here were numerous downsides to discovering human remains while cliff-jumping, naked, in the middle of the night. For example: explaining to the cops the circumstances surrounding the discovery and becoming acutely aware that your body and the body had been in the lake—in close proximity—together. Two weeks had passed, and I still didn’t feel like I’d showered enough.

I also hadn’t stopped wondering about the corpse—how old it was, who it was, how long it had been in the depths of Regal Lake before the storms had dredged it up.

As a bonus, I’d also spent the past two weeks “not grounded.” To say that my aunt had not been pleased when the Lake Patrol had escorted us home that night would have been an understatement. Since Lily and I were legally adults, Aunt Olivia had contented herself with very pointedly not scolding us and not punishing us, while simultaneously foisting so much family togetherness upon us that leaving home without her company had quickly become a fond memory and nothing more.

I’d taken to hiding out on the roof just to get a moment of peace. That was where I was when my phone rang. I answered it quickly, lest it announce my location to the occupants of the house. “Hello?”

I half expected it to be one of the White Gloves.

“Sawyer.” The voice on the other end of the phone paused after saying my name. “It’s Nick.”

The sound of his voice had me flashing back to The Big Bang and the moments after he’d jumped the bar.

“So I’m not Miss Taft anymore?” I asked pointedly, remembering the exact expression on Nick’s face as he’d taken the drunk frat boy off my hands: pissed at him, reluctantly appreciative of me and my ability to damn well take care of myself.

“Once someone starts a bar fight in my establishment and offers pointers on my tossing-out-dirtbags technique, we’re pretty much on a first-name basis by default.”

“I didn’t start the fight. I finished it. And if you keep tossing people out like that, you’re just asking for a case of tennis elbow.”

“Message received,” Nick told me. “Loud and clear.”

We descended into silence then. I thought about the way he’d looked tossing Frat Boy out on his ass. The clenched jaw, every muscle in his body tight.

“You still there?” he asked on the other end of the line.

“Yup,” I replied. After another second or two, I issued a reminder. “You called me.”

Another pause, shorter than the last. “I need a favor.”

Of course you do, I thought. Of course he hadn’t called just to reminisce about my endearing knack for self-defense. He’d had my number for months. If he’d wanted to call—at any point in time—he could have.

“What kind of favor?” I asked.

“Before we get into the specifics, I’d like to remind you that you owe me.”

“Debatable.”

“You don’t really believe that.”

He was right. After everything I’d helped Campbell put him through last spring, I did owe him. “What do you need, Nick?”

He replied, but I couldn’t make out what he was saying.

“I’m sorry,” I told him, “but I don’t speak incoherent mumbling.”

“There’s a party next weekend,” Nick gritted out. He did not appear to be relishing that statement. “A fund-raiser Davis Ames is throwing at the Arcadia hotel.” He said Ames like it was a curse word. “I need you to go with me.”

I’d never been much for dating, only partially because I’d never been the kind of girl that boys dated. I could handle catcalls and propositions and rumors about what might or might not have happened under the bleachers, but anything beyond that was virgin territory.

No pun intended.

“Sawyer?” Nick prompted.

“And here I thought you were going to ask me to plan a jewel heist,” I quipped, because quipping was easier than thinking about what he had asked in any level of detail.

“If I wanted to plan a jewel heist,” he retorted, “I would have called Campbell.”

Hearing him say her name didn’t hurt, even knowing their history. Thank God. My utter lack of an urge to wince reinforced for me that I was still on the right side of the fine line I’d spent my life skirting. Flirting was fine. Thinking was fine. Physicality, even, I could handle.

Just not feelings.

“Why didn’t you call Campbell?” I asked. They’d been each other’s method of blowing off steam, once, and if I owed him, she owed him big.

“Because,” came the reply. “I called you.”

That—and the way he’d said it, his voice softening—wasn’t something I had any intention of letting my mind linger on for long.

Luckily, Nick chose that moment to enlighten me as to why he wanted to go to some party badly enough to call in a favor. “I have a sister. She’s fifteen. Lives with our grandmother. Wants to do the stupid Debutante thing in a couple of years.”

He sounded so disgruntled at the idea that I grinned. “And this requires me going to a party with you why?” I asked.

“I have money now.” He sounded disgruntled about that, too. “I just don’t have the connections she needs. Or the reputation.”

“Are you asking me to make you respectable?” I said, enjoying this more than I should have. “What is this, a Jane Austen novel?”

“I like Jane Austen,” he replied evenly. “And you owe me.”

I did—and as long as I owed him, that was all this had to be. A debt I could pay. Maybe we’d get another dance in.

Maybe I could get him out of my system.

“You have yourself a deal,” I said. “Mr. Ryan.”

Before he could respond to my use of his last name, Aunt Olivia called out for Lily and me from inside the house, and I stifled a groan.

“What was that?” Nick asked.

My traitor lips ticced upward. “Goodbye, Nick.”

I hung up just in time to hear Aunt Olivia trill out, “Who wants to make personalized memo boards? And then I’ll show y’all the absolutely darling little outfits I got for Greer’s shower.”

My desire to make a memo board for a dorm room I hadn’t even agreed to live in yet ranked only slightly above my utter lack of inclination to attend a baby shower for a baby who I knew for a fact did not exist. I’d been expecting Sadie-Grace’s stepmother to have a “miscarriage” for months. When we’d received the invitation to the shower, I’d even tried telling Aunt Olivia that Greer was faking her pregnancy.

Aunt Olivia had shushed me. “Don’t be silly, Sawyer. I’m sure you simply misunderstood.” Personally, I thought witnessing a woman strapping on a fake pregnancy belly was the kind of thing that was pretty darn hard to “misunderstand,” but Aunt Olivia wouldn’t hear a word about it. “To think that any woman would do such a thing! Pshaw. I’ve had enough ridiculousness for one summer, thank you very much. We’re going to that shower. End of story.”

“Don’t you think the girls have been punished enough?” Uncle J.D. asked, right inside the window. As much as I agreed with the sentiment, the fatherly tone with which he’d said girls, plural, hit me like the sound of fingernails on a chalkboard.

“Are you implying that time spent with me is a punishment, John?” Aunt Olivia only called him by his first name when she was annoyed.

“They’re eighteen, Liv. Almost nineteen.”

“I’m always Liv when you want something,” Aunt Olivia said quietly.

“God forbid I try to talk to you like—”

“Like I’m her?”

I’d only heard them fight once before, about some kind of money problem.

Like I’m her. Like I’m her. Like I’m her. Aunt Olivia’s words repeated on a loop in my head. Who was she talking about? Did she think he was having some kind of affair? Or worse, had she found out what he’d done with my mother?

“Keep your voice down, Olivia.” J.D. followed his own advice, lowering his volume so much that I had to strain to hear him, even though they were standing right next to the window now.

“So I’m Olivia again?”

The question was met with silence—and then the sound of footsteps.

“Where are you going?” she called after him.

This time, my “uncle” actually answered his wife’s question, his words shot through with an emotion I couldn’t quite peg. “I’m going to the lake. If you’re going to keep the family home, someone has to check on the boats.”