illian waited until she’d poured each of us a cup of coffee before she spoke.

“I don’t want you worrying about your aunt and uncle.”

“Okay.” I took a long drink of coffee to avoid saying more, and she led me out to the front porch. A bench swing hung there. ­Lillian sat and, with an arch of her eyebrow, commanded me to do the same.

“Olivia has a way of landing on her feet. I should have worried less about her growing up.” Lillian took a sip of her drink. “And more about your mama.”

Since Christmas, Lillian had only tried to bring up my mom once or twice.

“I don’t intend to make the same mistake with you.”

I realized then that this was an ambush. Or possibly an intervention. I wondered if my grandmother had been informed about “the streaking incident.”

“You and Lily have obviously mended fences,” Lillian commented, making me think the answer to that question was no. “I’m glad to see it—but I also see you. You aren’t sleeping, Sawyer. You pace around this place like a cat in a cage. Something is bothering you. This would be an appropriate time for you to share what that something is.”

Oh, you know. My biological father may or may not be pressuring the DA to arrest a boy who was framed by my devil of a half-sister, who also somehow convinced her brother—who tried to kiss me—that he was the one who put that other boy’s brother in a coma.

“Things are fine,” I said.

“Sawyer.” Lillian fixed me with a look. “Splendid is good, good is okay, and okay and fine are horrendous.”

Not for the first time, I got the distinct feeling that Lillian would be rather lethal at poker. And chess.

“What can you tell me about the Ames family?” I asked. I meant the question to distract her, but that didn’t keep me from leaning forward to hear the answer.

“Why do you ask?” Lillian covered her lips with her coffee mug, just long enough to obscure whatever fleeting emotions my question might have provoked.

I’d always believed in absolute honesty: Say what you mean, mean what you say, and don’t ask a question if you don’t want to know the answer.

And then I became a Symphony Debutante.

“I’ve been having some trouble with Campbell Ames.” I could have told her what my mother had told me six weeks earlier. I didn’t—and wasn’t even sure why. “And over Christmas, Walker tried his hardest to kiss me.”

Lillian didn’t bat an eye at either of those statements. “Never trust an Ames boy,” she said. “They’re too handsome for their own good and too ambitious for anyone else’s.”

Ambitious wasn’t exactly a word I would have used to describe Walker. The senator, on the other hand?

“Are you speaking from personal experience?” I asked. I didn’t expect my grandmother to answer. Lillian Taft could dodge questions as expertly as she could use them as weapons.

Just this once, however, she surprised me.

“Davis Ames and I grew up together.” There was a long pause, and then she clarified. “Not here.”

She didn’t mean here as in this geographical location. She meant this world. This social stratosphere.

This twisted, sparkling place.

“Davis was always ambitious,” my grandmother mused. “He would say that we had that in common.” Another pause, another discreet lift of the coffee mug to her lips. “The place we came from… it was the kind of place I was terrified that Ellie would end up.”

Lillian so rarely referred to my mother by name. It was your mama, your mother, my daughter.

“I didn’t do enough to keep this family together.” Lillian stared out at the street. I wondered if she even realized she’d changed the subject, or if in her mind, it was all connected: her past with Davis Ames, the way she’d turned my mother out, the scandal, the fact that I was here, sitting on this porch with her, now.

You did what you could. That was what I was supposed to say, but there was still enough of the old Sawyer in me that I didn’t. I wouldn’t lie to her.

Or, at least, I wouldn’t lie to her about this.

“Did you kiss him?” Lillian asked suddenly. “Walker Ames?”

“I wouldn’t do that to Lily.” It occurred to me then that what Campbell had told me—what she’d done to Walker—would hit my cousin a thousand times harder than it had hit me. Campbell’s lie had torn Lily’s life apart at the seams.

“I do not recommend kissing Ames boys.” Lillian’s voice brought me back to the present. “If you can help it.”