I’m the only Olivia Taft there’s ever been.
I remembered everything my mom had ever told me about her sister, including the way Aunt Olivia had run away during her own Debutante year, right after their father had died.
Twenty-five years ago. Liv Taft ran away twenty-five years ago, and when she came back . . .
She’d told everyone to call her Olivia. My mom had several go-to descriptors for the woman her sister had become. Ice queen had been one of them.
Another was fake.
“The Lady of the Lake is Liv Taft.” I said the words out loud, still trying to wrap my mind around them. “She never ran away. My mom said her sister was gone almost nine months, but really . . .”
“I was preparing,” Olivia said. “Learning. I’d been watching Liv for years, but that wasn’t enough. If I was going to take her place, people’s memories needed time to fade. They needed to be able to tell themselves that she’d changed, and I had to make myself into something new. I had to be perfect.”
Perfect. I thought about the way Lily had described her mama to me, back at the beginning of our Debutante year. Mama just likes things to be perfect.
“You took her place,” I said, swallowing hard. “You killed the real Liv, and nine months later—”
“I didn’t kill her!” That was the first flash of real emotion I’d seen out of “Olivia.” There was a depth of feeling in her voice—wild, unconstrained grief. “I never would have hurt Liv. I just watched her, that’s all. I wanted to find a way to introduce myself. We were supposed to be like sisters! But . . .”
“But you killed her.” I pressed again. Since Olivia had started ranting, she hadn’t looked at the gun even once.
She seemed to have forgotten she held one.
What was it I’d said to Sadie-Grace in the hole? The name of the game is stall.
“I did not kill Liv.” Olivia stepped toward me. “J.D. did.” She turned to Campbell. “And so did your mother. And your father. I was there. I saw them. They pushed her. She went over the edge. I heard her body hit the side of the cliff on the way down. J.D. dove in. Sterling, too. And all useless, vapid Charlotte could do was stand on the edge and scream. Eventually, Julia woke up. Thomas, too. And I watched.” She shook her head, closed her eyes. “I watched her friends drag her out of the water. I watched J.D. try to revive her. I heard them all agree, when he couldn’t, that it was an accident.”
It was an accident. I could hear Lily’s father saying those words on John David’s recording. I could hear him telling Aunt Olivia to say her name.
And then he had said it. Liv. I’d thought he was using a nickname.
“They were all just going to leave her there,” Aunt Olivia continued, eyelids flying open, “but then they saw the marks the fight had left on her arms. It didn’t look good—for any of them. Sterling’s DNA was all over her. J.D. had a motive. Charlotte, too.”
“So they sank her.” Campbell seemed to be taking this better than I was.
“It was Julia’s idea,” Aunt Olivia said. “She cared about her brother more than she ever cared about Liv. Even Thomas, who was new to the group—he went along with it. They promised him the moon, and he promised to keep his mouth shut.”
I forced myself to connect the flurry of names to the people I knew. Julia and Thomas were Boone’s parents. Charlotte and Sterling were Campbell’s. “They weighed her body down,” I said, trying to imagine how they could have made a decision like that. “And then they told everyone she’d run away.”
“I kept expecting the body to be discovered,” Aunt Olivia said. “I thought about calling the police, but for all I knew, Liv’s rich friends and their rich families would try to find a way to turn it all around on me.”
“So you didn’t say anything.” I stared at her. “You didn’t call the police. You bided your time, and then you took over her life.”
There was a moment of elongated silence, and then Victoria burst into a speed of rapid-fire and very emphatic Spanish. She ended in English. “Who are you people?”
She meant the question as an indictment of just how twisted this situation was, but I repeated her question with a different framing—and intent.
“Who,” I said, taking a step toward Aunt Olivia, “are you?”
“I’m Olivia Taft.”
“You’re Ellen’s daughter, not Lillian’s.”
“I’m Olivia Taft,” she repeated, chin held high. “I’m Lily’s mama—and John David’s. I am the perfect daughter to Lillian. I have been a wonderful wife. I knew you were my husband’s child, and I welcomed you with open arms, Sawyer, because you were like me. You grew up with nothing, and you deserved everything, and I helped give it to you. Doesn’t that mean anything to you?”
There was truth to those words. I hadn’t expected the woman my mom had referred to as an ice queen to welcome my presence in Lillian’s house, but Aunt Olivia had. She’d hugged me and loved me and taken care of me.
Drugged me. Tossed me in a hole. Pointed a gun at me.
“You just couldn’t leave well enough alone.” Aunt Olivia stepped toward us, her grip visibly tightening over the firearm in her hand. “I didn’t kill Liv. I loved her. I think, if she’d had the chance, she would have loved me. She would have wanted me to . . .”
“Become her?” I thought back to what Lily and I had heard on the tape. “You blackmailed her boyfriend into marrying you.”
That’s all I ever was to you? A charade? I flashed back to the recordings, to the questions Aunt Olivia had tossed at her husband. When are you going to understand that I’m better for you than she ever was?
“J.D. wanted to marry me,” Aunt Olivia insisted. “He wanted to forget what had happened. He wanted me to be her.” She paused. “The others just wanted him to keep me happy, because I knew.”
At the Fourth of July picnic, when Uncle J.D. had brought Ana, Boone’s father had been the one to tell him to leave. Charlotte and Julia Ames had closed ranks around Aunt Olivia.
“You blackmailed all of them,” I realized, thinking back to the message that Campbell’s mother had drunkenly instructed me to deliver to my aunt, back before she’d had reason to worry that J.D.’s infidelity might push Olivia over the edge.
It doesn’t matter how they dress you up, Charlotte had said, or what little tricks you learn, or how well you think you can blend. You are what you are, sweetheart, and you’ll never be anything else.
“You should have seen their faces when I showed up,” Aunt Olivia reminisced, “days before our debutante ball. I looked like Liv. I sounded like her. I spun the right story, and Lillian was so glad to have me back.” She smiled. “They couldn’t tell anyone the truth. Who would have believed them? They had no idea who I was or where I’d come from, and it wasn’t like they could go to the police and tell them they knew I was an impostor, because they’d killed the real Liv.”
She looked at me for a moment. “Did you know that, genetically, I am Lillian Taft’s daughter? Genetically, there’s no difference between her and Ellen. I thought Lillian might do a DNA test when I showed up, but I knew that mine would come back as a match for hers. As long as she didn’t try to test me against Liv’s little sister’s DNA, I knew I would be fine.”
Liv’s little sister. “My mom knew,” I said. “She might not have known known, but she sure as hell knew you didn’t feel like her sister anymore.”
“That wasn’t my fault. I wanted to be a good sister to Ellie, but she just made that so impossible! I had to keep her at a distance, and she never forgave me for that. J.D. could never quite forgive me, either. And that, sweetheart, is how this family ended up with you.”
Aunt Olivia raised the gun. She held it on us but didn’t fire. Instead, she walked over toward the door and picked something up.
It took me a moment to realize that it was a can of lighter fluid.
One secret to bury, I thought, hysterical laughter bubbling up inside of me. One to burn. The White Gloves couldn’t have equipped Aunt Olivia better for this insanity if they’d tried.
Campbell lunged forward, but Aunt Olivia whipped the gun toward her and shot. “Consider that your only warning, young lady,” she said as the bullet buried itself behind Campbell in the wood. “I won’t deign to miss again.”
“You were always nice to me,” Sadie-Grace said quietly. “When my mama died, you were the one who held me, not my daddy. I stayed at your house for weeks.”
“I know, sugar,” Aunt Olivia replied gently. “This isn’t what I wanted. Believe me.”
“What did you think was going to happen when you drugged Sawyer and Sadie-Grace and tossed them in a hole?” Campbell asked.
Aunt Olivia didn’t answer the question. “This wasn’t what I wanted,” she repeated.
“You wanted things to be perfect,” I said. I still wasn’t sure what had led Aunt Olivia to thinking this was the solution to her problems, but I did know there was power in telling people what they wanted to hear. “Maybe they still can be.”
“Don’t be silly.” Aunt Olivia dismissed that notion out of hand. “If we’d been the only ones on this island, this could have been contained. But now? Campbell is trouble. She always has been, and don’t even get me started on—”
“Sawyer’s right,” Victoria interjected. “This can still be contained. As the only outsider to this whole situation, allow me to assure you that literally no one would believe any of this if we tried to tell them a word of it.”
“Besides,” Campbell added, “do you really think my mama is going to let anything about what happened to the real Liv come out? Aunt Julia? My grandfather?” Campbell seemed to have recovered from her near miss with the bullet. She tossed her auburn hair over one shoulder. “My father is already in prison. There is no way on this planet that my grandfather would allow a scandal like this one to touch my only remaining parent and both of Boone’s.”
There was a moment’s silence, which Sadie-Grace obligingly filled. “I don’t mind about the hole,” she promised sweetly. “Accidents happen. Lily and I once accidentally kidnapped Campbell and tied her to a chair for three days, and that turned out fine.”
“You what?” Aunt Olivia said.
“You can still walk away from this,” I reiterated, putting everything I had into those words. “Things don’t have to be perfect. They can just be.”
For a moment, I thought she was considering that. And then she finished dousing the wood in lighter fluid and pulled out a lighter.