I have to go. I played the words I’d said to Nick over and over again in my mind. I made it halfway through dinner before thinking about what he’d said in return.
Don’t come back.
“Lily, sweetheart, you’ve barely eaten.” Aunt Olivia’s attention was blessedly focused on her daughter. Lillian’s, too. Neither one of them had clued in to the fact that there was a damned thing wrong with me. “Can I get you something else?”
Beside me at the table, Lily picked up a steak knife and began meticulously slicing her meat. Slice. Slice. Slice. She used her fork to spear a delicate piece. “I hear the local authorities are bringing in a forensic sculptor,” she said primly, sounding almost like her former self. She dabbed a napkin against her lips. “To identify the body we found.”
Focus on that, I told myself. Think about that.
Aunt Olivia’s reaction to the term forensic sculptor was completely predictable. “Lily,” she said, aghast, “we do not discuss forensics at the dinner table.”
“That’s right,” John David chimed in. “If I can’t politely entertain the idea of zombies who eat their own flesh, you can’t talk about dead people.”
And that was that. Aunt Olivia didn’t seem alarmed. She didn’t seem to find the idea of the Lady of the Lake being given a face particularly worrisome. She exhibited no behavior out of the ordinary whatsoever.
Until she invited Uncle J.D. over that night.
He wasn’t allowed inside the house—Lillian’s orders. So he sat on the back deck, talking to John David and waiting for Lily.
I wondered, when I couldn’t keep myself from it, if my response to Nick would have been different if J.D. had responded differently to me. How much of who I was came from years of watching my mom—and how much of it was something, the only thing, he’d given me?
Three hours later, Lily was still in her room, and her father was still out on the back deck. I’d stopped wondering, stopped replaying the conversation with Nick.
Mostly.
But I couldn’t keep from thinking about the way Nick had said that the reason I hadn’t pushed Lily to say something, do something, feel something, was that I was terrified of losing her.
Hell, that’s why you wanted to find Ana’s baby in the first place.
Eventually, John David went to bed. Eventually, Aunt Olivia stopped coming by to nudge Lily to go out and talk with her daddy.
I found myself standing outside Lily’s door. Somehow, she knew that I was there.
“I don’t want to talk to him,” she said.
“I know,” I replied. “But I do.”
The last time I’d talked to J.D. Easterling had been in the hospital, the night Lily and I had discovered his affair. He’d told me that it was neither the time nor the place to discuss our relationship. He hadn’t made any attempt to contact me since.
“Hello, Daddy.” Lily had woven her hand through mine, and she squeezed it a little tighter as she said the words.
I’d pushed. She’d let me. She’d stayed.
“Lily.” J.D. smiled. “Sweetheart, I’ve missed you so much. Thank you for . . .”
“Talking to you?” Lily’s voice was a little wobbly. She let go of my hand and rested both of hers on the deck railing. “I’m not here to talk to you. Maybe I’ll be ready for that someday. Maybe I won’t. But right now, Sawyer is.”
“Sawyer is what, honey?”
“Ready to talk to you,” I elucidated.
He was an affable person. He’d treated me fondly—as his niece. But now?
“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 me something that’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?”
“You don’t need to know that.”
She stared at him, impassive, until he answered.
“Since you were twelve.”
It took me a second to register the fact that J.D. Easterling had just claimed that he’d been giving Ana money before he’d had a physical relationship with her at all.
As far as I knew, he’d never given my mother a dime.
“Why were you paying her?” I asked. “If you weren’t sleeping with her, if you were just getting to know her—why give her money?”
J.D. didn’t answer. Lily shook her head, disgusted, because he couldn’t even give us this.
“I’m not paying Ana anymore.” J.D. tried to make it sound like he’d taken a stand, but taking into account what Campbell had said about the late Victor Gutierrez’s will, I saw straight through that.
Lily did, too.
“Is there anything else you want to know?” she asked me.
I was on the verge of saying no, of telling J.D. Easterling that I didn’t need or want anything else from him, when I realized that was a lie.
There was one thing. Even if he wouldn’t say a word about bodies or blackmail, even if he wouldn’t acknowledge me, there was one answer he could give me.
“You said that you got to know Ana when Lily was twelve. Where was she before that? Did she tell you anything? Where did she disappear to when she left town, back in the day?”
J.D. didn’t shrug off the question. He didn’t shrug me off this time. “I don’t know exactly, Sawyer. She mentioned something about spending some time in a small town near the lake when she was pregnant, and after that, she traveled. Sweden—her mother was Swedish. New York. California. Paris. Everywhere that wasn’t here.”
Inside the house, Aunt Olivia was washing dishes—by hand, even though we had a dishwasher. That had her positioned near the window, where she could see.
Where, with the window cracked open, she could hear every word.
Beside me, J.D. was talking to Lily again. I didn’t really hear what he was saying to her, because the sound of my own thoughts was suddenly deafening. Open window. Hear every word. I flashed back to the trip Sadie-Grace, Boone, and I had taken. I saw Ellen in my mind’s eye.
I heard Beth, Ellen’s granddaughter, screaming through the open window with each contraction.
Anything bought or sold in that town, Lillian had said of her sister, she has a hand in it.
The simple, ugly truth of the matter was that Ellen had been perfectly willing to sell Beth’s baby to Greer. It hadn’t occurred to me at the time to wonder if Sadie-Grace’s new little brother was the first baby Ellen had sold.
She mentioned something about spending some time in a small town near the lake when she was pregnant. J.D.’s answer to my question replaced everything else in my mind.
“A small town near the lake,” I said. I didn’t realize how loudly I’d said it until I realized that both Lily and her father were staring at me. I gathered myself. “What was the name of the town?”
J.D. claimed he didn’t know the answer.
But I did. Or, at least, I thought that I might. Two Arrows.