Lilly comes downstairs for breakfast on Saturday morning and finds June in the kitchen dressed head to toe in Lululemon, her golden hair in a sporty fishtail down her back. “Are you doing a partnership?” Lilly asks, peering at her curiously across the island. June, though tall enough that every gym teacher they ever had spent years trying fruitlessly to recruit her to play basketball, is hardly what one would call athletic. She once wound up in the ER with a sprained knee after tripping over a doll-sized windmill at a celebrity mini-golf tournament to benefit scleroderma research. Lilly hasn’t seen her wear sneakers in years.
But June shakes her head. “Caroline Bingley invited me to work out with her trainer,” she explains, yanking at one of the crisscrossed straps of her sports bra. “Be honest: do my boobs look like they belong to a JV volleyball player right now?”
“A little,” Lilly admits. Then, trying to sound as casual as humanly possible: “Did you eat?”
June’s gaze lingers on Lilly’s just a moment too long. “I had a yogurt,” she says at length, still rummaging around inside the bra. Lilly tries mightily to resist the urge to look in the trash for the empty cup: June has done inpatient treatment for anorexia on three separate occasions, and lately it’s like Lilly can hear the sound of the fourth time coming closer and closer like the growl of a far-off engine in the desert. Be careful, she knows better than to say.
“She couldn’t have invited you over to do something normal?” she asks instead, opening the fridge and pulling out a string cheese, biting off the end with a plasticky snap. It feels somehow suspicious, this olive branch from Caroline, though Lilly knows better than to say that out loud. “Like cocaine?”
June grins. “You should come,” she says, reaching down and tightening the laces on her running shoes with the grim determination of a late bloomer suiting up for middle school dodgeball. “I’m sure she wouldn’t mind one more.”
“Can’t,” Lilly says immediately. “I’m getting my underarms depilated by Edward Scissorhands.”
“Sounds invigorating.”
“One can hope.”
Once June’s gone Lilly heads up to her bedroom in search of her laptop; she passes her father doing wall sits in the hallway, his calf muscles like a pair of genetically modified grapefruits bulging under the skin of his legs. “Elisabetta,” he says, jaw twitching with exertion.
“Dad.” Lilly can’t help but smile. She’s not sure when exactly she realized she was her father’s favorite. She guesses she kind of always knew. Her earliest memories are of sitting on the counter at the original Meatball King with its revolving dessert case and red melamine bar, Dominic slipping her an extra garlic knot still hot from the oven when her mother wasn’t looking. “Don’t tell your sisters,” he always said, and if occasionally in the years since then she’s felt a little bit guilty about a certain lack of parental discretion on his part, she’d be lying if she said she didn’t love him the most, too.
“Can I ask you something?” she says now, sitting down on the second step so they’re more or less at eye level. “How much of what you said at dinner the other night about the house was real, and how much was you trying to put the fear of God in Kit and Olivia?”
Dominic grimaces, though she’s not sure if he’s reacting to the question or the exercise. “You realize I wouldn’t need to put the fear of God in Kit and Olivia if they’d stop running their credit cards for thousands of dollars to celebrate the fact that it’s Tuesday,” he points out.
“Dad,” she says again. “Come on.”
Her father sighs. “I put the house up as collateral,” he confesses, back still braced against the wall in his invisible chair. “Last year, right before the Six-Foot Stromboli debacle.”
Lilly winces. “Oh, Dad.”
“Six-Foot Stromboli was a good idea!” Her father bristles.
“Six-Foot Stromboli was a good idea,” Lilly agrees, though if it had been up to her she’s not sure she would have staked their family home on it. It’s like this, with her father: the fact of his past success does suggest that at some point he knew what he was doing, even if lately it feels like he’s operating his business in a world that no longer exists.
She waits for him to tell her he’s handling it; she waits for him to tell her this isn’t her problem to solve. She waits for him to tell her not to worry, but he doesn’t, and after a moment she just squeezes him on the shoulder, feeling the muscle bunched belligerently underneath his skin.
Back upstairs she tries to work for a while, but Olivia and Kit are blaring EDM on the patio and her mother is down the hall in the primary bedroom consulting noisily with Joaquin Shannon regarding the feasibility of replacing her father’s closet with a steam shower. Mari clomps inelegantly down the hallway in a pair of platform boots, a hiking backpack slung over her pale, narrow shoulders. “To sell my eggs,” she replies when Lilly asks where she’s going, which may or may not be the truth.
Still, it’s no louder or more disruptive than any other day, and if Lilly is being honest with herself, none of it has anything to do with the real reason she can’t concentrate. It’s pointless, spending her days screwing around with the punctuation in a screenplay that’s never going to go anywhere, that’s never going to pay the bills or save the house or prove she’s anything but a flighty, campy never-was. Nobody gives a shit about lady vampires. Not even Lilly herself.
She sighs and closes out the window, opening a new blank document. Staring at the empty page. She surprised herself at Charlotte’s restaurant the other night, telling Will about the novel. She hasn’t told anyone, not even June. Not that there’s anything to tell, really—it’s an idea, that’s all, a few sentences scribbled in a journal in the middle of the night, and if there’s a tiny part of her that wonders if it might blow her mind and her heart and her career wide open—
Lilly shuts the laptop. She’s being ridiculous, that’s all. Dreaming the goofy, grandiose dreams of a person who ought to know better.
Her phone trills on the nightstand just then, June’s name appearing on the screen over a picture of the two of them as babies, sunning themselves in matching hats at the beach. Lilly picks up right away. “What’s wrong?” she asks, heart already pounding. In her experience phone calls are for emergencies and emergencies only: Her father clutching his chest or Kit getting arrested on a drunk and disorderly. Joe’s mother calling, her voice tight and formal, to ask if Lilly knew where he was.
“I fainted doing burpees,” June reports now, sounding deeply miserable. “Can you come get me? I cracked my head on the floor.”
“Holy shit,” Lilly says, already springing guiltily to her feet. She knew it, she knew June hadn’t eaten anything, but still she let her just—“Are you okay?”
“Probably?” June says. She sounds dazed. “I have a bump.”
“Do you need to go to the hospital?” Lilly’s heart stutters inside her chest. She thinks of Junie at sixteen, ninety pounds with no period to speak of. She thinks of Joe on the floor in the bathroom at their apartment, his skin gone cold and gray.
“No,” June says immediately. “I mean, I don’t think so? I just, like, probably shouldn’t drive home.”
“Okay,” Lilly says, swallowing down a disproportionate panic. She feels like the worst sister in the world. “I’m on my way.”
The Honda is still in the shop, so she jams her sneakers onto her feet and heads across the development, the sun warm on the back of her neck. She manages not to sprint, but barely; still, by the time she turns up at Charlie’s front door twenty minutes later there’s sweat dripping down her spine inside her T-shirt, her damp hair sticking to her neck.
“Did you . . . walk here?” Caroline asks when she answers the doorbell, her gaze flicking up and down Lilly’s body.
“Yes?” Lilly replies, not entirely sure why that’s relevant. She peers past Caroline into the house, knowing she’s being rude and not particularly caring. She wants to put her hands on Junie’s face. “How’s my sister?”
“Better,” Caroline says, still peering dubiously in Lilly’s direction like she’s here to sell vacuum cleaners or convince them to accept Jesus Christ as their personal Lord and Savior. She’s wearing an immaculate white sports bra and a pair of spandex shorts that makes her ass look like two Royal Verano pears from Harry & David. “Come on in.”
Lilly follows her through the light-filled living room and out to the patio, where June is sitting by the pool with a fancy electrolyte-replenishing drink on the table beside her. “I’m sorry,” she says immediately, covering her eyes with both hands. “I feel like an idiot.”
Lilly shakes her head. “You’re fine,” she promises, smoothing a palm over her sister’s hair. She doesn’t know why she feels like she’s about to cry. “Why are you apologizing?”
“I wish you’d said something, Junie sweetheart,” Caroline puts in, squeezing June’s arm in a warm, sisterly way that makes Lilly want to growl. “Theo’s workouts really aren’t meant for beginners.”
“Evidently,” Lilly says, holding her hand out to pull June upright. “You ready?”
“Yup,” June says. “My car keys are in my purse.”
She gathers up her things and they say their goodbyes to Caroline; they’re headed for the front of the house when the door from the mudroom opens into the kitchen and in walk Charlie and Will.
Lilly stops so short she almost trips over the tasteful marble coffee table. Will doesn’t smile. He’s wearing shorts and a Juilliard T-shirt that’s been washed so many times it looks like it’s made of tissue, the jut of his collarbone just visible at the stretched-out neck. In the moment before she puts the thought firmly out of her head, it occurs to Lilly that she would like to bite it.
“Hey!” Charlie says, his face breaking into the kind of open, radiant grin that nets him thirteen million dollars a picture. “What are you doing here?” Then, looking from June to his sister and back again: “Everything okay?”
“June had a little episode,” Caroline announces, in a bright, astringent voice that positively invites a punch directly in the head. Being around Caroline reminds Lilly of the very first days after they moved to Pemberly Grove from the Valley, back before she met Isobel and learned how to stand for a photograph—the feeling of knowing she had the wrong kind of jeans and backpack and mother, of knowing she didn’t belong. It makes her want to chew with her mouth open. It makes her want to pick a fight, feeling anxious to communicate the gravity of the situation, even if nobody else seems to think it’s that big of a deal.
“It wasn’t a big deal,” June tells Charlie now; Will is still glowering in the corner like a bridge troll, water bottle dangling from his long, elegant fingers. “I think I was just a little dehydrated, that’s all.”
“She fainted,” Lilly reports. “She hit her head.”
“Holy shit,” Charlie says, crossing the room and putting both hands gently on June’s skull, feeling carefully around for the bump with the authority of a person who has played a doctor on three different nighttime soaps. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” June insists again—laughing, ducking out of his touch as her cheeks get pink. June is preternaturally shy about PDA of any kind. “Your sister has been taking good care of me.”
Lilly blinks, stung in spite of herself, even though she knows June didn’t mean anything by it. She should have tagged along this morning, even if it meant doing one-handed planks with Caroline and her trainer. She should have made June eat a Clif Bar while she watched. “We were just about to get going,” she announces, not wanting Will to get the idea that she was lurking around here like some kind of weird Shakespearean fangirl hoping he’d show up, but Charlie is already shaking his head.
“No, no, you guys should hang out for a while,” he says easily. “Have you eaten? We can grill.”
Lilly opens her mouth to say they can’t—meeting of the Reality Show Trash Bags of America, maybe, board elections, can’t miss ’em—when June cuts her off. “Sure,” she says, her cheeks still flushing prettily. “That sounds great.”
Lilly frowns. “Junie,” she says quietly. She feels jangly and nervous and twitchy to leave, like there’s something she ought to be doing; she’s thinking about Joe, about staving off disaster. About how to save people from themselves. “You should probably rest, no?”
But June shakes her head: “It’s okay,” she says, “I promise. I really am feeling a lot better.”
June digs her heels in once, maybe twice a year, which is how Lilly knows whatever’s happening between Charlie and her must be serious; still, she’s about to keep arguing when a scruffy brown dog comes careening down the stairs, his nails clicking wildly on the hardwood. Ranger is smaller than he looked in People, a shepherd mix with a foxlike tail and freckly muzzle. He swerves at the last minute and heads directly for Will, who crouches down on the floor and runs his palms along his bristly back, the two of them wrestling for a long, unconscious moment. The dog rolls over and exposes his smooth pink belly, wiggling delightedly.
Finally Will looks up, noticing Lilly staring. “What?” he asks, his expression turning defensive.
“I—nothing,” Lilly says, recovering a beat too late. “I’m just surprised, that’s all. You didn’t really strike me as a dog person.”
“I didn’t really strike you as a dog person?” Will laughs at that, though Lilly isn’t sure if she’s imagining that he looks slightly stung.
“Aw, he’s cranky, Lilly,” Charlie tells her, slinging a friendly arm around her shoulders and steering her and June back in the direction of the fully stocked bar out on the patio. “He’s not a serial killer.”
Lilly feels her cheeks get a tiny bit hot. “Can’t be too careful,” she manages to reply. Ranger butts his head against Will’s hand.
In the end it turns into a little bit of a party, Caroline’s friend Lucy showing up with a bottle of tequila and a couple of tech bros Charlie knows dropping over with some weed from an organic cannabis outfit they’re hoping he’ll invest in. Anne Mulgrew stops by, though it’s unclear to Lilly who would have invited her; an Icelandic pop star named Sera Foye floats, happily stoned, across the length of the pool. Lilly remembers this, from back before her family’s empire began to crumble: the way people come and go in houses like this one, the luxury and the largesse. More wine appears, seemingly out of nowhere. Charlie makes guacamole with avocados right off the tree.
The sun is just starting to set when Lilly ducks inside for more ice and finds Will standing freshly showered in the kitchen in jeans and a soft-looking Henley, gathering ingredients for a salad. “You need help?” she asks, surprised; she figured he’d disappeared entirely, off to quietly recite the Aeneid to himself in the original Greek or whatever it is he does for fun.
Will shakes his head. “I’m okay.” She’s just about to turn and head outside when he continues: “Caroline told me you walked here.”
“Is that . . . noteworthy?” Lilly asks, lifting an eyebrow.
He shrugs. “To Caroline, it is.”
“I walk a lot.”
“Me too,” he says. “Back at home, anyway.”
“Where are you from again?”
“New York,” he says immediately, then realizes a beat too late that she’s screwing with him. “Oh.”
“I’m teasing you.”
“I realize that now.”
“Welcome to the conversation.”
“Thank you.” He smiles then—a real smile, disarming. Before she can help herself, Lilly smiles back.
She sits down at one of the tall stools at the island, watching as he pulls a sharp-looking knife from the block. Lilly isn’t much of a cook herself, but she can tell from years of being around Charlotte that he knows what he’s doing, his hands quick and confident and keen. He adds walnuts and goat cheese and fat slices of peach to the big wooden salad bowl, working the fruit loose from the stone with the edge of his knife. “I have to say, Will Darcy,” she tells him, plucking a blueberry out of the punnet on the counter and popping it into her mouth, “if I didn’t hate you so much, I might be a little bit impressed right now.”
Will’s lips twitch. “If I didn’t hate you so much, Lilly Benedetto, I might be trying a little bit to impress you.” He shrugs. “I used to cook for my sister sometimes, back in high school.”
“When the help was on vacation?”
Will makes a face. “Don’t act like your family doesn’t have help, too.”
They don’t, actually; not anymore, at least. She thinks of the stack of meal kit boxes listing in the pantry back at her parents’ house, and decides not to mention them. No reason to add their dwindling fortune to the long list of reasons he thinks he’s better than her. “Come on,” she says instead, picking up a stack of plates and grabbing some napkins. It’s only her and June left by now, the tech bros off to catch a flight back to San Francisco and Anne Mulgrew home to read the encyclopedia. Lilly has no idea what happened to Sera. She hopes she didn’t drown. “Let’s get out there.”
Charlie grills some steaks to go with the salad, plus some vegetables for June, and they all sit around the long wooden table on the patio, the outdoor lights casting a warm white glow across the pool. Lilly’s been in her share of nice backyards, but she can’t help feeling a tiny bit covetous of the outdoor kitchen and capacious pergola, the lush garden teeming with native plants. The last landscape architect Cinta worked with convinced her to do some weird mood-lighting-and-vintage-lawn-furniture situation, and now their pool at home just kind of looks like the Playboy grotto.
“To new neighbors,” Caroline says, raising her wineglass and clinking it against June’s, “and old friends.” She’s had quite a lot to drink, which Lilly has to admit makes her marginally more tolerable. She’s a pretty good storyteller, spinning yarns about the bad bosses she worked with at her old agency, the time she got rear-ended by the least of the Jonas Brothers on La Cienega Boulevard, the willowy art house ingenue whose rider was just one hundred individual serving–size bags of Doritos and nothing else.
“She never ate them, as far as I know,” Caroline says, reaching for her wineglass. “I think she just liked to have them around her.”
“To swim through,” Will posits. “Like Scrooge McDuck,” Charlie agrees.
Lilly smiles, sitting back in her chair as the warm breeze whispers through the hair on the back of her neck, the smell of citrus and chlorine and salt drifting through the air. She likes watching them together, Will and Charlie: the easy way they have with one another, their familiar back-and-forth. It reminds her of being with her sisters, the rhythms of their conversations creased and softened like a photo folded up in the back of a jeans pocket.
If the playlist he queued up for dinner is any indication, Charlie’s taste in music swerves hard and unashamedly in the direction of Hall & Oates, but as they’re finishing their steaks the opening bars of an old Stevie Wonder song pipe through the outdoor speakers, and all at once Caroline jumps to her feet. “I love this one,” she announces, holding her hands out to Lilly and June and waggling her fingers. “We should dance.”
Will’s lips twist across the table. “So that Chuck and I can admire you?” he asks.
Caroline rolls her eyes at him. “I know this might come as a shock to your system, William, but not everything is about you,” she chides, which is officially the most Lilly has ever liked her. It’s possible Lilly’s had quite a lot of wine herself. Still, there’s a certain tipsy effervescence to Caroline right now that reminds Lilly of the girls she used to meet in line in club bathrooms sometimes, the ones who would drunkenly lend her a tampon or pass her a fistful of toilet paper under the stall door before disappearing back out onto the crowded dance floor.
“Sure,” she agrees, getting to her feet and sliding one hand into Caroline’s. Just for tonight, she decides, they can be friends. “Why not?”
They twirl around on the pool deck for a while, the sun sinking down over the trees to the west of them and the music changing from Stevie to Steely Dan to Fleetwood Mac. After a couple of songs Charlie gets up and joins them, his big dog-paw hands on June’s waist; Lilly dances Caroline over to the other side of the patio, wanting to give them a little bit of room. If anyone deserves a big romance, it’s June, who’s so much better than all the rest of them. It’s June, who is so sincerely good.
“I don’t know, Will,” Caroline calls over to where he’s still slouched alone at the table, scrolling through Charlie’s music with a despondent look on his face. “I don’t think Lilly and I are feeling appropriately admired.”
Will glances up, but barely. “You’re admired plenty,” he assures her. “You don’t need me.”
“He’s watching,” Caroline declares, raising her eyebrows mischievously. “He’s just worried it’ll make us vain.”
“Too late for that,” Lilly says with a shrug.
“I swear to god, Charlie.” Will drops the phone on the table in defeat. “Do you have a single song on this thing that isn’t just three and a half minutes of whammy bar? I feel like I’m growing a mustache just listening to it.”
Lilly ignores him. She ignores everyone for a moment, closing her eyes as Stevie Nicks caterwauls away over the expensive sound system; when she opens them again she finds Will staring back at her across the still, dark expanse of the swimming pool, his gaze hot and steady and overt. Caroline is staring, too, sharp and canny, and the expression on her face is enough for Lilly to remember they’re not actually friends after all.
Lilly clears her throat just a little too loudly. “You could dance, too, you know,” she calls over to Will, trying to keep her voice light.
Will snorts, leaning back in his chair and stretching his long legs out in front of him. “Please believe me when I tell you that nobody here wants to experience that.”
“He’s right,” Charlie calls helpfully. “He dances like an awkward guest host at the end of Saturday Night Live.”
Will doesn’t smile. Instead he gets up and abruptly starts clearing the table, assembling a tidy stack of plates in one arm and heading for the kitchen without further comment. Lilly moves to help him before she quite knows what she’s doing, scooping up a couple of serving dishes and ignoring Caroline’s watchful gaze from across the patio. Let her think whatever she wants to think, Lilly decides, following him into the cool, quiet house. She doesn’t know anything.
The kitchen is dark but right away Will flicks a switch on the wall with one elbow, flooding the room with bright overhead light. So much for . . . whatever she thought they might do in here, Lilly guesses, unless his appendix suddenly ruptures and she needs to perform a quick DIY organ removal. “You know,” she points out, setting a heavy ceramic bowl down on the granite counter, “if you want us to leave so bad, you could just say so.”
“If I wanted you to leave, you’d know it.”
“I—” Lilly breaks off. Every time she thinks she understands what’s happening between them it immediately changes, like the flea market mood ring she had when she was fourteen that she accidentally left on the edge of the sink in the restaurant bathroom at Olivia’s first communion dinner. Lilly loved that ring. She wishes she still had it, so that maybe she could name whatever it is she feels. “Okay,” she says finally, turning on the tap and reaching for a handful of silverware. “Well, could have fooled me. Are you just that sensitive about your dance moves, then?”
“You think I give a shit about my—” Will blows a breath out, like she’s the one who’s being difficult. “I’ll do that,” he tells her, motioning to the plates.
Lilly shakes her head. She feels irritated and itchy, and she doesn’t know why. She doesn’t even like him, she reminds herself firmly. He’s the actual, literal worst, except for the part where she can’t stop looking at him, stealing quick hungry glances out of the corner of her eye. He has three tiny freckles on the side of his neck, like a constellation. His eyelashes are long as a girl’s. “I got it,” she says.
“No, really.”
“It’s fine,” she says snottily. “I know you think I’m a useless, spoiled princess, but I promise I can rinse a dish.”
Will rolls his eyes. “That’s not—” He reaches for it, the full length of his body pressing against hers, and it’s like she’s an electric car that’s suddenly been plugged in to charge after a thousand miles, everything inside her vrooming to life—dashboard flickering, a mechanical rev. Both of them freeze. They stay that way for a moment playing chicken. Lilly knows when she’s staring down a dare.
“Can I ask you something?” he murmurs. His face is very, very close. “Why do you keep following me around trying to kiss me when you hate me so much?”
Lilly glowers, her cheeks getting hot. “First of all, who says I’m trying to kiss you?” she demands haughtily, turning back to the sink and shoving the plates under the faucet one by one. “For all you know, I could have come in here to change my tampon. I could have come in here to sit on the couch and stream the entire first season of Glee.”
Will lifts an eyebrow, but barely. “Did you?”
“No,” she admits grudgingly. “But second of all, stop crying. I don’t hate you any more than you hate me.”
“See,” he says, “that’s where you’re wrong.”
Well. Lilly doesn’t know what to say to that, and Will doesn’t say anything else, but when she glances up from the dishes there’s that look on his face again, the one she seriously does not get. “Lilly,” he starts, curling a hand around her waist, and the jolt of his touch is so hot and surprising that she drops the plate she’s holding right into the enormous sink, where it shatters with a holy racket into a million tiny pieces. Lilly swears.
“Everything okay in there?” Charlie yells from the backyard.
“Everything’s great!” they yell back in perfect unison. Lilly makes a face. She shuts off the water and turns around to face him, his fingertips just grazing her rib cage through her tank top. She can see his chest moving as he breathes.
“This is ridiculous,” she announces, trying to sound like a person whose heart isn’t slamming wildly against the inside of her rib cage, whose entire body isn’t humming with frustration and want. “Let’s just get it out of our systems already, and then we never have to see each other again.”
“Romantic,” Will comments dryly. He tilts his head to the side, interested. “Is that our problem here, you think? Am I in your system?”
Lilly scoffs. “Oh please,” she says. “I think we know exactly who is in whose system.”
“I mean.” Will’s eyebrows twitch; he takes a step closer, backing her up against the counter.
Lilly swallows hard. This close he’s bigger than she thinks of him as being, all broad shoulders and solid chest, a full head taller than her. The palms of their hands brush down low at their sides.
“I keep thinking about you,” he confesses quietly. He’s got his fingers wrapped around her wrists now—his thumbs stroking over the thin, sensitive skin on the undersides, making tiny circles there. “I don’t want to, but I can’t help it. I can’t fucking stop.”
Lilly laughs at that, loud and genuine. “Oh,” she teases, “now who’s romantic?”
“Can you not?” Will growls. “I’m serious.”
“I know,” she promises. It’s not like she doesn’t understand the sentiment. It’s a relief to have him say it, to know for sure she’s not the only one. She looks up at him for a moment, her head thunking back against the upper row of cabinets. “What do you think?”
Will doesn’t answer. He doesn’t have to; the expression on his face is so nakedly, achingly specific that Lilly gasps. It reminds her of the wildfires that rip through California every summer—quick and uncontrollable and enormous, swallowing entire neighborhoods in the time it takes to call for help. Part of her wants to grab her valuables and run like her life depends on it. The rest of her wants to watch it burn.
“Come upstairs,” he mutters finally, and it sounds like he’s begging. “Lilly. Come upstairs with me.”
Lilly hesitates for a moment, considering it. On the one hand, sneaking off to Will Darcy’s bedroom in the middle of a dinner party would probably confirm her as exactly the kind of person Caroline Bingley goes around telling people she is.
On the other hand: fuck Caroline Bingley.
“Yeah.” Lilly slips her hand into his and tugs him in the direction of the staircase, nodding. “Let’s go.”
That’s when she hears a voice from the side of the house: “Yoo-hoo!” it calls, ringing out like a klaxon in the warm, still night. “Anybody home?”
Lilly freezes. She knows that voice. Will seems to know it, too, instinctive. “Is that—” he starts, but Lilly holds a hand up.
“Just—” She shakes her head, suddenly dizzy—desire or disbelief, she isn’t sure. “Don’t say anything for a second, will you?” She makes her way toward the patio on wobbly legs, sliding the back door open just as the gate swings wide at the side of the yard; Charlie and June are getting to their feet at the table, Caroline staring with naked disbelief.
“Mom,” Lilly says, and her voice sounds like it belongs to someone else entirely. “Hi.”