Page 83 of Deadly Little Scandals
“Do you even know wherehereis?”
“Enlighten me.”
“We’re on King’s Island, and we really don’t want to be here when it starts to storm.”
ily didn’t say a word to anyone for two days after her father’s visit. I came close—more than once—to telling her what I suspected about Ana, Two Arrows, and our grandmother’s twin, but I didn’t.
I’d seen a crack in the barrier she’d put up between the rest of the world and her emotions, but I wasn’t sure what would happen when it shattered. I didn’t want to be the one to break her.
Damn Nick. Damn him for being right—and for being the one person I wanted to call. But he’d told me not to come back.
I assumed that meant he wouldn’t pick up the phone.
I’m done playing.
“Have you seen your cousin?” Aunt Olivia asked me. Since J.D.’s visit, she’d been, in Lillian’s words,in a bit of a tizzy. Also known as: full-blown togetherness mode. She’d filled our itineraries with lakeside bonding activities: water sports, mini golf at the yacht club, cookouts, s’mores, ghost stories, midnight movie marathons—pretending the whole time that Lily wasn’t silent and in danger of heatstroke with the way she was dressed.
“I’ll go look for her,” I said.
“I thought we could all go tubing,” Aunt Olivia called after me. “In that cove you like. What’s it called?” In true Taft woman style, my aunt answered her own question: “King’s Cove.”
I found Lily in our closet, hiding from her mother.
“Where’s a pantry when you need one?” I asked her.
I saw then that she was holding something in her hands.A phone.I stepped closer, and realized that it was mine. “Lily?”
She turned toward me. Her dark brown eyes met mine. “You got a text.” She held out the phone. “Three of them.”
Nick.My first thought was a nonsensical one, and I knew it. My second didn’t come in words. My stomach twisting, I took the phone from Lily.
After more than a month of radio silence from the White Gloves, they’d gotten in touch.Three texts.The rose, the snake, a message:The Candidates are many. The Chosen are few. You have been chosen. Tonight,King’s Island, midnight.
A fourth text came through while I was standing there, one word:Initiation.
“Each White Glove chooses her own replacement,” Lily said. “I’m betting Victoria chose you—or maybe Hope did. One of them probably chose Campbell, and I think Nessa’s halfway in love with Sadie-Grace.”
I didn’t ask whether Lily had gotten a text. I didn’t have to.
“It’s stupid,” Lily said softly. “That I wanted this so badly.” She swallowed. “Even when I stopped wanting anything else.”
“It doesn’t matter,” I told her. “I won’t go tonight.”
“It does,” she replied as she began taking clothes off the hangers. “And you will.”
Over the course of the summer, I’d never once unpacked my lake bag. I just swapped in clean clothes for the dirty ones and kept everything else—swimsuits, flip-flops, toiletries—packed. Lily, on the other hand, unpacked her bag every weekend.
And now she was packing. “Stop that,” I told her.
“My mama ran away when she was a year younger than we are now.” Lily addressed the words as much toward her paisley bag as to me. “Did you know that, Sawyer? I didn’t, until your mama let that slip to me over Fourth of July. When my mama was seventeen, she left home, society, all of it, for more than half a year. And when she came back, it was like she was a different person.”
“So?” I asked.
Lily zipped her bag. “I’m ready to be a different person, Sawyer.”
I reached for my own, already-packed lake bag. “I’ll go with you. Forget the White Gloves. We can have a secret society of two.”
Lily was quiet for a long time, then managed five words. “That’s not what I want.”
