s it turned out, if there was one thing capable of distracting me from the major clue I’d just found to my father’s identity, it was the kidnapping and unlawful detainment of a senator’s daughter.

“What the hell, Lily?”

“It’s not as bad as it looks,” Sadie-Grace assured me. “We’ve been feeding her.”

I could feel a migraine coming on.

“Well, not feeding her exactly,” Sadie-Grace rambled on, “because she’s in the middle of a juice cleanse, but—”

The phrase juice cleanse was the last straw. “If someone doesn’t tell me what’s going on here, I’m walking out that door”—I jerked my thumb toward the exit—“and calling the police. Or worse: our grandmother.”

Lily responded as if I had slapped her—or possibly farted deliberately in her direction. “You will do no such thing, Sawyer Taft.” She lifted her chin and met my eyes. “This is just a little misunderstanding.”

From behind her duct-tape gag, Campbell Ames objected vehemently to that characterization of the situation.

“We didn’t mean to.” Sadie-Grace was nothing if not earnest. “It just… sort of… happened.”

“How do you accidentally kidnap someone?” I meant it as a rhetorical question, but Sadie-Grace seemed to miss the incredulous tone in my voice.

“It starts,” she said very seriously, “with accidentally knocking them out.”

“Also known as felony assault,” I clarified.

“Believe it or not,” Lily said, delicately clearing her throat, “we aren’t the bad guys here.”

Tangled auburn hair fell in Campbell’s face as she did her best to lunge at my cousin, but whatever they’d bound her to the chair with—it held.

“Honestly, Sawyer,” Lily continued pertly, “if you can’t be bothered to keep an open mind, I hardly see the point of telling you anything at all.”

“An open mind?” I stared at Lily, waiting for some hint that she recognized how ridiculous it was to accuse someone of being closed-minded about kidnapping.

Nada.

Deciding there was one and only one way to speed up the process of figuring out what was going on here—and how likely I was to be arrested as an accessory after the fact—I crossed the room before Lily could stop me and peeled off Campbell’s gag.

“I am going to sue you, have you arrested, and utterly decimate you socially.” Campbell glared daggers at my cousin. “Not necessarily in that order.”

“Campbell Ames,” Lily replied, in an unfettered tone that would have been more appropriate if the two of them had just sat down to tea, “I’d like to introduce you to my cousin, Sawyer. She clearly did not think this through.”

Considering I had neither kidnapped someone nor threatened my kidnappers in a way that incentivized them not to let me go, I was pretty sure I was currently winning the foresight prize in this room.

“We said we were sorry!” Sadie-Grace edged back from Campbell, until her back literally hit the wall.

Campbell made a show of raking her eyes over Sadie-Grace, top to bottom, bottom to top, then turned to me. “Have you ever wondered,” she said, her voice dripping honey, “what total insecurity and a complete lack of social awareness would look like personified?”

Sadie-Grace made a muffled sound. I didn’t need to look down at her feet to guess that she had gone into ballet mode.

“Well, don’t just stand there,” Campbell commanded imperiously. “Untie me!”

Clearly, I’d been mistaken for the help. Unfortunately for Campbell, there were two kinds of people in this world: those who weren’t condescending and needlessly cruel and those I was pretty content to leave duct-taped to a chair.

“Now are you ready to listen?” Lily asked me quietly.

“Are you ready to talk?” I shot back.

Lily pressed her lips together, no smile. “Campbell is…” she managed after a moment. “She’s…”

Campbell smiled sweetly. “I’m what, Lillian?”

Somehow, I doubted the use of Lily’s full name—our ­grandmother’s name—was accidental.

Personally, I wasn’t a big believer in subtle threats. Or subtle insults. So I swung my attention back to the least subtle person in the room. “Secrets are like bandages,” I told Sadie-Grace. “Just rip it off.”

Sadie-Grace took a deep breath and then opened her mouth. Campbell grunted, bucked against the chair like a wild pony, and began screaming at the pitch of breaking glass.

“Make her stop!” Sadie-Grace sounded frantic.

“Why?” I replied, raising my voice just loud enough to be heard over Campbell’s ongoing shrieking. “There’s enough space between houses that no one can hear her. If she wants to turn her head around three hundred and sixty degrees and puke green slime, it’s no skin off my back.”

Sadie-Grace took a moment to digest that. “We have been feeding her kale juice.”

Campbell abruptly stopped with the banshee impression. She gave me a once-over, then slid her gaze back to Lily. “Cousin, you said? Now, would that be on your daddy’s side or your mama’s, Lily?”

“The scandalous one,” I replied, planting myself firmly in front of Campbell’s chair. “And speaking of scandals, I’ve only been here twelve hours, and I’ve already gathered that they’re a particular specialty of yours. You like attention, and you like to break the rules. I can’t help but assume that if you tried to tell anyone about this, and it was your word against Lily’s…”

I trailed off, waiting for the implication to sink in.

Campbell let out a light peal of laughter. “Aren’t you just precious?” she asked. Giving every appearance of being utterly delighted, she leaned forward, as much as she could given the restraints. “Would you like for me to tell you how Miss Propriety over there spends her spare time? When she’s not volunteering for charity, studying for the SATs, standing up straight, and practicing her most virginal smiles, of course.” Campbell was getting way too much pleasure out of this.

“How I spend my time is none of your business,” Lily said, her voice low—and desperate.

Campbell snorted. “Keep telling yourself that, porn star.”

The sudden silence following that insult was deafening.

Abruptly, Sadie-Grace jackrabbited forward. She slapped the duct-tape gag back over Campbell’s mouth, scurried backward, and crossed herself.

Twice.

Then she turned on her toes and eyed me beseechingly. “What do we do?”

Lily didn’t say anything out loud, but a slight shift in her shell-shocked expression echoed the question.

“You two do know that growing up on the wrong side of the metaphorical tracks doesn’t actually give a person any kind of criminal expertise, right?” I said.

Sadie-Grace frowned. “I thought they were literal tracks.”

Campbell caught my gaze, and despite the strip of duct tape over her mouth, there was a triumphant glint in her eyes, one that said that we were lesser and she was more, and things would always work out to her advantage in the end.

I was a strange kid whose even stranger hobbies had gotten her kicked out of Girl Scouts. I’d been born to an unwed teenage mother. I’d been called worse than porn star, and there were boys I’d never so much as kissed who’d claimed we’d done a whole lot more.

I’d been looked at that way that Campbell Ames was looking at me now more times than I could count.

“Start from the beginning,” I told Lily, making my way out of the pool house and nodding for my cousin to do the same. “I’m ready to listen.”