Page 54 of Deadly Little Scandals
“Sawyer.” Victoria turned to me, implicitly accepting Lily’s second offering as sufficient. “You’re up.”
The secret I’d written down on my card was only two words long.I CARE.I’d spent a lot of my life in self-protection mode. I’d learned early on that it was better not to expect too much of people. I liked to think of myself as someone who didn’t have tender feelings for other people to hurt.
If nothing mattered that much, it was hard for anything to penetrate your armor.
But the truth was that I cared. I’d always cared—about the way my mom was the best friend a girl could ask for one moment and off chasing daydreams the next. About the way a subset of people had talked to me and about me in the town where I’d grown up.
About not having a father.
Now I had other people to care about, too. People who could leave me. People who could decide, if they were so inclined, that I was more trouble than I was worth.
“Sawyer,” Victoria prompted again.
I glanced at Lily, who’d just admitted that, for the first time in her life, she had no idea who or what she wanted.
“I wrote down ‘I care,’” I said, still looking at Lily. “But since I suspect that won’t beenough”—I shifted my gaze to Victoria, who might not have chosen to press me the way she’d pressed Lily—“I’ll throw in another secret for good measure.”
There wasn’t much I could have said that would have stood a chance of distracting Campbell from Lily’s admission—and everything it implied about Lily’s relationship with Campbell’s brother. So I went for something just as personal, a corollary to caring—and being well aware of the dangers of caring too much.
“Idoknow what I want,” I said. “And I know what I don’t want.” I’d never actually said this out loud before, but the words came out easily. “I never want to fall in love.”
That night, when Lily and I snuck back into the family’s lake house and to the turret room, our grandmother was the one who caught us on the stairs.
“Your mama isn’t happy you girls pulled a disappearing act,” she warned Lily mildly.
“Mama’s never happy,” Lily said. “Or she always is. Honestly, it’s getting hard to tell.”
Lillian’s expression softened—or at least shifted—as she processed the truth in Lily’s words. Without any additional commentary, she turned to me. “Sawyer, your mama might have a bit of a headache in the morning.” My grandmother was far too discreet to say the worddrunk, but she did elaborate. “I believe there were Long Island iced teas involved.”
The fact that my mom had been drinking in their presence was enough to get an eyebrow raise out of me. They were lucky she hadn’t gotten weepy and started reminiscing about my conception.
Assuming she didn’t.
“Come on,” I told Lily, nodding toward the turret room. “Ellie Taft sleeps like the dead when there are Long Island iced teas involved.”
Since my mom was passed out in one of the twin beds in the turret room, Lily and I both squeezed into the other. It was a tight fit, but we were both spent, and I don’t think either one of us wanted to be alone. Her hair ended up spread across our pillow. Mine was bunched up beneath me.
I didn’t say a word to her about Walker, and she didn’t say a thing to me about love.
orning came early—and bymorning, I meantJohn David. I awoke to him cannonballing onto the bed Lily and I were sharing. I ended up with what I was fairly certain would turn into a pretty impressive bruise, and Lily ended up on the floor.
John David, on all fours on the bed, made no apologies.“Golf cart,”he declared emphatically.“Parade.”
Due to what he’d termed a “sparkler deficit,” John David had opted for themed decorations. The theme he’d decided on was “Star Wars Spangled Banner.”
“Does the cart look enough like the Death Star?” John David asked, eyeing his work critically. “Except also like the American flag?”
I thought there was some questionable and assuredly unintentional symbolism at play there for a holiday that was supposed to be patriotic, but who was I to argue with genius?
“It looks exactly like the Death Star,” I told him. “And also the American flag.”
“Good.” John David narrowed his eyes at Lily and me. “Listen up, soldiers. We only have ninety minutes to finish these lightsabers and droids.”
It turned out that when it came to arts and crafts, John David was an even stricter taskmaster than his mother. With five minutes to go on our ninety-minute deadline and all three of us sopping wet from sweat, he stepped back to appraise our work.
“Perfect,” he declared. “Now all we need is to get William Faulkner into her costume.”
Putting pants on a dog was not what one would call “easy.” Putting pants on a purebred, hundred-pound Bernese mountain dog who was fairly certain she did not want to wear pants could have substituted for one of the twelve labors of Hercules.
