could see the rest of the kitchen, where Ellen was pouring lemonade out of a white plastic pitcher. The appliances looked old and none of the colors matched, but everything in that kitchen was spotless.
Ellen plunked a mason jar down in front of each of us. “Drink.”
I drank the lemonade. So did Sadie-Grace. And then I circled back to what I’d said before. “Twenty years ago, Ana Gutierrez got pregnant. The baby was a summer baby—or very early fall. Ana came here to give birth.”
I wasn’t sure if I meant here as in Two Arrows or here as in Ellen’s house. I was fishing, and the old woman who sat down in the chair between Sadie-Grace and me was smart enough to know it.
“You tell my sister you met me?” she asked after a moment.
When I’d first moved in with Lillian, I’d viewed my exchanges with her as a form of bartering: I’d answer one of her questions in hopes of her answering mine. We’d progressed past that, these last few months, but Ellen seemed like the type to respect an even trade.
Or better yet, a trade that favored Ellen. Answer the question. Answer any question she asks you.
“I told Lillian about my last visit,” I confirmed. “I told her that I met you.” Then I volunteered the answer to her next question before she could weigh the costs and benefits of asking it. “She said that I shouldn’t come back.”
“Smart girl.” Ellen took a long drink from a mason glass that very clearly did not contain lemonade. “Lil,” she clarified. “Not you.”
I probably should have heard some kind of threat or warning in those words—the implication that not coming back would have been smart—but I couldn’t get past the idea of someone, anyone, referring to the great Lillian Taft, grande dame of society, as a girl.
“You’re going to catch flies with that mouth if you keep gaping at me,” Ellen said mildly.
Nothing about this woman is mild. I had to remind myself of that, and then I circled back around to the point.
“Lillian doesn’t know that I came here today. She doesn’t know that Ana gave birth in Two Arrows.” I waited a fraction of a second to see if that would get me a reaction. It didn’t. “Lillian doesn’t know that you’re the one who arranged for Ana’s baby’s adoption.”
Adoption, a voice in my mind whispered, or sale.
Ellen took her time taking my measure, then allowed herself another healthy drink of the concoction in her jar. “Around here, we’d say that a girl like you, making assumption
s like those and talking that kind of talk, was getting a little big for her britches.”
Her accent was still coming in and out. I wasn’t sure what to read into that, but I did have the general sense that this could go badly.
A smarter person would have backed off. “I just want to know what happened to Ana’s baby,” I said.
“That baby is our friend Campbell’s half-sister,” Sadie-Grace chimed in. “Or maybe her half-brother? And there’s this girl Victoria, and she’s the baby’s—”
“Ellen doesn’t care about Victoria,” I told Sadie-Grace.
“There’s a lot of things I don’t care about,” Ellen commented. That, too, was a warning—that I shouldn’t get too comfortable here, just because we were related by blood. “And,” Ellen continued, “there’s a lot of things I do care about. My family. This town.”
Your business, my brain filled in. People asking questions was bad for business. And rich people coming around probably wasn’t great.
“Just tell us about the baby,” I said. “There’s no reason not to. Ana isn’t ever coming back here, and it’s not like whoever ended up with the baby is ever going to be in the market for another one. It’s been nineteen years.”
That earned me a heavy stare. My phrasing—talking about the market for babies—was tiptoeing its way closer and closer to the word sold. It was bad enough, from Ellen’s perspective, that Sadie-Grace and I knew her father had shown his gratitude toward Beth with a healthy check. The woman who ran this town couldn’t be happy about the idea that we knew—or at least suspected—that Audie wasn’t the first child she’d exchanged for a big wad of cash.
“Please,” I said. It would have sounded more earnest coming from Sadie-Grace, but I knew in my bones that she’d take the word better coming from me. There was a long silence—tenser for me than for Sadie-Grace, who didn’t realize that our situation was precarious in the least.
“If I tell you what you want to know, you’ll git?” Ellen asked me finally.
“Immediately and without any further questions,” I confirmed.
Another few seconds ticked by. Each one felt intentional. And then Ellen placed her forearms on the table and leaned toward me.
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