Everything hurt.
The cart must have flipped. That was my first thought. It felt immediate, like less than a second had passed since we’d gone over the ledge, but that couldn’t have been true, because, somehow, I was lying on muddy, damp grass, sticks and rocks digging into the flesh bared by my vintage dress.
“Lily?” That was my second thought as I pushed up to my elbows, my entire body objecting. The lights on the golf cart had gone out. I couldn’t see either of my companions. “Lily, are you okay?”
That question was greeted by a moan. I crawled toward the sound until I hit a figure lying prone. Not Lily, I realized belatedly. Victoria.
“I’m fine,” she said before I could ask.
I wanted to tell her that she wasn’t fine, that she was an idiot, that we all were, because what did we expect to happen, off-roading in a vehicle that wasn’t meant for off-roading with limited visibility and unpredictable terrain?
I heard Victoria sit up before my eyes could process what little movement I was able to see. There was a shuffling sound, and then there was light. “Let’s hear it for dresses with pockets,” she said, brandishing her phone.
Flashlight mode let me see just far enough that I was able to spot Lily. She’d landed much farther from Victoria and me than either one of us had been from the other. My brain said that didn’t make sense. Lily had been sitting right beside me. Victoria was the one who’d been in the back.
As I crawled carefully toward Lily, I let my thoughts race, let my brain outline all the reasons that if I was in one piece, Lily had to be, too.
“Lily.” I reached her. “Are you okay?”
Unlike Victoria, she didn’t moan. I told myself that it was because Lily was too much of a stickler for manners, and she found moaning uncouth.
“Lil—”
“Sawyer.”
For a fraction of a second, I was terrified that Victoria was the one who’d said my name, even though it had come from Lily’s direction, even though I was close enough to her body now to practically feel the words on my face.
“You’re okay?” I said.
Lily let out a long and wobbly breath. “I’m in significantly better condition than my dress.”
Leave it to her to be thinking about our clothing at a time like this.
“Victoria?” Lily asked.
“I’m fine.” Victoria punctuated that statement by flooding us with light—not from her phone this time. She’d managed to find the cart. The roof had been knocked clean off, and two of the four bars that had been holding it up were demolished.
At least the lights still worked.
“You’re bleeding,” Victoria stated. I thought she was talking to me, but she quickly corrected that misapprehension. “Not you. Her.” She jerked her head toward Lily, who was still lying on the ground, and who, I could see now, had blood smeared across her face and temple.
“I shall choose to believe,” Lily said, forcing herself into a sitting position, “that her is Victoria’s version of an affectionate nickname.”
I reached out. “Your head.”
Lily swatted my hand away. “Head wounds bleed. It’s what they do. I’m okay.”
“What’s your name?” I asked her. “What’s today’s date? Who’s the president?”
“As long as we’re asking questions,” Victoria said beside me, “Sawyer could enlighten us as to why she and Davis Ames felt the need to step outside back at the gala.”
“What is your deal with the Ames family?” I said at the exact same moment that Lily attempted to climb to her feet and deal with Victoria herself.
“Sawyer has her reasons,” she said, unsteady on her feet. “She and Mr. Ames have… a lot in common.”
The vise around my chest loosened slightly. If Lily was with it enough to infer that the reason I’d stepped outside with Davis Ames was because—as far as she knew—he was my grandfather, her cognitive capacities were clearly intact.
The fear that her condition was serious gave way to guilt more intense than any I’d felt in the past few weeks. “Lily,” I said. “Don’t.”
Don’t defend me. Don’t remind me that I’m a liar.
Lily pursed her lips. “Sawyer, you’ve been acting . . .” Even with a head wound, Lily couldn’t bring herself to use a descriptor as ill-mannered as weird or strange. “. . . at odds with yourself for weeks. What is going on with you?”
I looked toward Victoria—and the demolished golf cart. “We need to get the cart upright and get out of here. If someone else comes over that drop, we’re toast—or they are.”
Victoria handed Lily a strip of fabric. “Press this to your head and try to stop the bleeding. Sawyer, help me with the cart—and answer the damn question. Mine or your cousin’s, I’m not bothered much as to which.”
Getting the cart upright again was the easier task. I could have ignored Victoria’s instruction. I could have told Lily that I was fine, but I just kept thinking of the seconds when I hadn’t been sure I’d ever be able to talk to her again.
Up until now, I’d been keeping secrets from Lily, but I hadn’t lied to her.
Campbell knows that her father isn’t mine. She’s not going to keep it from Walker forever. One way or another, that much of my secret was coming out.
Better that Lily heard it from me.
“I was talking to Davis Ames,” I said, the cuts and scrapes on my legs, arms, and chest throbbing as Victoria and I coordinated our movements and got the cart back on its wheels, “because his son was the father of Ana’s baby.” I glanced at Victoria. “I’m guessing your father knows that, and his takeover attempt earlier this summer was somehow related.”
“My niece was pregnant by Campbell’s father?” Victoria asked, eyebrows jetting up.
“The senator—” Lily stopped, then tried again. “Sterling Ames,” she corrected herself, and then she finally just said, “Two?”
As in: He got two teenagers pregnant?
“What do you mean, two?” Victoria asked.
I directed my answer to my cousin. “Not two, Lily. My mom, what she told me that night at the Christmas party about Sterling Ames, it’s not true.”
“She lied to you?” Lily said. “But Campbell’s mama as good as confirmed it.”
“A case of mistaken identity,” I explained. “Wrong pregnant teenage girl.”
“And it’s just a coincidence that your mother and her friend both got pregnant?” Victoria asked.
I walked around to the back of the golf cart. “Help me push this,” I said. “It’s either that, or we leave it here.”
For a moment, I thought Victoria would press for answers, but she didn’t. “We need the light.” The White Glove was remarkably calm under pressure—and far more logical than I would have anticipated. “Phones don’t get a signal out here, so we’re on our own for getting back to the party. The headlights do a hell of a lot more than a cell in flashlight function.”
I listened but couldn’t hear even a trace of the other groups. How far into the woods had we gone? How big were they?
“Push,” Victoria told me. “Lily, if you need to ride . . .”
“I can push.”
Somehow, I had a feeling that after Victoria saw this side of my very proper cousin, getting an invitation to the next White Glove event wouldn’t be a problem for Lily.
We’ll be lucky if the next one doesn’t kill us.
“Do we even know which direction we’re going?” Lily asked five minutes later.
I was on the verge of responding, but Victoria beat me to it. “I always know exactly where I am. It’s a family trait.”
“Stop,” I said suddenly. They complied. “Listen,” I told them. The silence had given way, and in the distance, I could hear something—people. Talking. Laughing.
“Over here!” Victoria yelled. Lily and I added our voices, to no effect.
“We could go in that direction,” I said, eyeing what I could see of the terrain. “But we’d have to leave the cart behind. The brush is too dense, and the trees are too close together. We’ll never make it through that way pushing.”
We fell into silence and, again, heard laughter. It was faint, but it was there.
Victoria turned her phone back to flashlight mode. “I guess this will have to do.”
Lily and I followed closely on her heels. Eventually, the sounds of the others grew louder, and when there was finally a break in the trees, I could make out the outline of a golf cart ahead. It took until we got much closer for me to realize it was parked—and empty.
A second later, I heard the voices again and realized, with a start, that one of them was male. I looked to the key, still in the golf cart we’d found. Closer inspection showed that it had a key chain, but not one of ours.
No snake, no rose.
Victoria shone her flashlight on the key, and I saw that the key chain was a Mercedes.
A stick snapped up ahead of us. Victoria pivoted, and so did the light. One second, I spotted clothing slung carefully over a low-hanging limb on a nearby tree, and the next second, a naked man stepped into view and turned in the direction from which he’d just emerged.
Beside me, Lily let out a strangled whisper. “Daddy.”
I’d thought, in passing, that Lily’s father might be having an affair, but there was a difference between thinking something in the abstract and seeing it in the flesh. Literally.
I briefly entertained the ridiculous idea that maybe Aunt Olivia was out here with him, but the next second, a woman stepped into view. She saw the flashlight, even though Uncle J.D. was too involved in what he was doing—and her—to notice.
“J.D.,” the woman said softly.
I stared at her, trying to process what I was seeing. The woman reaching to grab her clothing off the tree had blond hair, but her features and skin-tone bore a striking resemblance to Victoria’s.
I know that woman. I told myself I was being ridiculous, that there was no way, but the next word out of Uncle J.D.’s mouth put a nail in that coffin.
That word, which he murmured into her neck, was: “Ana.”