I looked slowly from the long chunk of hair on the floor to Lily, who was still staring Victoria down.
“Hope,” Victoria said. “A little help here?”
Hope stepped forward and took the scissors from Lily’s hands.
“She’s good with hair,” I heard a White Glove whisper beside me. “Really good.”
As I watched Hope, with her appreciation for chaos, assessing the damage Lily had wreaked, I thought back to the picture in the dossier Campbell had shown me. To Summer.
I tried to imagine what it would feel like to be Hope, to have lost a sister.
Ten minutes later, Lily was sporting a chin-length bob.
“My work here is done,” Hope declared. She snipped the scissors in the air to accentuate the point.
I let myself look at Lily. The bob didn’t look bad at all. Mostly, it looked different, which I deeply suspected, for Lily, was the point.
As the lot of us got dressed again and headed for the main house—and the party—I thought back to the night at Arcadia, when Campbell and I had found three keys waiting for us at the valet stand. The White Gloves had already cut Lily once.
But that was before we’d caught her father with Ana in the woods. Before her family had fallen apart. Before she’d broken up with Walker and fearlessly taken a chunk out of her own hair.
Pick her, I thought. She needs this more than I do, more than Sadie-Grace, maybe even more than Campbell. Pick her.
Stepping into the foyer, I found myself looking automatically for Nick. Per our plan, he was supposed to meet me here. I would play the role of his escort. His date. We’d mingle. We’d chitchat.
We’d make sarcastic comments about the evils of mingling and chitchat.
But Nick was nowhere to be seen. Where is he? I tried and failed to push down the urge to get out my phone. The screen informed me that I had a missed call and a text: three words, which was practically a novel, considering Nick’s views on texting.
Something came up.
He didn’t say what that something was. It doesn’t matter, I told myself. I didn’t need him here to hold my hand.
To hold me.
The whole point of this party was creating an opportunity for Ana to show up and taking advantage of the opportunity to talk to her if she did. That would be easier without Nick along.
I’m glad something came up. I’d halfway convinced myself of that when my grandmother saw me from across the room. She must not have spotted Lily yet, because she eyed my side bang and crossed the open floor plan to talk to me.
“Sawyer, might I have a word?”
“Do I have a choice?” I asked.
Lillian smiled. “I’m not going to ask you about those bangs,” she said, taking my arm and leading me to a nearby alcove in a way that would have suggested to any onlookers that she was interested in doing nothing more than showing me the art hanging on the wall there. “And I’m certainly not going to ask you what your cousin did to her hair.”
So Lillian had seen Lily. Then why corner me?
“She’s not just my cousin,” I muttered under my breath. “And I think her hair looks good.”
My grandmother studied me for a moment. “Have I done something to upset you, Sawyer?”
“No.”
“You’ve been avoiding me.” The fact that Lillian hadn’t communicated that information through the use of a pleasant rhetorical question told me how much she was bothered by the observation.
She wasn’t wrong. I had been avoiding her—for the past two weeks.
“If this is about your mama . . .” Lillian started to say, but the look on my face seemed to bring her up short. “Or your aunt . . .” she modified. Then, taking in my expression, she paused. “Well, for heaven’s sakes, Sawyer, what is this about?”
I made a show of studying the painting in front of me. It was a landscape, and though it didn’t strike me as anything special, I had few doubts that the signature in the bottom right corner would have meant something to someone who knew art.
“I went to Two Arrows.”
I heard Lillian suck in a breath beside me. In public, that was the most that any revelation could cause her to do.
“Two Arrows is not a safe place for you to go.”
I wasn’t sure what I’d expected from Lillian, but that sentiment wasn’t it—though given the vibe I’d gotten from her sister and her gun-toting associates, maybe it should have been.
“You grew up there,” I pointed out. “And you turned out fine.”
“That, I believe, is a matter of some debate.”
I turned to look at Lillian. She hadn’t asked me if I’d met her sister. I knew her well enough to deeply suspect that she wasn’t going to.
“You named my mom after her,” I said. “Ellen, Eleanor—but both called Ellie.”
Lillian was quiet for a moment, and I flashed back to the two of us standing beside her husband’s grave, weeks before.
“She was the strong one, growing up,” Lillian said. To the outside observer, her expression wouldn’t have looked like it changed at all, but I felt a shift in her. I heard it in her voice. “There were days when she didn’t eat so I could.”
Lillian hadn’t said her sister’s name—not Ellen, not Ellie. She hadn’t commented on the fact that she’d named my mother after someone from whom she was estranged.
“Your sister went hungry for you,” I said, finding it hard to believe that there had ever been a time in my grandmother’s life when she hadn’t considered herself strong. “And you left town and never looked back.”
That got me another almost inaudible intake of air, subtler this time, more controlled.
“I would have brought her with me,” my grandmother said. “I tried. Did she tell you that?”
Ellen hadn’t, but she had said that she didn’t want anyone’s charity—least of all her twin’s. “She didn’t want to come with you,” I surmised.
“She didn’t want to want to, Sawyer. She always hated when I talked about leaving that town, and she hated it when I left. She hated your grandfather. Edward Alcott Taft. Even the sound of his name set her to gnashing her teeth. She hated who I was when I was with him. There are days I’m not sure what she resented more—that I left, or that I offered to pull her out.”
“She doesn’t hate Two Arrows,” I said.
Lillian hesitated. “She should.”
My grandmother had told me, more than once, that I didn’t know what it was really like to be poor. Having been to the town where she’d grown up, I wondered if poverty was the only reason that Lillian had wanted to leave.
I thought about Beth, the woman whose screams we’d heard. Audie’s birth mother. She was my second cousin. Given that our grandmothers were identical twins, genetically, she might as well have been a first cousin.
“Your sister had six kids,” I told Lillian. “She has six kids. Did you know that?”
Did any of them go hungry so that their siblings could eat?
“I did what I could for Ellen’s family, Sawyer. I wish to God she’d let me do more.”
“There must have been a way,” I argued.
“My sister found a way.” Lillian’s voice was flat now. Her face had lost its perfunctory, performative smile. “There was some violence in Two Arrows, years back. It left some gaps in the local… ecosystem.”
Because that wasn’t vague or anything.
“Ellie—Ellen, she filled the gaps. Anything bought or sold in that town, she has a hand in it, and she gets a piece of it.”
Anything, I thought. Like drugs. Or sex. I thought of Beth again. Or babies . . .
“Believe me when I say you do not want to get mixed up in my sister’s business,” Lillian told me. “Now, this is neither the time nor the place . . .” She trailed off. I was getting ready to remind her that she was the one who’d cornered me when I realized why she’d trailed off.
Ana Sofía Gutierrez had arrived.
Victoria’s father had told me that he knew why tonight’s party was being thrown. Did that mean that he knew Victoria was looking for the baby, or that he knew Ana was going to be here?
More importantly, how did he intend to respond?
Beside me, it took my grandmother a moment to recover her poise but not more than that. “At least she doesn’t have that man with her.”
There was little question in my mind that that man was meant to be translated to that bastard. All things considered, it was a good thing that, this time, J.D. had decided to stay away.
Across the open floor plan, Victoria began weaving her way through the crowd to greet Ana. A petite woman with dark hair and a figure only partially camouflaged by her A-line dress joined them at the bottom of the stairs. I recognized her from the Arcadia fund-raiser.
That’s Victoria’s mother. And that’s Ana, talking to Victoria and Victoria’s mother.
I didn’t realize I was walking toward them until I felt Lillian’s fingers digging into my arms.
“Don’t you dare, Sawyer Ann,” she said, her for-show smile back in place. “I put in an appearance tonight because your aunt asked me to. Public appearances matter. The situation needed smoothing over. You going over there?”
“Not smooth?” I suggested. “Or discreet?”
I restrained myself from pointing out that Lillian attending a Gutierrez party hardly seemed like enough of a statement to quell gossip about the affair.
“I was told that certain parties would not be in attendance,” my grandmother continued. She refused to give a single outward sign that she’d taken any note of Ana or the way that Victoria and her mother were leading her through the crowd.
If Victoria can get her father to talk to Ana, Ana might talk to us. I watched Victoria’s mother place a kiss on her husband’s cheek and pull him from someone who might have been a business contact, an acquaintance, or a friend.
“Far be it from me to suggest that you’re staring,” Lillian told me. “But . . .”
But Victor Gutierrez just saw Ana. She said something to him. He’s staring at her now. He’s taking a step forward. He’s smiling.
This was going surprisingly well—right up until the moment when Victoria’s eighty-something-year-old father placed a loving hand on Ana’s cheek and keeled over.
Dead.