he Ballad of Lily Easterling and Walker Ames was supposed to be a love story for the ages. Or at least, that was what I’d been told.

That was what Lily had always seemed to believe.

“Sawyer.” Victoria turned to me, implicitly accepting Lily’s second offering as sufficient. “You’re up.”

The secret I’d written down on my card was only two words long. I CARE. I’d spent a lot of my life in self-protection mode. I’d learned early on that it was better not to expect too much of people. I liked to think of myself as someone who didn’t have tender feelings for other people to hurt.

If nothing mattered that much, it was hard for anything to penetrate your armor.

But the truth was that I cared. I’d always cared—about the way my mom was the best friend a girl could ask for one moment and off chasing daydreams the next. About the way a subset of people had talked to me and about me in the town where I’d grown up.

About not having a father.

Now I had other people to care about, too. People who could leave me. People who could decide, if they were so inclined, that I was more trouble than I was worth.

“Sawyer,” Victoria prompted again.

I glanced at Lily, who’d just admitted that, for the first time in her life, she had no idea who or what she wanted.

“I wrote down ‘I care,’” I said, still looking at Lily. “But since I suspect that won’t be enough”—I shifted my gaze to Victoria, who might not have chosen to press me the way she’d pressed Lily—“I’ll throw in another secret for good measure.”

There wasn’t much I could have said that would have stood a chance of distracting Campbell from Lily’s admission—and everything it implied about Lily’s relationship with Campbell’s brother. So I went for something just as personal, a corollary to caring—and being well aware of the dangers of caring too much.

“I do know what I want,” I said. “And I know what I don’t want.” I’d never actually said this out loud before, but the words came out easily. “I never want to fall in love.”

That night, when Lily and I snuck back into the family’s lake house and to the turret room, our grandmother was the one who caught us on the stairs.

“Your mama isn’t happy you girls pulled a disappearing act,” she warned Lily mildly.

“Mama’s never happy,” Lily said. “Or she always is. Honestly, it’s getting hard to tell.”

Lillian’s expression softened—or at least shifted—as she processed the truth in Lily’s words. Without any additional commentary, she turned to me. “Sawyer, your mama might have a bit of a headache in the morning.” My grandmother was far too discreet to say the word drunk, but she did elaborate. “I believe there were Long Island iced teas involved.”

The fact that my mom had been drinking in their presence was enough to get an eyebrow raise out of me. They were lucky she hadn’t gotten weepy and started reminiscing about my conception.

Assuming she didn’t.

“Come on,” I told Lily, nodding toward the turret room. “Ellie Taft sleeps like the dead when there are Long Island iced teas involved.”

Since my mom was passed out in one of the twin beds in the turret room, Lily and I both squeezed into the other. It was a tight fit, but we were both spent, and I don’t think either one of us wanted to be alone. Her hair ended up spread across our pillow. Mine was bunched up beneath me.

I didn’t say a word to her about Walker, and she didn’t say a thing to me about love.