Page 4 of Deadly Little Scandals
The whole situation was a mess. My entire life, my mom had never once made me feel like a mistake, but somehow, discovering that she’d conceived me on purpose made me feel like one.
If my mom hadn’t still been grieving her father’s death…
If she hadn’t felt like a stranger in her own family and desperately wanted someone or something to call her own…
If her “friend” Greer hadn’t seen that vulnerability and sold her on a ridiculous, happy vision of becoming a teen mom…
Then I wouldn’t exist.
“Sawyer.” Lillian said my name gently. “Bangs are for blondes and toddlers, and you, my dear, are neither.”
If she wanted to pretend that my hair was the real issue between us—and in this family—I was okay with that. For now.
“If you brought me here to check up on me,” I told her, “I’m fine.” I averted my gaze, and it landed on my grandfather’s tombstone. “I’m a liar, but I’m fine.”
I couldn’t forgive my mom for deceiving me, but every day, I got up and let Aunt Olivia and Lily and John David go about life like normal. It was hard not to feel like the apple hadn’t fallen far from the tree.
“Your mama was a daddy’s girl, Sawyer.” Lillian looked back at the tombstone. “Your aunt, too. Growing up the way they did, they never had to be fighters. But you? You’ve got a healthy dose of me in you, and where I come from, a person has to fight to survive.”
That was the second time she’d referenced her origins. “Why did you bring me here?” I asked, unable to shake the feeling that nothing about this conversation—including the location—was an accident.
Lillian was quiet for a stretch, long enough that I wasn’t sure she was going to reply. “You asked me weeks ago if I could find out what happened to your mama’s friend Ana.”
The breath stilled in my chest.Ana, Ellie, and Greer,I thought, forcing myself to keep breathing.Three teenage girls, one pact.Greer had lost her baby, and that meant that Ana’s—if she’d had it—was the only other person on this planet with an origin story the exact same flavor of screwed-up as mine.
Her kid would be my age now, almost exactly.
“What did you find out?” I asked Lillian, my mouth dry.
“Ana was a quiet little thing. My recollection of her was fuzzy. She was new in town. I’d heard of her people but didn’t know them. From what I’ve pieced together, she and her family picked up and moved back home around the time I found out about your mama’s delicate condition.”
By that time,I thought,Ana was pregnant, too.
“Where were they from?” I asked. “Where did they move back to?”
There was a long pause as my grandmother made an intense study of me. “Why do you want to find this woman?”
Lillian knew that Uncle J.D. was my father, but as far as I’d been able to tell, she had no knowledge of the pact. There was no real reason for me to keep it from her, but it wasn’t the easiest thing in the world to come right out and say.
“Sawyer?” my grandmother prompted.
“Ana was pregnant, too,” I said, clipping the words. “They planned it that way. I don’t know if she had the baby, but if she did…”
Lillian weathered the blow I’d just dealt her. “If she had the baby, then what?”
I tried to find words, but they all seemed shallow and insufficient. How could I adequately explain that the same reason I’d wanted to find out who my father was, the same reason I’d longed to meet the family my mom despised, the reason I’d stayed here even after I’d discovered the truth—that was exactly why I wanted to know what happened to Ana’s baby, too.
People who’d always had a family to count on and a place to belong couldn’t truly understand the draw of that little whisper that saidThere’s someone like you.
Someone who wouldn’t hold my origins against me.
“I just want to know,” I told Lillian, my voice low.
There was another silence, more measured than her last. Then she reached into her purse and handed me a newspaper, folded open to the business section.
I scanned the headlines but had no idea what I was supposed to be looking for.
“The article about the attempted corporate takeover,” Lillian told me. “You’ll notice that one of the companies is an international telecommunications conglomerate whose CEO is a man named Victor Gutierrez. The other company is owned by Davis Ames.”
