Page 104 of Deadly Little Scandals
I turned around first. A few seconds later, my mom followed suit.
“I want you to know,” Ana told her, “that I’ve stopped seeing J.D.”
“Good for you?” my mom ventured.
It was on the tip of my tongue to ask if she wanted a prize, but then a horrible thought occurred to me. “He’s not back with Aunt Olivia, is he?”
“Not as far as I know,” Ana said. “I’m moving to the East Coast. I need a fresh start, and Victoria has talked me into investing in a start-up she’s been working on. I’m going to be following up with other potential investors while she finishes her degree.”
I had no idea what Victoria was majoring in, but somehow, I wasn’t surprised that she seemed to be landing on her feet. I wondered briefly what the chances were that the other potential investors were former White Gloves.
“What did you say to Lily?” my mom asked Ana.
Lily’s biological mother glanced back to the bar, which Lily was wiping down maniacally with a damp rag, going back over the same spots again and again.
“That’s between my daughter and me.”
“She almost lost me.”
Lily and I were lying in the field behind our house. It was unseasonably warm for December, but still cold enough that we should have been wearing jackets.
We weren’t.
“That’s what Ana said,” Lily continued. “Late in her second trimester, she almost lost the pregnancy. She couldn’t afford the hospital bills, and she said she just kept thinking—what if something happened to me after I was born? What if I got sick? What if I needed medicine she couldn’t afford?”
“She could have gone to her family,” I said, thinking back to my conversation with Victor Gutierrez.
“She would have,” Lily said softly. “And they would have controlled her entire life—and mine.” She paused. “She thought about going back to Davis Ames, too, but Ellen found her first.”
The rest of the story came pouring out of Lily’s mouth—how Ellen had sold Ana on the idea of a loving couple who couldn’t have children of their own, a couple who would pay Ana’s expenses, who would give the baby everything, whowantedto make sure their baby’s biological mother had a real shot at life, once she’d given birth.
Ana hadn’t found out who that couple was—or that said couple’s infertility was a lie—until later. Once she’d discovered that, once she’d realized all the ways she’d been lied to, she’d decided that the price she’d been paid wasn’t nearly enough.
“She said that she went to Daddy when I was twelve,” Lily continued. “She told him the truth, and he told her that he’d give her whatever she wanted, do anything she wanted, if she’d just leave me where I was.”
Beside me, Lily closed her eyes. I kept mine open and skyward.
“He used to bring her pictures,” Lily murmured. “That was part of their deal. He gave her money, and he told her all about me.”
Neither one of us had heard a word from Uncle J.D. in the past four months.
“I feel like I stole him from you,” Lily said suddenly, opening her eyes and turning to face me. “If he’d known I wasn’t his from the beginning, he wouldn’t have—”
“He raised you,” I interrupted her. “You’re his, Lily. He clearly feels that way, and I don’t need a father.” She was on the verge of objecting, so I continued. “With a sister/cousin/pregnancy-pact buddy like you, I’m good.”
Lily snorted—quite possibly the most unladylike sound I’d ever heard her make.
Catching sight of movement near the house, I sat up. “What’s my mom doing here?” I asked as she started striding across the field toward us. “And why is she carrying formal dresses?”
he previous December, my mom had shown up unannounced on Lillian’s front porch, moments before the whole family had left for the annual Christmas party at the club. Why Ana’s visit had convinced her to pull a repeat performance, I couldn’t say, but there was no talking her out of it, and she was dead set on dragging Lily and me along.
“Hold still,” Lily gritted out as she twisted my French braid—which she’d just finished—into some kind of updo and jabbed a half-dozen bobby pins directly into my skull.
“That hurts,” I told her.
“Pain is beauty,” Lily retorted. She stepped up behind me in the mirror, and her expression shifted. The dresses my mom had bought us matched. Hers was navy, mine a brighter, cerulean blue.
“You know,” I said, thinking back on the past year, “I never really understood that phrase—pain is beauty—until now.”
