Lily 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.”
I felt like she’d hit me, the way she’d punched her fist into the wall of what remained of the King’s Island house.
“Don’t do this,” I told her.
“If I stay,” Lily replied, her voice low, “I’m going to do something I’ll regret.”
To say that Aunt Olivia wasn’t pleased when she discovered Lily’s absence would have been an understatement. She demanded that I tell her where Lily went, but I didn’t know. Lillian got involved.
I still didn’t know.
“Do you know when she’ll be back?” Aunt Olivia pressed. “You must. Lily tells you everything.”
That hurt. Clearly, she doesn’t. Not anymore. “She took a bag with her,” I said. “That’s all I know.”
Aunt Olivia glared at me. “Don’t be ridiculous, Sawyer. That can’t possibly be—”
“Ease up, Olivia,” my grandmother cut in.
“Excuse me?” Aunt Olivia whipped around to face Lillian. If they hadn’t been wearing lake attire, I would have termed it the Battle of the Twin Sets.
“Leave Sawyer be,” Lillian ordered my aunt. “I’ve been expecting this. Lily needs—”
“Tell me what my daughter needs, Mama.” Aunt Olivia wasn’t smiling. Aunt Olivia always smiled, but she wasn’t now.
“Lily needs what she needs,” Lillian said evenly. “And I think we both know that she’s old enough to decide what that is for herself. Think of yourself at her age. You knew exactly who you wanted to be, Olivia.”
I heard the emphasis on Aunt Olivia’s name but didn’t know quite what to read into it, other than the fact that Lillian meant business. And when Lillian Taft meant business, the rest of this family listened.
Myself excluded. That was what I found myself thinking half an hour later, after Aunt Olivia had reluctantly—and temporarily, I was sure—stopped badgering me about Lily. Weeks earlier, my grandmother had as good as told me to stay away from Two Arrows. She had strongly implied that it could be dangerous for me to go there, to get mixed up with Ellen and whatever her business was.
Now that Aunt Olivia was occupied with Lily’s disappearing act, she wasn’t so focused on keeping me within eyesight, and that meant I finally had a chance to do the thing I’d been thinking about for the past two days.
Ever since Uncle J.D. had mentioned the small town where Ana had gone while she was pregnant—right before she gave the baby away and started traveling the world.
Moving quickly and silently, I went back upstairs to get my cell phone. The texts from the White Gloves were still pulled up. I dismissed them. For a moment, I thought about calling Nick. I remembered the way he’d jumped over the bar when that drunken frat boy had gotten physical. I hadn’t needed his help, but he’d been there, beside me, in a flash.
Once someone starts a bar fight in my establishment and offers pointers on my tossing-out-dirtbags technique, I could hear him saying, we’re pretty much on a first-name basis by default.
If he knew where I was going and what I was doing, if he knew about the gun I’d found pressed to my back the last time I’d gone to Two Arrows… would he come?
Would he even pick up the phone?
I could have called. I could have found out. But when Nick had accused me of being a runner, he’d gotten at least one thing right. I was better at leaving than being left.
Don’t come back.
I began composing a text. Not to Nick. To Campbell and Sadie-Grace. “Lily’s gone,” I said under my breath, talking as I typed in the words. “Not sure for how long. I need to go to Two Arrows.”
Campbell didn’t reply, but Sadie-Grace did. All her message said was I’ll drive!