Page 26 of Deadly Little Scandals
I don’t want to talk to her,I thought, staring down at the sidewalk below.I don’t want to see her.
So why did I bolt from the nursery and head for the stairs? The doorbell chimed. Greer went to open it just as I arrived. She froze when she saw who was on the other side.
“Greer,” my mom drawled. “You look fantastic. Why, you’ve barely put on a pound. If it weren’t for that baby bump, I’d swear you weren’t pregnant at all.”
Subtle, Mom. Real subtle.
As if she’d heard my thoughts, my mom turned to look at me. I could see her wanting to say something, on the verge of saying something—but she didn’t get the chance.
“Ellie.” Greer’s grip on the door tightened, but she didn’t shut it.
One did not slam the door in the face of one of Lillian Taft’s daughters—in front of witnesses.
My mom had grown up in this world. She knew how the game was played, but as she maneuvered her way through the room, chitchatting with other guests, she kept at least half of her attention on me. When the party moved to what the Waters family referred to as “the Great Room,” she fell in beside me and spoke. “You look good, Sawyer. Happy.”
Happy? She thought I looked happy?Happy that you’re here? Happy that you slept with Uncle J.D.? Happy to have recently discovered a decades-old corpse?
I couldn’t even muster a proper response.
The Great Room furniture had been removed and replaced with a cluster of eight-top tables, each set with different china. I only half heard Greer telling people that this set was her mother’s, and that set was her grandmother’s, and oh, that one belonged to Great-Grandmother Waters.
Why are you here, Mom? What do you want?
My mother took a seat at the table with the Waters china and stared up at me expectantly. Before I could decide whether to join her or back away, Aunt Olivia appeared beside me and steered me into a seat, placing herself squarely between my mom and me.
She must have sensed that this could go to hell in a handbasket—fast.
A woman I recognized took a seat across from Aunt Olivia. “It’s been an age,” Julia Ames—Boone’s mother—declared. “How have you been, Liv?”
“She goes by Olivia now.” My mom could weaponize smiles with the best of them. She’d told me once that after their father had died, Aunt Olivia had run away. Back then, she’d gone by Liv. When she’d come back, she was Olivia, practically perfect in every way and not interested in sharing her sister’s grief in the least.
She abandoned you, so you slept with her husband.If my mom was here to give me excuses, I didn’t want to hear them.
Campbell took the seat on my left. “You’re not happy to see her,” she murmured. “I get it. Believe me, I do, Sawyer. But you have to talk to your mama.”
Campbell Ames was the last person in the world I expected to be brokering parent-child reunions—especially given that sheknewmy mom had lied to me.
And then Campbell made her reasoning apparent. “See if she knows anything about Ana.”
There’s no logical reason to think that the Lady of the Lake is Ana Gutierrez.I got why Campbell had gone there—Ana had been pregnant with Sterling Ames’s child, and we all knew Cam’s dad wasn’t exactly a trustworthy guy. The fact that his teenage mistress had seemingly disappeared didn’t look particularly good.
But the past year had taught me to look before I leaped.
“I don’t know how Boone broke his pinkie finger!” Sadie-Grace’s perky statement snapped me back into the moment. She appeared to be addressing Boone’s mother. “I’m sure whatever he was doing at the time, it was totally PG.”
“Sawyer.” My mom cleared her throat. “Could I borrow you for a minute?”
Brunch was just being served. Mini muffins, mini cinnamon rolls, mini quiches, and mini cucumber sandwiches. So many tiny foods, so many reasonsnotto talk to my mother.
“Please.”
A flash of vulnerability crossed her face, and my chest tightened. Campbell gave me a look, and I stood. I couldn’t undo a lifetime of loving the only parent I’d ever had—and for better or worse, I couldn’t ignore her forever.
ell?” I said. I’d gone outside. My mom had followed. Now the two of us were standing in the backyard. The only sound, other than my question, was the tinkling of water over the infinity edge in the pool. “Why are you here?” I asked.
My mom caught my gaze and held it. “You’re not allowed to hate me.” She softened the declaration with a small, lopsided smile. “I’ve thought about it, and I’ve decided. I love you too much. You’re not allowed to hate me.”
She’d never had any trouble telling me that she loved me. Even when she was barely more than a kid herself, even when our little family was struggling—I had always known that I was loved.
