rom what I picked up during the remainder of the ­evening, Campbell Ames had a reputation for pulling “stunts like this.” It wasn’t entirely clear what constituted a stunt, though I did gather that borrowing cars that didn’t belong to her and wearing white after Labor Day were both in Campbell’s repertoire. Given that Walker wasn’t the only one to receive a copy of that text, his prediction that I wouldn’t be the scandal du jour for long had proved right on the money.

Debs and Squires like to play. If I’m missing… suspect foul play.

Hours later, I rolled my eyes as I scrubbed every trace of makeup from my face. This was what happened when people had too much money and too little sense. Thanks to Campbell Ames and her ­little stunt, my mother’s good buddy Lucas had left before I’d gotten a chance to ask him whether, by any chance, he and my mom had engaged in coitus roughly nineteen years ago.

Taking a perch on top of the antique desk in “my” room, I played back the day’s events. I scrutinized everything: the exact words Senator Ames had said to me at the department store, the expression on Lucas’s face when he’d placed that first bid, the fact that Davis Ames had ultimately purchased the pearls. At home, I would have gone for a late-night walk as I turned the details over in my mind, but here, I had nowhere to go and nothing to distract me.

If Lucas is my father, his family would want to keep that on the down low. It was a big if. I was assuming facts not in evidence. Just because Lucas Ames had been my mother’s friend, just because he’d tried to outbid my uncle tonight didn’t mean—

“Watch your foot! That’s my head.”

I glanced toward the window, which I had cracked open after getting out of the shower.

“Watch your head,” came the reply. “That’s my foot!”

There was an instant of silence, followed by a muffled shriek.

I don’t want to know, I thought. It’s none of my business. And yet…

I slid off the desk, walked over to the window, opened it, and looked down.

Sadie-Grace and Lily, dressed in all black, were climbing down an honest-to-God trellis. Who even had a trellis?

It’s not my business if they fall and break their necks, I thought. It’s not my business where they’re going at—I looked at the clock—a quarter to one.

And yet… I had nowhere else to go and nothing else to distract me. I stood there watching them until they had their feet firmly planted on the lawn. And then, as they attempted to sneak down the street in what I’m sure they thought was a very stealthy manner, I shook my head. I rolled up the sleeves of my nightshirt and threw on a pair of running shorts.

And then I climbed down the trellis.

I trailed my cousin and Sadie-Grace for three blocks. They ended their nighttime journey on another cul-de-sac, with homes only a little bit smaller than my grandmother’s. Lily approached the front porch of one of the houses, then slipped something out of her pocket.

A key, I realized as she fit it into the lock. A moment later, she and Sadie-Grace were gone.

Is this really so awful? I heard Sadie-Grace asking in my memory.

I suppose, Lily had replied, that depends on how one feels about felonies.

My curiosity piqued, I headed for the front door myself. They’d locked it behind them, but I made quick work of the lock.

My stance on felonies had always been rather fluid.

The inside of the house was under construction. Tarps blocked off entire rooms. I listened for Lily and Sadie-Grace, but heard nothing. Making my way silently down the hall, I used my phone as a flashlight, and soon, one mystery was solved.

There was a portrait on the wall: Aunt Olivia and Uncle J.D., on their wedding day.

“Okay,” I murmured. “So technically, Lily wasn’t breaking and entering.”

Technically, I was.

The fact that Aunt Olivia’s house was being renovated explained why Lily’s family appeared to be staying at my grandmother’s, but it didn’t explain why my very proper cousin had taken off in the middle of the night like a couture-clad bandit.

I made it to the living room without seeing any signs of Lily or Sadie-Grace. Unlike the rest of the house, this room seemed to be fairly untouched by the remodel. The only sign that the house wasn’t lived in was the trio of boxes stacked carefully next to the coffee table. Each one had been neatly labeled.

The one labeled Symphony Ball was too good to pass up.

Dried flowers. White gloves. A videotape. A pillow with my aunt’s initials stitched onto it in gold. A program from the ball itself. Going through the box was an exercise in masochism. Part of me wanted to know what I was in for with this whole debutante thing, but a bigger part needed to get a sense of my aunt.

My mom wasn’t always the most reliable narrator. My aunt may or may not have been “heartless, image-obsessed, and a pod person,” but it was incontestable that Aunt Olivia had been in her twenties, married, and fairly independent when my mother had been kicked out of the house.

She could have stepped in.

She could have helped.

“But you didn’t.” I flipped open the album only to be greeted with a familiar, fancy script. Symphony Ball, it declared with gracefully looping letters. Keeping an eye on the door—and an eye out for Lily—I thumbed through the album and stopped when I came to a portrait of twenty-four teenage girls in identical white dresses, standing under a familiar marble arch. I found Aunt Olivia, and my mind went to the Squire photograph I’d stolen from my mother’s drawer. I didn’t need to do a side-by-side comparison to know that the composition was almost identical.

“Another tradition,” I muttered. I ran my fingers over the embossing: Symphony Debutantes. Then I flipped the page. “And Symphony Squires.” Twenty-four boys in long-tailed tuxedos stared back at me. I scanned the photo for Uncle J.D., then froze. My eyes darted to the year embossed onto the photo.

“Sawyer?”

I jumped to my feet. “Lily.”

“What are you—“

“I followed you.” I cut her off, my heart slamming into my rib cage with the force of a sledgehammer, my brain going a thousand miles an hour. On some level, I heard Lily tell me that I should go home. On some level, I realized that Sadie-Grace had joined her.

But on another level, I was twelve years old again. I’d just found the picture in my mother’s drawer. It hadn’t been taped to the back, not then—not until after my mother had discovered me looking at it.

I forced my mind back to the present.

“Maybe we should tell her,” Sadie-Grace was saying. “She might be able to help.”

“Tell me what?” My voice was calm. The album was dead weight in my hand, but it only took a moment of misdirection and some elementary sleight of hand before I had the picture out.

Twenty-four teenage boys in long-tailed tuxedos, standing under a marble arch.

“It’s late,” Lily said, sticking out her chin. “You should go.”

She was backlit by a light in the hallway. It wasn’t until she turned her head away from me that I saw the tear tracks on her face. For a split second, she looked like my mom.

How many times, when I was a kid, had I come across her with that look on her face exactly?

“I could go,” I told Lily, unable to tear my mind completely away from the picture in my hands. “I will, if you ask me to again. But…” I let the word hang in the air. “I could also stay.”

I could stay, and she could tell me what was going on.

I could stay, because we were family.

I could stay and come up with an excuse to go through everything in my aunt’s keepsake box with a fine-tooth comb, because this picture I’d just pilfered—the picture of twenty-four squires my aunt’s age, her husband included?

It was identical to the photograph I’d stolen from my mom.

The only difference was that the year on my mom’s picture had been scratched out. Four of the faces had been scratched out. I’d assumed that my mystery father had done Symphony Ball with my mother. I’d assumed that was why she had the photograph in the first place.

I’d assumed wrong.

“I think we should tell Sawyer,” Sadie-Grace said decisively. “She grew up in a bar.”

Lily hesitated, then finally managed to form a single question. “Can you keep a secret?” she asked me.

I thought of the picture I’d just stolen—not to mention the implication that my mystery father would have been an adult when my mother was just seventeen. “Like you wouldn’t believe.”

Wordlessly, Lily led me through the house, out the back door, and to what appeared to be a pool house in the backyard.

“Before you say anything,” she told me primly, “you should know that we can explain.”

“Explain what?” I said.

In reply, Lily opened the door to the pool house. There, inside, was a teenage girl, bound, gagged, and duct-taped to a chair.

“Sawyer,” Sadie-Grace said ruefully. “Meet Campbell Ames.”