Page 40 of Deadly Little Scandals
I did, and I didn’t. Nothing about this was okay.Iwasn’t okay. So I sent the text to Nick, and then I waited.
The hospital had a room for Lily. The nurse showed us back as we waited for her to finish the CT scan—family only. We left Campbell and Sadie-Grace in the waiting area and I found myself alone with Lily’s father.
Ourfather.
“How long?” I asked him, my voice devoid of all emotion.
He looked at me, no more disheveled than if he’d just stepped off the golf course or out of a boardroom. “They’ll bring her back as soon as they—”
“How long have you been sleeping with Ana?”
“We’re not discussing this, Sawyer,” J.D. said.
“Would you rathernot discussthe affair you’re having now,” I asked him, eyes narrowed, “or the one you had approximately nine months before I was born?”
The implication underlying my question landed like a punch.
“You…”
“I know,” I said. “I know that you slept with my mother. I know that you got her pregnant. I know that you’re the kind of person who could pretend, all this time, that I was just your niece.”
“Does Lily—”
I didn’t let him finish the question. “You are aware that Ana was a friend of my mom’s, right? Did you know that they got pregnant together? That they planned it?”
“Sawyer.” J.D.’s hand closed around my forearm. “This isn’t the time or the place.” He might have said something else, but then his gaze caught on something behind me.
Someone.
I turned to see Ana Sofía Gutierrez standing in the doorway. I couldn’t believe she’d had the gall to come to the hospital, let alone Lily’s family-only room. I definitely couldn’t believe that the moment Lily’s father saw her, he stopped talking to me and crossed to take her hands in his and whisper something in her ear.
I stared at the two of them. For ten or fifteen seconds, I stood there, frozen, and then a strange, numb fury settled over my body, extremity by extremity and limb by limb. I’d spent monthsnotacknowledging the truth of my relationship to the man, and now that I had?
He’d walked away.
I didn’t remember taking a single step toward the two of them, but the next thing I knew, I was within an arm’s length.
“I should go,” Ana was murmuring. I didn’t know why she’d come to the hospital in the first place, why she’d followed us out of the woods, in a way sure to inspire questions and start the rumor mill churning.
“I’ll be okay,” J.D. told her.
That was about all I could take. “Really don’t think whether or notyouare going to be okay is the real issue here.”
“Hey,” Ana said, looking directly at me for the first time since she’d appeared in the doorway. “Ease up. We’re all worried about Lily.”
“You don’t even know Lily,” I snapped. “And clearly, she isn’t much of a priority to either one of you.”
“Sawyer,” Uncle J.D. said lowly. “Please.”
“Please what?” I retorted. “Please don’t make a scene?”
Before he could reply, a doctor appeared and pulled him aside, and the two of them began talking in muted tones. I wanted to hear what they were saying, but I couldn’t quite convince my body to turn my back on the woman opposite me.
The woman who was having some kind of affair with my aunt’s husband. The other participant in the pregnancy pact. A woman Campbell and I hadn’t been able to find a trace of.
“Everything is going to be fine,” she told me.
That snapped me out of it. “You don’t get to tell me that things are going to be fine,” I said, enunciating every word. “And you don’t get to ‘worry’ about Lily. You’re banging her father, who, as goes without saying, is a fetid piece of rotting—”
