he most convenient thing about having a remarkably small chest was that there was always room for padding. Since I’ve moved into Lillian’s house, my assets had been enhanced with everything from water bras to foam held in place with boob tape.

Actual boob tape.

Today, however, marked the first time that I’d padded my chest by wearing a recording device. Sadie-Grace had acquired it. I did not ask how or where, and in return, she had only attempted to fluff up my chest once. As I reached out and rang the bell, I admitted to myself that I could have probably just used the audio recording function on my phone.

But what fun was that?

I waited a full five seconds before I rang the doorbell a second time. Campbell had promised that her mother wouldn’t be home—and that, at least for the next few minutes, her father would be.

I heard footsteps coming. I measured them—too heavy to be Charlotte’s, too crisp for Walker’s.

Game on.

“Sawyer.” The senator did an impressive job of looking both happy and utterly unsurprised to see me. “Always a pleasure to find one of the lovely Taft ladies on my front porch. Unfortunately, I have to inform you that Campbell isn’t home.”

She’s staking out the house, waiting to send Lily and Sadie-Grace the all clear to search your office, while she does the same thing here.

“I’m not here to see Campbell,” I said politely.

The senator adopted a slightly more aggrieved expression, full of fondness nonetheless. “I’m afraid Walker is not in any condition to be receiving visitors.”

I took that to mean that Walker had been self-medicating again. Even a “stable” Walker wasn’t necessarily a sober one. The fact that Sterling Ames could stand there and act like he had no part in that made me want to hit something.

Hard.

Instead, I tried to sound sympathetic. “It must be difficult for you.” I tried to imagine how the senator would refer to Walker’s long and painful downward spiral. “This… stage of his.”

The senator managed a smile. “He’s sowing his wild oats.” That was the story, the acceptable one. “Boys will be boys, I suppose.”

And snakes will be snakes.

“I’ll tell him you stopped by.” The senator had the door halfway closed when I stepped forward and wedged my foot into the entryway.

“I’m actually not here to see Walker or Campbell.” I allowed a hint of something that wasn’t sunny or polite into my tone. “I came to see you.”

I’d give the man this: He had an excellent poker face. Maybe I’d inherited mine from him.

“I’m happy to make time for any of my constituents,” Sterling Ames said. “You’ll need to make an appointment with Leah, of course.”

Leah-in-the-red-heels. The assistant.

“I’ve been talking to my mom.” I didn’t expect a visible reaction, and I didn’t get one—but the door stayed open. “About her ­Debutante year.”

The senator was a man who understood subtext. Better yet, he knew quite well that it could be used as a threat.

“About what happened back then,” I continued, decidedly not specifying that what had happened was that this man had impregnated my mom.

There was a slight tic in my biological father’s jaw. That was it—all the acknowledgment I was going to get.

“I’m sure talking to your mother has been very therapeutic.”

I needed to get him out of the house. I needed to keep him from shutting this door. Subtext wasn’t working, so I answered his statement with a shrug. “Not as therapeutic as talking to the press.”

There was a beat of silence. Cue reaction in three… two…

The senator stepped out onto the front porch, shutting the door behind him. He didn’t even look at me as he spoke. “Let’s take a walk.”

In the silence that accompanied our brisk walk away from the house, it took everything I had not to access my mental bank of famous movie quotes and murmur a message to Campbell. ­Houston, we
are go.

“Sawyer.” The senator had regained whatever shred of calm he’d lost. “What are your plans for next year?”

This wasn’t how I’d expected him to respond to my threat, but the whole point of this endeavor—besides the audio I was ­recording—was to distract the man, so I played along.

“My plans?”

“For the future,” the senator clarified.

I have a very elaborate, very detailed plan. I’m in the middle of orchestrating it right now.

“College,” I said aloud. “I’ve always enjoyed history.”

“Not the most practical degree.”

I shrugged. “I could make more as a plumber than I could in most white-collar professions straight out of college.”

“Do you have aspirations to plumb?”

The question was pointed, but there was enough humor there, too, to make my stomach twist. Senator Sterling Ames was too easy of a man to like.

Just keep him talking. Keep him out of the house—and away from his office.

“I’m not a person who’s ever had many aspirations.” I decided to nudge the conversation forward—just enough so that he wouldn’t forget that there was more at stake here than the pros and cons of a liberal arts degree. “I aspired to make sure the bills were paid. I aspired to make sure there was money for groceries. And I was really dedicated to the goal of not being sexually harassed more than twice a day.”

I felt a stab of something like guilt, but sharper and colder. It lingered, because what I’d just said? That wasn’t a fair assessment of my childhood. I’d taken care of my mom as much as the reverse, but I’d never wanted for anything.

Especially a father.

Especially one like him.

“What can I do?” the senator asked. “For you?”

This was just a distraction, part of the plan, a cog in a very complicated machine. But I couldn’t ignore the fact that this was also me walking side by side with the man who was responsible for half of my DNA. There he was, inquiring into my well-being.

“Think, Sawyer,” the senator said softly. “What do you want?”

I got it then. It should have been apparent from the get-go. If I’d been approaching this objectively, it would have been.

“You’re paying me off.”

That earned me a dose of disapproving silence in response. One did not simply say that one was being offered a bribe—unless, of course, one was hoping to catch one’s sperm donor saying something incriminating on tape.

The more threatening, the better.

“There is one thing…” I let that hang in the air for a few moments. “There’s a boy. His name is Nick Ryan, and you had him arrested for grand theft.”

Throwing water on a grease fire wasn’t smart, but occasionally, it was fun.

“Be smart, Sawyer. Don’t get dragged down by a loser like that.”

“You asked me what I wanted,” I insisted. “I don’t want money. I don’t want advice about my future. I don’t want anything from you, except for your family to drop the charges.”

Or, you know, for you to run your mouth off about Nick, the pearls, and your intentions. Tomato, to-mah-to.

“I’m afraid, at this point, that’s out of my hands. You would have to bring your concerns to the DA.”

“You know the DA,” I said. “You’re the one who pressured him to press charges against Nick in the first place.”

I didn’t get a confirmation. I didn’t get a denial. I got a heaping side of fatherly advice. “Your mother made some very poor choices when she was your age, Sawyer. I would hate to see history repeating itself.”

The anger buried deep in my gut loosened. I could feel it rising up, and for the first time in months, I empathized with my mom. I felt for the stupid seventeen-year-old girl she’d been and the cold dose of reality she’d faced when she turned up pregnant by a man like this.

“I would hate,” I countered, parroting the senator’s phrasing back at him, “for anyone to find out that you knocked up an impressionable teenage girl when you were a full-blown adult.” I probably should have stopped there, but I couldn’t quite help myself. “A married adult. An adult in law school, already on your way to a promising political career.”

One second the two of us were walking, and the next we’d stopped. His hand was lying on my shoulder. He didn’t grip it, didn’t squeeze, didn’t apply bruising force—but every survival instinct I had said that he wanted me to know that he could.

This was my father.

This was the answer to the giant question mark that had dogged my life.

“It would be very inconvenient if you were to continue down this line of thought.”

Inconvenient. I swallowed, weathering the blow. That was what I was to him—all that I was. I would have preferred a threat.

“I wouldn’t want to inconvenience you.” There was no reason for me to sound gutted. I was the one playing him here. I was the one recording this conversation. I was the one with the upper hand.

So why did I feel six years old and alone?

“Smart girl.” The senator allowed his hand to fall from my shoulder. “Because if you do become inconvenient?” His tone turned almost affectionate. “I’ll kill you, sweetheart.”