alker wasn’t driving, but he thinks he was. I stared at Campbell.

“You were driving.” My mind was spinning. “But Walker doesn’t know that. He thinks…” I was so horrified I could barely form the words. “You let him think that he’s the one who hit Colt?”

No response from Campbell.

“How does that even work?” I took one step and then another, until I was standing in front of Campbell instead of behind her. “You were both drunk, but he was too drunk to remember? Did you put his body in the driver’s seat? Or just lie to him later?”

Campbell bolted. In a flash of white towel and tan skin, she was halfway out the door. I followed on her heels. All I could think was that Walker was my half-brother. He was the type of person who pulled a girl out onto the dance floor and invited her to insult him. He missed being a good guy. He chased people away, because deep down, he believed that he deserved to be alone.

“How could you?” I started to say, but before I finished, Campbell stepped to the side. I was still going forward. Somehow, I ended up outside the door, and she ducked back in. Before I could react, she slammed the door to the sauna.

I hadn’t been aware that it locked until I tried to get back in.

“Campbell!” I pounded on the door with my fist. “Open this door!”

Eventually resigning myself to the fact that she had no intention of doing so, I turned to make my way back toward the changing room. Whatever my next move is, it is not going to happen while I’m wearing literally nothing but a towel.

Unfortunately, that thought proved to be prophetic. I made it half a step away from the sauna before I realized that when Campbell had slammed the door, she’d caught my towel. The edge was stuck between the door and the frame.

I tugged, to no avail.

I looked down the hallway—to the left, to the right—but there was no one there. No Lily, no Sadie-Grace, no spa employees.

Whatever my next move is, I realized, setting my jaw, it’s not going to happen while I’m wearing nothing but a towel.

Unless I wanted to stand here indefinitely, it was going to happen while I was wearing nothing at all.

We shall not speak of the rest of Spa Day.

Suffice to say, I eventually obtained my clothes, and I was also asked to leave the premises. That was how I ended up back at Lillian’s house several hours earlier than scheduled. I fit my key into the front door and tried to prepare myself for the Southern Inquisition.

I eased the door open an inch or two, but realized an instant later that I needn’t have bothered. Aunt Olivia and Uncle J.D. were arguing too loudly to hear me.

“Are you sure there’s nothing you want to tell me?” Aunt Olivia phrased the jab as a question.

“You know everything, Olivia. You’d be the first one to remind me of that.” Uncle J.D. was easygoing. Uncle J.D. was a ­goofball—­
90 percent John David and only 10 percent Lily. But right now, he sounded… not quite angry.

Bitter.

“Allow me to rephrase, dear: are there any financial matters that I should be aware of?”

“Stay out of it, Liv.”

“Don’t call me that.” Aunt Olivia’s tone wasn’t quite angry, either. Cold. “I called to check on the renovation timeline. It’s ridiculous that it’s taken them this long. Imagine my surprise when they said the project was halted in December.”

“I’m going to work this out.…”

“Halted for lack of funds.”

She just mentioned money, I thought dumbly. Aunt Olivia doesn’t talk about money.

I thought back to the auction—to the moment when Davis Ames had outbidden Uncle J.D. on the family pearls. The old man had mentioned something about rumors.

Before Uncle J.D. could reply to Aunt Olivia’s accusation, before she could press him for an answer, a door slammed.

“If you get a call from the neighbors,” I heard John David call out, “I want you to know that duck had been infected with the zombie virus, and he had it coming.”

The argument in the kitchen evaporated in an instant.

“Come in here,” Uncle J.D. called back, “and tell us about this zombie duck.”

I heard John David sigh. “I might have scared him. And he might have pooped all over the neighbor’s car.”

Deciding this was as much of a distraction as I was going to get, I opened and closed the door—loudly. “I’m home,” I called. Before anyone could reply, I darted for the stairs. Thank you, John David, patron saint of girls weathering the fallout of accidental nudity.

I made it up a third of the grand staircase before I heard the distinct sound of a throat clearing behind me. I turned to see my grandmother standing at the bottom of the stairs.

“Sawyer,” she said. “A word?”