he woman with my grandmother’s face gestured for us to sit. Dumbly, I did, and Sadie-Grace and Boone followed suit.

All three of us stared at her.

“I take it my beloved sister never mentioned that she had a twin?”

Lillian and Davis Ames had both referenced the town they grew up in. I knew that Lillian had met my grandfather at a party at the Arcadia hotel, but I hadn’t connected the dots that the town where she’d grown up was probably close to Regal Lake.

I hadn’t spent much time, if any, thinking about my grandmother’s family.

“Lillian never shared that little tidbit,” I confirmed. She never mentioned any siblings at all.

“You didn’t grow up in the city,” came the reply. “Accent gives you away. You have to work to lose it, and you haven’t.”

Neither had she.

“I don’t mean to be forward,” Boone said politely, “but holy shizzballs, this was not how I pictured this conversation going.”

The doppelgänger across from us stared at him. Hard. Hard enough that the dog at her feet jumped up, ears back, and gave a token growl.

“Boone’s socially awkward,” Sadie-Grace said helpfully. “It’s part of his charm.”

The old woman snorted, and the dog’s ears came back up. With one glance back at his mistress, he took a few steps forward and flopped down at Boone’s feet, exposing his belly. Boone gave it a scratch.

“Don’t go getting a big head,” one of the gun-toting women told Boone. “He’s a softy. Loves everyone.”

“And very especially me,” Boone added.

“Last name,” the woman in charge barked. It took me a minute to realize that she was talking about Boone—asking about him.

“His last name is Mason,” I answered, but then I got a suspicion about what she was really asking. “His grandfather is Davis Ames.”

“Thought so,” came the reply. “Davey was always the same way—skinny as hell, always tripping over his tongue or his feet.”

“Are we talking about the same man?” Boone asked, suddenly serious. “The single scariest, most demanding individual to ever walk this planet?”

The woman let out a cackle of laughter. “I guess we all change.” She paused. “Davey changed more than most, after my sister left him high and dry to chase after that rich grandfather of yours.”

That part, clearly, was addressed to me.

“He wasn’t the only one she left high and dry,” Sadie-Grace said suddenly, her voice earnest and sympathetic. “Was he?”

It was hard, once you knew Sadie-Grace, to hold anything she said against her. Her intentions were always good, and she was the kind of empathetic that had her crying at coffee commercials.

But this woman didn’t know that, and despite the fact that she had Lillian’s face—give or take some wear and tear—the sound of another round of earsplitting screams reminded me that Boone, Sadie-Grace, and I were in a precarious position.

“Don’t you go feeling sorry for me, girlie,” my great-aunt ordered Sadie-Grace. “I’m the one who told my sister to stop coming around here. I’m nobody’s charity case, least of all hers.”

Another scream.

“We should go,” I said.

“You shouldn’t have come here in the first place,” the woman countered. “Now I have to deal with this.”

“This as in a trio of promising young people with an impeccable sense of discretion?” Boone asked hopefully.

“This as in us,” I corrected. I didn’t have time to consider my next move as carefully as I would have liked. “Sadie-Grace’s stepmother is the one in there with your Beth.” That, at the very least, complicated the calculation on their end. “We already knew that Greer wasn’t actually pregnant, and we’re not the only ones who know that.”

“And she insisted on secrecy from us,” one of the gun women muttered.

“Hush.” The doppelgänger’s tone was mild, but the way that one word sucked the oxygen out of the air told me that she was the kind of dangerous I’d once attributed to Davis Ames.

“What do you propose we do about all of this?” That question, just as mild, was addressed to me.

“Nothing,” I told her. “This is Greer’s problem, not yours. Let her deal with it.”

“It’s not that I don’t want a little brother,” Sadie-Grace blurted out, one of her feet starting to beat back and forth around her other ankle. “I do. I really, really do. I just want Greer to tell Daddy that the baby’s adopted, because if she doesn’t, I might have to, and if I’m the one who tells him, he might not ever forgive me, and he might not ever forgive her, and, worse, he might not go through with the adoption at all.”

It’s not an adoption, I thought. Adoptions—legal ones—went through the state. Adoptions didn’t inspire the parties peripherally involved to press a shotgun into the small of a potential witness’s back.

“It’s illegal for Greer to pay Beth for her baby,” I said, knowing the risk as I said it. “Paying you on a purportedly unrelated matter is more of a gray area.” I let that sink in. “Does Beth even want to give up her baby?”

I counted the silence that followed that question with the
beats of my heart. One. Two. Three. I made it to six before I got my answer, in equal parts because my heart was racing and because the woman across from me knew how to use silence as a weapon.

“Of course she does. You think living in a place like Two Arrows makes us monsters? Hell, girlie, I birthed six babies of my own and would give my life for every one. Beth’s one of my grandbabies. I’d put all three of you and that hoity-toity bitch inside in shallow graves before I’d let anyone force a decision like this on one of mine.”

The woman was, in her own way, as good at guilt-tripping as Lillian was.

“I’m sorry,” I said. Two Arrows felt different than the town I’d grown up in, but I was betting the unspoken code of honor was the same. If you insulted someone, you apologized, unless you wanted them to make you apologize.

“Seems to me,” I continued, “that all of us can get what we want here. You can get your money—Beth’s money,” I corrected myself, “from Greer. Beth can give her baby to people—including a big sister with not a lot of common sense but an absolutely oversize heart—who will love the tar out of him, and we can all make Greer tell Sadie-Grace’s dad the truth.”

“What kind of man could find out his wife had faked an entire pregnancy and just proceed on with an adoption?” one of the women asked.

“The thing about my daddy,” Sadie-Grace said, “is that he really loves beetles.”

Everyone stared at her, expressions ranging from puzzled to concerned.

“And,” Sadie-Grace continued emphatically, “he hates dating.”

“You can do it, honey.” Greer’s voice floated out to us. “I’m here with you. I’m right here.”

“Greer isn’t all bad,” Sadie-Grace went on optimistically. “She just needs help being good.”

My grandmother’s twin shifted her attention back to me. “She take after her daddy?” she asked, jerking her head toward Sadie-Grace.

A little bit clueless, a lot anxious, with a heart the size of Texas? I thought.

Out loud, I said, “Yes.”

That was the absolutely batty thing about this—there was a chance that if Greer told Charles Waters the truth, he would just stare at her for a minute and scratch his head and then start talking about insects.

“Fine, then,” the woman across from me said. “The girl calls her daddy—or has that piece of work inside do it—to tell him the full story, and we do this all legal-like, so long as you three can agree not to say a word about any money that might change hands on the side.”

What did it say about me that I didn’t hesitate to agree with something like that?

In the end, I only had one question for this gray-haired, sun-worn, life-hardened mirror of my grandmother.

“What’s your name?” I asked her right before we left.

“Ellen,” she replied, and then the set of her features softened, just for a second. “Lil used to call me Ellie.”