Catcalling Lily was a mistake that most customers at The Holler only made once.
“Do I come to your place of employment and make rude noises in your direction?” she asked the man leering at her over the bar. “No. No, I do not. And would you appreciate someone talking to your daughter or sister that way? No. No, you would not.”
“Honey,” the man drawled. “You’re wound awfully tight. How ’bout I loosen you up?”
“Want me to take this one?” I offered.
Lily shook her head. “My parents raised me to be a lady,” she told the man primly. “And now I’m a lady who knows an awful lot about a whole range of medieval torture techniques. . . .”
The one-bedroom house Lily and I were sharing was smaller than the one I’d grown up in, but instead of dollar-store shower curtains, a hand-sewn privacy curtain sectioned Lily’s bedroom off from the living room. She’d taken to shopping at flea markets and thrift shops to furnish our place, and the decorations—even the faded and chipped ones—showcased what even I could recognize as impeccable taste.
“Knock, knock!” my mom called as she entered through the front door.
We really needed to start making use of the lock.
“Trick still huffy that I told that gentleman exactly what I could do to him with a sterling silver salad fork?” Lily asked.
Normally, my mom would have grinned in response. She’d been surprised four months earlier when we’d shown up on her doorstep, to say the least.
Coming back to the town where I’d grown up had been Lily’s idea. I’d spent a year in her world. She’d wanted to give mine a try. I’d asked her once and only once if she was sure about putting college on hold, and she’d told me that college would still be there when we were ready.
Both of us.
Lily needed a chance to figure out who she was when she wasn’t trying to be what other people wanted, and I needed to find my way to putting the past to rest and living now, with no backup plans and no feet out the door.
I thought of Nick most days but had only called him once. He hadn’t answered.
“Is Trick actually upset with me this time?” Lily asked, startled by my mom’s lack of response to her initial question about The Holler’s owner.
“Trick couldn’t get upset with you if he tried,” my mom assured Lily. “And no one would dream of taking umbrage to any threats you may or may not have made involving salad forks and soup spoons.”
“What were you going to do with the soup spoon?” I asked. But my gaze stayed on my mom, because something had brought her to our door, and I had the general sense that something wasn’t good.
“Lily, sweetheart . . .” My mom’s tone confirmed my assumption. “There’s someone at the bar looking for you.”
My mom almost never referred to The Holler as “the bar.”
“Is it Lillian?” I asked. I’d been waiting for this since the night Lily and I had shown up here, both of us wet and me wearing a scarlet robe.
“No,” my mom said gingerly. “It’s Ana.”
It took everything I had to stay in the position I’d taken up near the pool table and not join Ana Gutierrez and Lily at the bar.
“She’s going to be okay,” my mom told me. “Our Lily’s equal parts sugar and steel.”
I picked up a pool cue and nodded for my mom to start racking up the balls. I needed to keep busy, if I was going to persevere in giving Lily space.
“Are you okay?” I asked my mom once she’d finished racking.
My mom glanced back at Ana. “I just keep thinking that this was how it was supposed to be—Ana and her daughter, me and mine.”
Things between us weren’t the same as they’d been before my debutante year. Too much had happened since, and my mom was still learning to just let me be. A lifetime of interdependence was a nasty habit to kick.
“Sawyer? I know the pact was stupid.” My mom grabbed the cue ball and broke, sending the rest of the balls scattering around the table. “It wasn’t just our lives we were playing around with. It was yours, too. I know that it was selfish for me to think that you could solve everything that was wrong with my life, fill every hole.”
In the months that Lily and I had been here, this was the first glimmer I’d gotten that my mom had really changed.
That at least some part of her understood.
“You were a kid,” I said, lining up my first shot. “You were dealing with a lot. And if you hadn’t been . . .” I hit the ball. “You wouldn’t have me.”
The day after we’d arrived, I’d told my mom the truth about Liv. I’d expected her to explode, to go storming back to the city, demanding to know how Lillian felt about having chosen an impostor over her.
Why she was protecting Olivia still.
But instead, my mom had grieved. She’d told me, a few nights back, crying for her sister, that the truth hadn’t been a blow. It was a relief. The sister she’d known hadn’t iced her out. The disconnect she’d felt with Olivia wasn’t in her head. Her teenage anger at being forced to pretend otherwise, the grief that no one had understood . . .
It was real.
“You’re stripes,” my mom commented when my first shot went in.
“Ellie.” Ana cleared her throat behind us.
I turned around first. A few seconds later, my mom followed suit.
“I want you to know,” Ana told her, “that I’ve stopped seeing J.D.”
“Good for you?” my mom ventured.
It was on the tip of my tongue to ask if she wanted a prize, but then a horrible thought occurred to me. “He’s not back with Aunt Olivia, is he?”
“Not as far as I know,” Ana said. “I’m moving to the East Coast. I need a fresh start, and Victoria has talked me into investing in a start-up she’s been working on. I’m going to be following up with other potential investors while she finishes her degree.”
I had no idea what Victoria was majoring in, but somehow, I wasn’t surprised that she seemed to be landing on her feet. I wondered briefly what the chances were that the other potential investors were former White Gloves.
“What did you say to Lily?” my mom asked Ana.
Lily’s biological mother glanced back to the bar, which Lily was wiping down maniacally with a damp rag, going back over the same spots again and again.
“That’s between my daughter and me.”
“She almost lost me.”
Lily and I were lying in the field behind our house. It was unseasonably warm for December, but still cold enough that we should have been wearing jackets.
We weren’t.
“That’s what Ana said,” Lily continued. “Late in her second trimester, she almost lost the pregnancy. She couldn’t afford the hospital bills, and she said she just kept thinking—what if something happened to me after I was born? What if I got sick? What if I needed medicine she couldn’t afford?”
“She could have gone to her family,” I said, thinking back to my conversation with Victor Gutierrez.
“She would have,” Lily said softly. “And they would have controlled her entire life—and mine.” She paused. “She thought about going back to Davis Ames, too, but Ellen found her first.”
The rest of the story came pouring out of Lily’s mouth—how Ellen had sold Ana on the idea of a loving couple who couldn’t have children of their own, a couple who would pay Ana’s expenses, who would give the baby everything, who wanted to make sure their baby’s biological mother had a real shot at life, once she’d given birth.
Ana hadn’t found out who that couple was—or that said couple’s infertility was a lie—until later. Once she’d discovered that, once she’d realized all the ways she’d been lied to, she’d decided that the price she’d been paid wasn’t nearly enough.
“She said that she went to Daddy when I was twelve,” Lily continued. “She told him the truth, and he told her that he’d give her whatever she wanted, do anything she wanted, if she’d just leave me where I was.”
Beside me, Lily closed her eyes. I kept mine open and skyward.
“He used to bring her pictures,” Lily murmured. “That was part of their deal. He gave her money, and he told her all about me.”
Neither one of us had heard a word from Uncle J.D. in the past four months.
“I feel like I stole him from you,” Lily said suddenly, opening her eyes and turning to face me. “If he’d known I wasn’t his from the beginning, he wouldn’t have—”
“He raised you,” I interrupted her. “You’re his, Lily. He clearly feels that way, and I don’t need a father.” She was on the verge of objecting, so I continued. “With a sister/cousin/pregnancy-pact buddy like you, I’m good.”
Lily snorted—quite possibly the most unladylike sound I’d ever heard her make.
Catching sight of movement near the house, I sat up. “What’s my mom doing here?” I asked as she started striding across the field toward us. “And why is she carrying formal dresses?”