t was a truth universally acknowledged that a person in want of plastic baggies need only look in the Taft family kitchen. Aunt Olivia was the queen of Ziplocs. She’d taken over Lillian’s cabinets and had entire drawers dedicated to them—every size, every type, a year’s supply of each at least.

Helping myself to a gallon-sized bag, I opened it, dropped my bounty inside, and zipped it shut. Senator Ames had politician hair. I’d had zero luck getting ahold of so much as a single strand in the past month. Luckily, however, I was a full 50 percent of the team devoted to fetching coffee at his regional office, so in between his frequent trips to Washington, it hadn’t been difficult to smuggle out one of his used coffee cups.

“What in the world are you doing, honey?” Aunt Olivia was surprisingly stealthy when she wanted to be.

I turned to face her and looked down at the disposable coffee cup I’d just Ziploc-ed.

“Nothing.”

“That doesn’t look like nothing,” Aunt Olivia commented. “Exactly how gullible do you girls think I am?”

“Fine,” I admitted with a sigh. “It’s a coffee cup in a plastic bag.” When in doubt, state the obvious.

“And why might one wish to preserve a discarded coffee cup?” Aunt Olivia was either bemused or suspicious—the patented ­Southern Smile she’d just whipped out made it impossible to tell which.

“Was that a rhetorical question?” I asked to buy time.

Aunt Olivia gave me a look she typically reserved for John David. “No,” she said. “No, it was not.”

I improvised. “It’s a Christmas tradition,” I said, glancing down at the baggie in my hand. I’d found, in the stretch between ­Thanksgiving and now, that the entire extended family tiptoed around any questions about the way that my mom and I usually celebrated the holidays.

Lily wasn’t the only one who’d realized that my mother still wasn’t taking my calls.

“Putting a coffee cup in a plastic baggie is a Christmas tradition?” Aunt Olivia definitely sounded suspicious now, but only about a quarter as suspicious as she should have.

“It’s like hanging stockings,” I spitballed. “But for people on a budget. Are those cookies hot?” I changed the topic as rapidly as I could. Aunt Olivia had spent the day baking sugar cookies. The countertops were covered with them. I reached for one shaped like a candy cane, and she slapped my hand away lightly.

“I haven’t even iced them yet,” she chided. “Besides which, ­Sawyer Ann, I can guarantee that you won’t want to spoil your appetite for tonight.”

This evening was the annual Christmas party at Northern Ridge. It was open to all club members—and the families of all Symphony Ball Squires and Debs. John David had spent the better part of the last week attempting to describe to me the wide array
of deliciousness that would be ours for the taking at the party.

The gingerbread was supposedly the food of the gods.

But I hadn’t come down here to discuss gingerbread—or for a single plastic bag.

I’d come down here for two of them.

“Do you have any lipstick I can borrow?”

Aunt Olivia could not have been more surprised if I’d asked her to personally shave my head.

“The dress Lillian wants me to wear tonight is red,” I said. “I’m usually more of a clear gloss or nothing person, but…”

Aunt Olivia’s eyes came very close to watering as she pulled me into a side hug. “My makeup’s in the bathroom. You help yourself, sweetheart.”

I almost felt guilty about the fact that I’d just been looking for an invitation to rifle through the bathroom she shared with Uncle J.D. so that I could obtain his sample as well.

“I know that this must be a very difficult time of year for you, Sawyer.” Aunt Olivia laid her hands lightly on my shoulders and gave them a squeeze, “I know you miss your mama, but we are very glad to have you here.” She turned back toward the stove. “I’m not one to talk badly about anyone, but I could wring my sister’s neck for pulling these kinds of games on you.”

I could have used that as an opportunity to make my exit, but the urge to defend my mom ran deep. “She just wants me to come home.”

Aunt Olivia pulled a bowl down from the cabinet and began making what I could only assume was the icing. “It’s the silent treatment, is what it is. You give her what she wants, or she cuts you out. Lord knows this wouldn’t be the first time, but her own daughter …” Realizing what she was saying, Aunt Olivia brought herself up short. “That’s neither here nor there.” She turned back to face me again. “The point is that you’re welcome here, Sawyer. You always have been.”

I stared at her, my brain turning that statement over. “What do you mean I always have been?”

For a moment, I didn’t think Aunt Olivia would answer. “No reason to go raising the ghosts of the past.”

That was such an Aunt Olivia thing to say after she’d already raised them. I’d been told my entire life that my mother’s family didn’t want us. She was an embarrassment, and I was worse. They’d kicked her out. They’d cut contact.

But my mom was the one not answering my phone calls now.

“Sawyer.” Aunt Olivia paused, hesitating only for a moment. “The past year has been difficult for Lily. I will confess that I was not sure how your… situation… would play into that, but your being here and a part of this family has been a real blessing for my daughter. And for the rest of us.” Another hug, and then: “Now, shouldn’t you be seeing about that lipstick?”

Aunt Olivia steered me out of the kitchen and toward the stairs. As she did, I caught sight of the family Christmas tree. Blown-glass and crystal ornaments were intermingled with ones that had been made by pudgy little hands when Lily and John David were young. Three stockings hung on the mantel—one with Lily’s name on it, one with John David’s, and one with mine.

For the first time, it occurred to me to wonder whether or not my stocking was new.

“Go on,” Aunt Olivia said, planting an affectionate swat on my bottom. “Scoot. I promised your grandmother we’d be the first ones in line for family pictures at the party tonight.”

I scooted. I barely noticed the portraits on the walls these days, but the small nail hole next to the family portrait at the top of the stairs hit me harder than it usually did. My mom wasn’t always the most reliable narrator, but Lillian had never denied kicking her out. My grandmother had banished all trace of her younger daughter to the attic.

But she kept it all. I forced that thought down and walked to my aunt and uncle’s bathroom. Unlike the senator—and Aunt Olivia—Uncle J.D. wasn’t a neatnik. His brush was chock-full of hairs, and, luckily for me, Aunt Olivia kept an emergency box of Ziplocs in her vanity.

Uncle J.D. is not my father. The fact that I even had to think those words was ridiculous. And yet… my mom had asked me to let this go. She didn’t want me to know who my father was.

She doesn’t get to make that decision for me. I told myself that I had already made my choice. This didn’t have to be an emotional thing. I could find my answer logically and systematically, no emotions involved. That meant investigating all four of the men whose faces my mother had scratched out of that photo.

Even my uncle.

I barely remembered to grab a red lipstick out of Aunt Olivia’s drawer before I made my way back to my room. Crossing over to the bed, I opened the drawer to the nightstand, intending to tuck the samples I’d collected out of sight, but instead, my gaze fell
on the photograph I’d stolen from Aunt Olivia’s box.

Four faces were circled. One—Thomas Mason’s—I’d drawn through with an X.

I set the baggies down on top of the nightstand and pushed the photo to the side. Beneath it in the drawer was something else I’d found myself looking at just as often in the past month: a printout of a news article. It had taken some digging for me to figure out Nick’s last name, let alone his brother’s first, but eventually, my internet sleuthing had turned up answers.

Colt Ryan was twenty-two, an employee at Northern Ridge Country Club. Like Nick, he’d been a valet. One night after work, he’d been walking the two miles to the nearest bus station, when he’d been hit by a car.

A hit and run.

The only coverage I’d managed to find on it was a paragraph and a half long. I’d printed the article and read it a hundred times. One day, Colt Ryan had been fine, and the next… coma.

I hadn’t heard from or seen Nick once in the past four and a half weeks. I’d done what he’d asked: I’d kept my mouth shut.

“Can you zip me?”

I turned to see Lily standing in the doorway. She was wearing a black velvet dress, knee-length and fitted. She spun to turn her back toward me, and as I crossed the room to zip her dress, I realized that I’d left the nightstand drawer open.

The article—and the photo—were visible.

The zipper on Lily’s dress caught. She was saying something about my accessories for tonight, but I barely heard her as I worked the zipper back down and up again. Smooth skin disappeared as I finished fastening the dress into place.

“Go ahead and put yours on,” Lily instructed me, “and I’ll zip you.”

I did as I was told—and positioned myself to block Lily’s view of the drawer.

“Penny for your thoughts,” she commented as she ran a hand over my dress, smoothing the fabric.

“A penny won’t buy you much these days,” I told Lily as she zipped me. “Thought inflation.”

“Sawyer,” Lily faux-chided. “Inflation isn’t something we talk about…”

I snorted. It took me a second to realize that she hadn’t trailed off midsentence intentionally. I contorted my upper body to look back at her and realized that she was looking over my shoulder. Before I could stop her, she’d sidestepped right by me.

Straight for the open drawer.

She stood there for a moment, then reached. “What’s this?”

I looked down at her hand, hoping that she’d be holding the article about Nick’s brother. No such luck. She was staring at the photograph—twenty-four Symphony Squires, four with thick circles drawn around their faces, one circle crossed out.

“It’s not important,” I said, reaching to take it from her.

She stepped back. “That’s not just a fib, Sawyer Ann. That’s a lie.”

“Is there really a difference?”

“Sawyer.” Lily emphasized my name in a way that made the muscles in my stomach twist. “Why do you have this picture?” She was quiet for a moment. “Why did you circle Daddy?”

“It doesn’t matter,” I said again, but Lily knew why I’d decided to come here. She was the one who’d helped me go through the boxes in the attic. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out why I might have a photograph of men in our parents’ generation—or why I might have circled a handful.

“Don’t take this the wrong way,” Lily told me, sounding more Southern-proper than she had in ages, “but if you think there’s any chance my daddy might have slept with your mama, you are playing with half a deck.”

“Lily,” I started to say, but she held up her index finger—the index finger of doom.

“A quarter of a deck,” she amended fiercely. “At most.”

“I’m not the one who zeroed in on those men.” I should have stopped there, but I didn’t. “My mom has a copy of that picture. She—”

“She doesn’t have much of a deck at all.” For once, Lily didn’t bite her tongue. “We both know your mama was trouble, Sawyer. As far as I can tell, she still is.”

Downstairs, the doorbell rang. I barely heard it. “You don’t know anything about my mother,” I said fiercely.

Yes, I’d chosen to come back here. Yes, my mom had taken that badly. But that wasn’t all she was. She’d been there for me my entire life. Maybe not always the way I wanted, but she’d been there. She’d thrown midnight ice-cream parties and taught me to mix cocktails and let me teach her to tie ropes. She’d never pressured me to be someone else, never once made me feel like she was anything less than delighted with exactly who I was.

That was more than most people could say.

“Excuse me,” I said sharply, turning my back on Lily. “Me and my quarter of a deck are going to make ourselves useful and answer the door.”

She followed on my heels as I descended the stairs. The doorbell rang again.

“It’s probably just carolers,” Lily called after me.

I would have rather faced down a half dozen churchgoers yodeling “Silent Night” than continue the conversation my cousin and I had been having upstairs. I was halfway to the foyer when Uncle J.D. stepped out of the kitchen and beat me to the door. He opened it, and I skidded to a stop. Lily nearly rear-ended me.

It wasn’t carolers.

I sucked in a breath and found that no matter what I did, I couldn’t seem to let it out.

“Ellie.” Uncle J.D. was gobsmacked, but he covered well.

Better than I did, as I gaped at the woman standing in a little black dress and modest black heels on my grandmother’s front porch.

“Mom?”