Page 103 of Deadly Little Scandals
We really needed to start making use of the lock.
“Trick still huffy that I told that gentleman exactly what I could do to him with a sterling silver salad fork?” Lily asked.
Normally, my mom would have grinned in response. She’d been surprised four months earlier when we’d shown up on her doorstep, to say the least.
Coming back to the town where I’d grown up had been Lily’s idea. I’d spent a year in her world. She’d wanted to give mine a try. I’d asked her once and only once if she was sure about putting college on hold, and she’d told me that college would still be there when we were ready.
Bothof us.
Lily needed a chance to figure out who she was when she wasn’t trying to be what other people wanted, and I needed to find my way to putting the past to rest and livingnow, with no backup plans and no feet out the door.
I thought of Nick most days but had only called him once. He hadn’t answered.
“Is Trick actually upset with me this time?” Lily asked, startled by my mom’s lack of response to her initial question about The Holler’s owner.
“Trick couldn’t get upset with you if he tried,” my mom assured Lily. “And no one would dream of taking umbrage to any threats you may or may not have made involving salad forks and soup spoons.”
“What were you going to do with the soup spoon?” I asked. But my gaze stayed on my mom, because something had brought her to our door, and I had the general sense that something wasn’t good.
“Lily, sweetheart…” My mom’s tone confirmed my assumption. “There’s someone at the bar looking for you.”
My mom almost never referred to The Holler as “the bar.”
“Is it Lillian?” I asked. I’d been waiting for this since the night Lily and I had shown up here, both of us wet and me wearing a scarlet robe.
“No,” my mom said gingerly. “It’s Ana.”
It took everything I had to stay in the position I’d taken up near the pool table and not join Ana Gutierrez and Lily at the bar.
“She’s going to be okay,” my mom told me. “Our Lily’s equal parts sugar and steel.”
I picked up a pool cue and nodded for my mom to start racking up the balls. I needed to keep busy, if I was going to persevere in giving Lily space.
“Areyouokay?” I asked my mom once she’d finished racking.
My mom glanced back at Ana. “I just keep thinking that this was how it was supposed to be—Ana and her daughter, me and mine.”
Things between us weren’t the same as they’d been before my debutante year. Too much had happened since, and my mom was still learning to just let me be. A lifetime of interdependence was a nasty habit to kick.
“Sawyer? I know the pact was stupid.” My mom grabbed the cue ball and broke, sending the rest of the balls scattering around the table. “It wasn’t just our lives we were playing around with. It was yours, too. I know that it was selfish for me to think that you could solve everything that was wrong with my life, fill every hole.”
In the months that Lily and I had been here, this was the first glimmer I’d gotten that my mom had really changed.
That at least some part of her understood.
“You were a kid,” I said, lining up my first shot. “You were dealing with a lot. And if you hadn’t been…” I hit the ball. “You wouldn’t have me.”
The day after we’d arrived, I’d told my mom the truth about Liv. I’d expected her to explode, to go storming back to the city, demanding to know how Lillian felt about having chosen an impostor over her.
Why she was protecting Olivia still.
But instead, my mom had grieved. She’d told me, a few nights back, crying for her sister, that the truth hadn’t been a blow. It was a relief. The sister she’d knownhadn’ticed her out. The disconnect she’d felt with Olivia wasn’t in her head. Her teenage anger at being forced to pretend otherwise, the grief that no one had understood…
It was real.
“You’re stripes,” my mom commented when my first shot went in.
“Ellie.” Ana cleared her throat behind us.
