our father’s mistress?” I echoed what Campbell had just said. “Because this wasn’t enough of a soap opera already.”

Campbell shrugged. “I know my father, and that means that I am aware that no matter how well we plan this, there is a chance that he will lawyer or bribe or weasel his way out of any real consequences. If we want him to pay, we need a backup plan. We have to hit him where it hurts.”

“His reputation.” Lily was the one who filled in the gap.

“It’s not so much having a mistress,” Campbell said, “as it is being caught.”

I thought back to what Campbell had said when she’d explained to me just how damaging Secrets could be to Lily. Some things weren’t so much a matter of purity as discretion.

“And how are the police supposed to discover that your father’s mistress has the pearls?” I asked.

Campbell reached down and picked something up off the ground beside the lawn chair. She rose again and offered it to Lily.

“A camera,” my cousin stated. “With a telephoto lens.”

“You have a God-given talent for taking dirty pictures.” Campbell smiled sweetly at Lily. “How would you feel about putting that to good use?”

As much as I hated to admit it, I could see the logic behind Campbell’s alteration to our plan. If the story we wanted to push was that the senator had framed Nick for the purpose of preventing him from looking further into the hit and run, people were going to question why Sterling Ames hadn’t actually planted the pearls in Nick’s possession. That the senator had been holding on to the pearls because he could might have been the truth. But the idea that he’d stolen the pearls and given them to his mistress?

That was salacious.

Stupid and borderline implausible? Maybe. But at the end of the day, salacious sells.

“Would it have killed you to tell us about this part of your plan earlier?” I asked Campbell.

She shrugged. “I just found out about Leah last week.”

Leah. I registered the name, and my brain connected the dots. “His assistant?”

Leah-in-the-red-heels. Leah, who wasn’t more than a few years older than us.

A tiger doesn’t change its stripes.

“I have a massage in fifteen minutes.” Lily still hadn’t agreed to take compromising pictures of the senator’s mistress. She looked down at the camera. “Then makeup at two and hair at two thirty.”

“Then it’s fortunate, isn’t it,” Campbell replied pleasantly, “that I texted Leah from my father’s phone and asked her to meet him in their normal hotel room at noon. You didn’t hear it from me, but I deeply suspect she’ll be dishabille.” She smirked. “Except for the pearls.”