queeze in a little closer.” The photographer shot the lot of us a cheesy grin that he probably hoped the whole family would mimic. “Can I get the young lady with the blond
hair to tilt her chin slightly? And young man—hands out of your pockets.”

Lily and John David were fidgety. I couldn’t blame them, even though this surreal turn of events had achieved the opposite effect on me. I stood facing the camera, frozen, unable to so much as blink. My grandmother stood to my right side, my mom to my left.

She’s here. She’s wearing pearls. Her hair is pulled back into a French knot. I wasn’t sure what shook me more—the fact that my mom was pretending she hadn’t spent the past three months ignoring me, or the degree to which her hairstyle and dress and even her posture reminded me of Lillian.

“Perfect,” the photographer declared, stepping back behind his camera. “Now, if I could get some smiles…”

The seven of us were standing in front of a Christmas tree that was nearly two stories tall. Every ribbon, every light, every ornament was perfect—and everything about this felt wrong.

In the old days, the photographer’s flash would have gone off. Instead, one moment, he was snapping digital pictures, and the next, he was done. We were ushered off to the side, and the next family filed in.

“I’m going to find the gingerbread.” John David was nobody’s fool. He had even less of an idea what was going on than I did, but he had no intention of sticking around to find out. He was a good three feet away when Aunt Olivia’s hand shot out and grabbed him by the back of the collar.

“What are we not going to do this year?” she asked him.

John David turned around and eyed her. “We are not,” he said aristocratically, “going to eat so much gingerbread that we puke.”

She smoothed a hand over his lapels and then let him loose. He was off like a rocket.

I caught my mom with the strangest look on her face.

Aunt Olivia saw it, too. “What?” she said, her voice a peal of bells, her eyes shooting daggers at my mom.

“It’s nothing,” my mom replied, shaking her head. “I just never pictured you with a little boy, Liv.”

The fact that my mom could come here pretending she hadn’t been punishing me for looking for my father was strange. The way she’d just casually shortened her sister’s name—the sister who, as far as I knew, she hadn’t seen in eighteen years—was downright bizarre.

The silence that followed was a second too long. My grandmother, my aunt, Uncle J.D.—they’d all been doing an impressive job of pretending that my mom hadn’t shown up unannounced. You never would have known, observing us, that the adults hadn’t seen each other in years. But my mom’s offhand comment?

That got a response.

“Yes, well, imagining me with a son would have required spending some modicum of time devoted to thinking about someone other than yourself.” If smiles were deadly, Aunt Olivia’s would have downed my mother where she stood.

“Sawyer.” Lillian stepped in before my mother could reply. “Perhaps you could show your mama the main dining room. It’s changed quite a bit since she was last here.”

My mom wove her right arm through my left. She didn’t spare her mother so much as a glance, but when she spoke to me, Lillian was obviously the subject of her oh-so-pleasant statement. “She’s the boss.”

Hello, land mines. My name is Sawyer, and I’ll be skipping through a field of you this evening. I steered my mother away from the rest of the family. As we made our way through the great room, into Ash Hall, and through to the dining room, I could feel a dozen sets of eyes—or more—pulled our way, like metal shavings to a magnet.

“That dress can’t be comfortable.” My mom leaned close to talk in my ear, as if the two of us were sharing delightful secrets. “Are you wearing a strapless bra?”

I managed to wait until we’d made it to the dining room before replying. “Mom.”

“All I’m saying is that the Sawyer that I know would rather wear electrical tape than—”

“Can we please stop talking about my bra?” I gritted out.

At some point in our walk, I’d stopped leading her, and she’d started directing me. We ended up on the far side of the dining room, standing near one of the twenty-foot-tall windows, overlooking the pool. The thick plaid curtains—a Christmas special—had been drawn back just enough that we could see the night sky. The pool was covered and not much to look at, but the stars were a sight to behold.

“They don’t shine as brightly here.” My mom nudged me gently in the side. “You can’t have forgotten that already.”

I felt like she’d hit me. “I haven’t forgotten anything.”

“Look at you,” my mom said softly. The words didn’t sound as critical as I would have expected them to, but they packed a punch all the same.

“Look at you,” I replied. “You’re not exactly dressed for tending bar.”

“Smile,” my mother murmured. “We have an audience.”

A quick glance told me we were drawing even more stares than we had a moment before, but I didn’t give a damn about our audience.

“You’ve been here for a few months,” my mom told me. “I spent almost eighteen years here. You’re like a foreign exchange student, baby. I’m a native speaker, so smile.”

I bared my teeth. To call it a smile would have been a bit of a stretch.

“That’s my girl.” That sounded more like my mom than anything else she’d said since she arrived, and it hurt.

If you didn’t expect things of people, they couldn’t disappoint you. I knew that, but a part of me would never stop expecting her to…

To what? I asked myself.

“You should have called me,” I said. “You should have answered when I called.”

“I know.” She looked down at the floor. “I just kept hoping you’d come to your senses. That you’d come home.”

“Home is forty-five minutes away,” I pointed out. “It doesn’t have to be an either/or proposition. Even if I’m living with Lillian—you can still see me.”

My mom gazed out at the pool. “You’re the one who left, Sawyer.”

“I had a right to come here.” That ended up sounding more like a question than I would have liked. “They’re your family—but they’re my family, too, and they’re not all bad.”

“If they were,” my mother replied after a moment, “your coming here wouldn’t have been so hard to swallow. If they were all bad—if living like this was all bad—I wouldn’t have to worry that you’d like it.” She looked down, her lashes casting shadows on the cheekbones Aunt Olivia envied so much. “I was never happy here after Daddy died. They probably haven’t told you this, but your aunt ran away, left a note and took off in the dead of night for eight months, close to nine. The police were called. Mama, of course, asked them to keep the investigation discreet. And when my sister finally deigned to return? Your grandmother never said a word about it. We just had to pretend that Liv had been on a vacation or at boarding school or that we knew where she’d been at all times.” She shook her head ever so slightly. “Except she wasn’t Liv anymore. She was Olivia, and she was perfect. It was like all that grief, all that anger, all that everything… it just evaporated, and there I was, twelve years old and awkward as all get-out and angry at her in ways that no one would let me say. And it just… stayed that way.” Her voice was muted now. “I didn’t belong here.” She turned slightly toward me. “I still don’t.”

“You had friends here,” I said, thinking back to the photographs I’d seen in the attic. “And you obviously had a… connection… with someone.”

“Sex,” my mom corrected. “The word you’re looking for is sex.”

I opened my mouth, but didn’t get a word out before a voice spoke up behind us.

“Ellie?”

For an instant, my mom looked a decade younger. Her eyes widened. Her lips parted slightly. She turned toward the person who’d approached us. “Lucas.”

For someone who’d just been insisting she didn’t belong here, my mom looked awfully happy to see Lucas Ames.

“As I live and breathe,” he drawled. “It’s the Ghost of Christmas Past.”

“You grew,” my mom commented.

He grinned. “You didn’t.”

“Sawyer.” My mom seemed to remember that I was standing there. “This is…”

“Sawyer and I go way back,” Lucas said smoothly. “I did what I could to save her from boredom at Pearls of Wisdom, but am sad to report that neither of our families much appreciated the gesture.”

“Imagine that,” my mother snorted.

“My father bought your mother’s pearls.” Lucas waited for that to register before he dropped the bomb. “And then they were stolen.”

“Someone stole Lillian’s pearls?” Ellie’s eyebrows skyrocketed.

“Can we not talk about the pearls?” I asked. My mom and Lucas both turned to me, like they’d only just remembered I was there. I wondered if they realized nearly the entire room was watching this little reunion with interest.

How many of these people remembered that the two of them had been friends? How many suspected Lucas of being my father?

Before I could suss out the answer to that question, Davis Ames approached with Boone’s mother on one side and Campbell’s on the other.

“Hello, Eleanor,” Davis said smoothly.

Lucas replied before my mother could. “I was just catching Ellie up on local gossip. Who’s married who, who’s inherited what, all grand larcenies that have been committed in the past few months…”

“Lucas.” The senator’s wife gave him a look. “Please.”

“You look good, Ellie.” That was from Boone’s mother. “And, of course, your daughter is charming.”

There were at least a dozen benign replies my mom could have made without blinking an eye. Why, thank you. Of course she is. I’m so proud of her. But instead, what my mom said was…

“She takes after her father.”