Page 48 of Deadly Little Scandals
“Who else knows that my father is also yours?” Lily asked quietly. “You didn’t tell me. You didn’t feel like you could. Whodidyou tell?”
I’d only told one person.
“Nick,” I said. Before the gala, before he’d called in any favors, back when I could count the total number of times we’d had anything resembling a conversation on one hand, I’d told him something that no one outside of this family had any business knowing.
“Are you two…” Lily trailed off, then course-corrected. Right now, what Nick and I were—or more accurately, given his radio silence, what we obviouslyweren’t—was beside the point. “He’s the only one who knows?” Lily asked instead.
I pressed my lips together and shook my head. “Lillian knows, too, but I didn’t tell her.”
Lily brought a hand to cover her mouth, like she could take whatever she was feeling and snuff it out. After several seconds, she lowered her hand. “And Campbell? You two have been thick as thieves this summer, whispering every chance you get.”
I hadn’t realized that she’d noticed—or cared. “I told Cam that her father wasn’t mine. That’s all.”
“Okay. Tell me everything,” Lily said, her voice hollow and her eyes strangely bright. “And, Sawyer? Don’t you dare leave a damn thing out.”
xplaining the circumstances surrounding my conception took a while. But once Lily seemed to have wrapped her mind around the abbreviated version of Sawyer’s Messed-Up Origins 101—the pact, Greer’s involvement, exactly what I’d been talking to Ana about at the hospital—the decision to go back through the recordings with a fine-tooth comb didn’t take us long.
We started back at the beginning—not just the three recordings Lily had played for me, but every conversation John David had caught. The rest of them were fairly run-of-the-mill—no mention of bodies or blackmail or how and when Aunt Olivia had discovered that her husband was my father.
“I can’t stay here,” Lily told me once we’d finished. “I just…I can’t be in this house right now, Sawyer.”
I let my gaze travel to the roses the White Gloves had left us—and the envelopes.
“I’m with you,” I told Lily. “Let’s get the hell out of Dodge.”
King’s Island. 10 p.m.That was all our invitations said. Once we ascertained that John David was occupied with decorating his golf cart—and once we hadpromisedto return in time to put the finishing touches on it in the morning—we did get the hell out of Dodge, via Jet Skis.
Riding separately from Lily, I leaned into the wind as we cut across the main channel.As far as we can, as fast as we can.I’d missed Lily these past weeks. I’d missed beingus. Whatever she needed from me, I’d give her.
Anywhere she ran, I’d run, too.
Water sprayed the right side of my body as Lily sped past me. We wove in and out of a larger boat’s wake.Farther. Faster.I could feel the sun on my face and forearms and the tops of my feet.
But no matter how loud the roar of the engine beneath me was, no matter how free I should have felt, I still couldn’t outrun the realizations of the past hour: that Aunt Olivia had known about her husband’s mistress—not to mention the truth about my paternity—for an indeterminate amount of time; that Uncle J.D. had apparently been giving Ana money; that years ago, long before either Lily or I had been conceived, Aunt Olivia had blackmailed her husband into marriage.
You won’t tell anyone what happened,I could hear Uncle J.D. saying.You have as much to lose as I do if the truth about that body comes out.
Right after the Lady of the Lake had washed ashore, Aunt Olivia had gone on a strike against weekend trips to Regal Lake. She’d filled our days with crafts and togetherness and left zero time for us to follow up on what we’d stumbled into. That wasn’t suspicious per se.
Not in isolation.
That body…
I hoped Lily was having an easier time outrunning her thoughts than I was having with mine. Barring that, I was cautiously optimistic that whatever the White Gloves had planned for this evening would do the trick.
It was still light outside when Lily and I made it to King’s Cove. We stayed out on the water until the sun started its descent. As daylight began to give way, we cut our engines and waded into the shallows, throwing the entire weight of our bodies into pulling the Jet Skis up onto the shore.
King’s Island wasn’t more than a hundred yards across. There was no dock and only one crumbling building, made of siding and wood. The closer we got to it, the more apparent it became that, at some point, there had been a fire here. Parts of the house had burned and had never been replaced.
There was no roof.
“What time is it?” Lily asked me.
I wasn’t wearing a watch, so I made my best guess based on the sun’s position, sinking down past the horizon. “Eight thirty, eight forty-five?”
“That gives us another hour to kill.” Lily placed her hand on the wall of the abandoned house. She stared at it for almost a minute, then headed inside. I followed. “If I asked you to fight me,” she said softly, “would you?”
My stomach dropped, like an elevator whose cables had been abruptly cut, and a chill crawled up my spine. I’d thought that I’d been forgiven. I’d thought Lily and I were us again. Even when she’d been giving me the silent treatment, I’d never thought she wanted to hurt me.
