Page 97 of Deadly Little Scandals
Years ago, when my mom had gone to tell her mother that she was pregnant, Aunt Olivia had beaten her there. She’d already told Lillian thatshewas pregnant.
With Lily.
“Lily is two months younger than me,” I said out loud.And so is Ana’s baby. Lily has blond hair and dark brown eyes. Ana came to the hospital when Lily was injured.
There was a reason that Aunt Olivia hadn’t wanted Lily to go to Two Arrows, why she hadn’t taken kindly to me asking Ellen questions about Ana.
“Ellen said she didn’t take a dime from the people who adopted Ana’s baby,” I told Aunt Olivia. “Ana got paid, but Ellen didn’t.” I paused. “Ellen wouldn’t takeyourmoney.”
“Wait a second,” Campbell interjected. “Are you implying…”
That Lily is Ana’s baby.
“I went to Ellen.” Olivia spoke before I could. “To my mama. Do you know how hard that was, Sawyer? How humbling? When I left Two Arrows, she saidGood riddance. And if she’d known where I was going—what I was planning to do…” Aunt Olivia shook her head. “I never wanted to go back there, but I’d told Lillian and my husband that I was pregnant. I’d beaten Ellie to the punch. Back then, J.D. would have left me if I’d given him half an excuse. But if he thought I was pregnant with his child? If Lillian thought her beloved oldest daughter was pregnant, when she heard about the mess Ellie had gotten herself into?”
“You lied,” I translated.
“I protected myself,” Olivia countered. “You should understand that better than anyone, Sawyer. People like us—we have to protect ourselves. No one else is going to do it for us.”
I thought of Lillian, telling me that I was a fighter, telling me that neither of her daughters ever had been.
I thought about Nick and the way I’d always seen both of us as people who could take care of themselves.
“You lied about being pregnant,” I repeated. “And then you needed a baby.”
“Mama never liked me much,” Aunt Olivia said. “I was too much like Lillian, not enough like her. I wantedmore. God knows what possessed me to go to her for help. But when I did, when I came clean about where I’d been and the life I’d been living, do you know what she said? She said that the things I wanted might have been Lillian things, but the way I’d gone about getting them? The focus and determination and grit? That was all her.” Olivia smiled. “She said that blood was blood, and I was hers, and she’d help me pull one over on her holier-than-thou sister.”
Help you. As in get you a baby.How had Ellen found Ana? How had she talked Ana into giving up the baby?
“Did Ana even know who she was giving her baby to?” I asked out loud.
Aunt Olivia’s response was immediate. “Lily is mine,” she said, in a tone I recognized—one that brooked no argument. She’d used the exact same tone when she’d dismissed my assertion that Greer was faking her pregnancy, telling me not to be ridiculous, that no woman would do a thing like that.
Because she’d done it, too.
“I love my daughter more than life,” Aunt Olivia said fiercely. “John David, too, and before you ask, yes, I carried him my own self, though quite frankly, I don’t see how that matters.” She closed her hand over the lighter, just for a moment. “My children are the best thing I’ve ever done, and I won’t let anyone ruin that.”
She repositioned her grip and flicked the lighter. The second I saw the flame, my mind dissolved into a mess of overlapping thoughts—lighter fluid, a house made out of old wood. Ana’s baby. Uncle J.D. The way he claimed he’d started paying Ana before they were ever involved.
What if she’d run out of money? What if she’d known—or figured out—who had been raising her baby?
What if she’d told J.D.exactlywho she was?
For all their faults, Lily’s parents loved her. I’d never doubted that, and as I took a step toward her mother, I didn’t doubt that now.
“Lily loves me,” I said out loud. I took another step toward Lily’s mama. “She would be heartbroken if anything happened to me. You know that.”
“I know,” Aunt Olivia said. “But accidents do happen—especially at the lake.”
I wondered if that was why she—and Ellen and whoever else had helped them—had brought us to King’s Island. Did Olivia know we’d spent time here earlier this summer? Or was she just looking for a place where she could stage an accident?
What kind of accident involves a fire and a gun?I took another step.
Aunt Olivia swung the gun toward me, her other hand still holding the flame. She spoke again as she began backing toward the door. “You stay right where you are, Sawyer Ann.”
“I think,” Sadie-Grace whispered beside me, “that this is bad.”
The gun. The lighter. Old wood, soaked in an accelerant.
