Page 81 of Deadly Little Scandals
“I really don’t think...” he started to say.
“If you want me,” Lily said, her eyes fixed on the water down below, without any feeling in her tone, “then Sawyer is part of the package. You can talk to both of your daughters—or neither.”
Lily’s father straightened slightly in his chair, the only tell I could see that until that moment, he’d been holding out hope that I hadn’t told Lily the truth about my parentage.
“This situation is... complicated,” J.D. said, casting a meaningful look at the house. Through the window, I could see Aunt Olivia in the kitchen, watching us.
“I’m not looking for a father,” I told him. “Evidence suggests you’re not a particularly good one anyway.”
“He was,” Lily said quietly. “Once.”
That, more than anything else, seemed to pierce his armor. “Sweetheart, you don’t understand....”
She understood enough. Lily had agreed to come out here with me so that I could get something resembling closure, but standing this close to the man who’d fathered me, I found that I didn’t have any real desire to ask him how he’d ever been able to pretend I was just his niece.
I couldn’t ask him to fix whatever it was that was wrong with me.
So I asked a different question—for Lily. “What do you know about the Lady of the Lake?”
Lily hadn’t been able to stop listening to that recording. She needed to know, and I needed to push her, to trust that I could.
“Who?” J.D.’s confusion was genuine, if momentary.
“The Lady of the Lake,” I repeated. At the railing, Lily’s hands tightened over the wood. “The body we found.” I took a stab in the dark. “The reason Aunt Olivia called you when Lily mentioned a forensic sculptor.” No visible response. “The one,” I continued, “that Aunt Olivia is holding over your head.”
I could see the gears in his mind turning, could see the exact moment when he decided to smile and shake his head and treat me like I was speaking nonsense. “Sawyer, I—”
“Lie to her,” Lily said softly. She turned back but looked down at the deck, at the water-marked wood beneath our feet. “You’re good at that.”
That shot proved true. It hit its target and stopped him in his tracks.
“I know you don’t love Mama.” Lily couldn’t stop now that she’d started. “Maybe you never did. But did you ever even love me?”
I could see the shell she’d retreated into these past weeks starting to crack.
“More than anything on the face of this earth,” her father said. “Everything I’ve done, I have done for you, Lily. There’s nothing I wouldn’t do for you and your brother. You and John David are my world.”
“Ouch,” I muttered, under the mistaken impression that treating his words cavalierly might make them hurt less.
“Then tell us about the body,” Lily whispered. “Or tell us about the blackmail. Tell mesomethingthat’s true.”
“I love you.” He looked at her like she was the most precious thing on this planet, then turned to me. “And, Sawyer, I care for you, too. I do. That’s why I’m asking you to just leave well enough alone. This family has been through enough. I’ve put this family through enough.”
“It’s never enough,” Lily said, and the emotion in that abbreviated sentence took me aback. This was the Lily who’d hit the wall. This was the kind of angry that didn’t know how to be anything else.
This was what she’d been keeping under lock and key.
“Ask me something else,” J.D. begged her. “Lily—if there’s something else you want to know, anything else—just ask me.”
I expected her to turn around and walk back inside. She’d come out here for me, and it was clear by this point that I wasn’t going to get anything resembling closure—or answers.
Instead, Lily asked, “How long have you and Ana been having an affair?”
This was exactly the conversation she hadn’t wanted to have. I wished that I could protect her from this. I almost wished I hadn’t pushed.
“We got to know each other when you were twelve.” J.D.’s answer was immediate and without frills. I knew instinctively that it was true. “It wasn’t physical for a few years.”
“How long have you been paying her?”
