Chapter no 20

Twelve (The Naturals, #4.5)

The girl sits down, and her mother brushes her hair. Long, even strokes. “You’re lucky, you know.” The brush stills, then the woman wielding it corrects herself. “Blessed.”

Blessed because the leader has chosen her.

Blessed because she’s favored by God. What a joke.

“Sadie.” Her mother says the name she was given at birth, the one he

knows. “This is a blessing.”

It would have been easier if she couldn’t hear, plain as day, that Mama believes that.

Believes in him.

The girl turns. She needs, just this once, for her mother to see the truth

—to see her.

“I don’t have visions.” Truths get more potent the longer you keep them from your tongue. There’s years of power in this one. “I never have. He doesn’t have them, either. He’s a liar. I’m a better one, and I will literally rip his eyes out of their sockets the next time he comes to my bed.”

She was nine the first time. With the right lies—the right truths—she put him off. Until she was twelve.

“This isn’t you.” Her mother backs away, frightened, but the girl called Sadie—the girl who used to be Sadie—knows the truth.

After all, her mother was the one who told her, all those years ago— Pretend it’s not you. Whatever happens, pretend that it isn’t happening to you.

Sadie is good at pretending. Lia is better. After all, she’s pretended to be Sadie all these years.

“I love you, Mama.” Lia can make that sound and feel true without having to worry about whether or not it still is. “Even though you’re planning on telling him everything I tell you, even though you’ll stand back

and let him put me in a hole in the ground, even though you’ll watch me starving and dying of thirst and look straight through me until he gives me permission to exist again—I love you.”

Her mother is wearing a bracelet made of thorns—penance. She removes it, tries to force it around her daughter’s wrist.

Lia lets her. As the thorns bite into her flesh, she lets her eyelashes flutter. Her face visibly softens. She dons the Sadie mask. “You did well, Mama.” The words are gentle, and they sound true-true-true. Lia is leaving tonight. She knows now that no one will be coming with her. She can feel the last bit of Sadie flickering inside of her like a candle, ready to die.

She lets Sadie caress the side of her mother’s face, one last time.

“Your faith is pure.” Lia knows how to sell a lie, and nine-tenths of it is telling people exactly what they want to hear.

“This was a test?” Her mother is breathless. Questions can’t be lies, but Lia hears the hesitation, the uncertainty. Some part of Mama has always known what the leader does to those, like Sadie, whom he calls blessed.

But the others? They aren’t like Sadie, aren’t like Lia. They don’t know when someone is lying, when the leader is spitting falsehoods. They can’t lie nearly so convincingly themselves.

This is the truth: there is blood on Sadie’s hands, on Lia’s. One lie—the right lie—can doom a man. She wishes a lie could save her mother.

He’s going to kill you someday. All of you.

Lia won’t be here to die. “It was a test,” she confirms gently. She leans forward, touches her forehead to her mother’s. “Tell me you love me.”

It’s Lia who turns, not Sadie. It’s Lia whose hair her mother is brushing.

She’ll always be Lia now. “I love you, Sadie.”

It would be easier, for Lia, if that were a lie.

‌“Worst thing about this case.” Dean sat at the end of my bed. It had taken three days—and Briggs calling in a favor—for my boyfriend to get twenty-four hours of leave from Quantico. Given that Briggs had also had to grease the wheels to excuse Michael’s better-to-ask-for-forgiveness-than-‌

permission trip to Maine, I was starting to suspect that someone at the FBI Academy was going to be read in on the Naturals program fairly soon.

“The worst thing about this case…” I took my time to feel the weight of the words. “The worst thing is knowing that Mackenzie could have died because I got it wrong.”

I’d left a vulnerable twelve-year-old alone with a killer whose specialty was exploiting vulnerabilities. I knew better than to make assumptions. I knew how easily one wrong mental turn could lead even the strongest profiler astray.

And yet…

Dean took my hand in his and turned it over so that he could trace his thumb along the lines of my palm. “Are you sure that the worst part wasn’t why you got it wrong?”

Being a Natural didn’t make a person infallible. I knew that, but I’d started working with the Bureau young enough that I also had a healthy amount of experience under my belt. Normally, when I made mistakes, they were smaller.

Normally, I self-corrected.

I didn’t need to turn too much of my profiler’s eye inward to know why it had been far too easy for me to see a psychologist as the enemy. I’d thought from the beginning that the woman didn’t—and couldn’t— understand what Mackenzie had been through.

Just like the Bureau psychologist I’d been assigned when I was a teenager had never understood me.

“You think I should see someone.” I let my fingers curl slowly into a fist, and Dean cupped his hand around mine.

“I think it might help.” His lips brushed, white-hot, over my knuckles.

As much as I’d fought to ignore my own scars, I’d never tried to make Dean forget his. I had never—and would never—pretend that the worst moments of his life didn’t matter. I knew and accepted that Behavior, Personality, Environment wasn’t a one-time calculation, that everything we did and experienced became a part of us.

I knew that the things that happened when we were young had the longest to burrow in.

Without our particular childhoods, none of us would have been Naturals. Lia wouldn’t have been Lia without growing up in the cult. Sloane had always had an affinity for numbers, but isolation had turned them into a coping mechanism. Michael’s sensitivity to emotions developed as a survival skill, and Dean understood killers because he’d been raised to be one. I’d long since accepted the role that my own childhood had played in making me a Natural profiler.

Why was it so much harder to accept that there were other traumas whose effects had formed me just as much?

“Quentin Nichols had a sister.” I leaned back against the headboard, my fingers intertwining themselves with Dean’s. It was easier—always—to talk about someone other than myself. “She killed herself when she was eighteen. Quentin was four years younger.”

“He was there.” Dean didn’t make that a question.

“His family blamed him for not being able to stop it.” That was what I’d been able to piece together, after the fact. “According to people who knew him, Nichols always said that was why he went into crisis negotiation—to save lives. But in reality…” I closed my eyes, just for a moment, knowing that Dean deserved more than me talking about the case because it was easier than addressing the elephant in the room.

“In reality,” I continued, opening my eyes to his deep brown ones, “Nichols convinced himself that he had saved his sister. He was there for her, in the end. He told her it was okay. He let her go.”

Dean’s head tilted down toward mine. “He gave her what mercy he could.”

Dean and I had always acknowledged that to do what we did, a person needed a bit of monster in them. That was why he understood Nichols, why I could see the motive and understand it myself.

“I killed my mother.” I’d said those words to Mackenzie’s psychologist. I could say them to Dean now. “I was holding the knife. I felt it go into her

chest.”

“You couldn’t stop it,” Dean told me. “The knife was in your hands. Her fingers wrapped around yours.”

I laid my hand on his chest. There was a spot, just inside the rib cage… “You need to talk to someone,” Dean told me.

I closed my eyes. “I know.” For almost a minute, I sat there, listening to the sound of his heart, feeling it beat beneath my palm.

“Best part of this case.” Dean always knew exactly when I’d reached my limit, exactly how to distract me. He laid his hand on my chest. I could feel the warmth of it through my thin white T-shirt. I could feel him feeling my heartbeat.

“The best part of this case was Mackenzie.” I didn’t even have to think about my answer. “Before she came in—she danced.”

She was going to survive, just like she always had. “You talked to her parents?” Dean asked.

I nodded. “She’ll come to us when she’s fifteen—if she still wants to.”

Mackenzie’s parents were hedging their bets on their daughter joining the Naturals program, but the profiler in me knew that their daughter wouldn’t change her mind about this. She’d spend the next three years convincing them that normal wasn’t an option.

Not for her. Not anymore.

Without warning, Dean’s mouth descended over mine. I rose up to meet him, my hands on either side of his face, my legs wrapping themselves around his body.

I wasn’t normal.

Neither was he.

“The new girl can’t have my room.” The voice that issued that statement was completely matter-of-fact and utterly unbothered by what Dean and I were up to on the bed.

We split apart.

Laurel tilted her head to one side. “Do you prefer the screams,” she asked Dean softly, “or the blood?”

There was a single beat of silence, and then Lia sauntered into the room behind my little sister.

“I give that a nine out of ten for delivery,” Lia told Laurel. “But a ten for creepy content.”

Laurel shrugged, her expression unchanging. “I try.”

Most of the time, Laurel tried not to be creepy—and failed. But my sister was strangely at ease with Lia, who was already training her to use her unnatural solemnity to her advantage and to spot lies.

“The new girl can’t have my room when she gets here,” Laurel repeated emphatically. “I don’t care if it’s not for another three years.”

Technically, my grandmother was the one raising my sister. Technically, our base of operations was not Laurel’s house. Technically, she didn’t have a room here, but when we’d returned from this case, we’d found the bedroom Laurel sometimes stayed in completely decorated with ponies.

I belong here. That was what the expression on Laurel’s tiny face said. Her mouth, in contrast, addressed Dean. “I was just messing with you about the blood.” She paused. “And the screams.”

I glanced at Lia, and she shrugged, which I took to mean that statement was mostly true.

“Come on, short stuff.” Lia tweaked the end of Laurel’s ponytail. “Let’s leave Angsty and the Brood here to their special alone time, and I’ll teach you how to convince your teacher that the dog really did eat your homework.”

Before Lia could actually leave Dean and me to our own devices, her cell phone rang.

“Video call,” she told us. “It’s Sloane.”

It took all of two seconds before Lia had helped herself to a slice of the bed. The moment she did, Laurel took off.

“Hey, Sloane.” Lia answered and angled the phone’s screen so that Dean and I could see.

“The nine millimeter Luger was designed by a German weapons manufacturer in 1902.” Sloane’s greeting was unconventional, if not entirely unexpected. “In 2015, the FBI shifted to using a one-hundred-and- forty-seven grain nine millimeter Gold Dot G2 for ammunition.”

Lia took one for the team and responded to that statement. “Either you’re in the middle of weapons training, or you’ve spent the past forty- eight hours with Celine.”

Special Agent Delacroix had fired a shot in the line of duty. She’d saved Mackenzie’s life—and taken the life of a killer. There was a process that had to be followed in the wake of an event like that. Celine had to be cleared—legally and psychologically—before she could return to the field.

“Celine needs me.” Sloane fiddled with something, though I couldn’t quite make out what she held between her fingers. “No one has ever needed me before.”

“We all need you,” Dean told her. Sloane was our light in the darkness. “Dean,” Sloane said very seriously, “I hope this is not oversharing, but Celine needs me in a very different way.” Knowing Sloane, I half expected

her to share exactly what that very different way entailed—possibly with graphs, almost certainly with precise description of angles and body parts— but she spared us the explicit details and opted instead for another statistic. “Did you know that forty-six percent of Texans meditate at least once a week?”

“You don’t say.” Lia grinned.

Sloane frowned into the camera. “I just did say. And, Cassie? I looked into those brothers in Texas, and the thing is, they aren’t.”

“Aren’t brothers?” I asked.

“Aren’t in Texas,” Sloane corrected. “At least, they’re not there anymore. The whole family picked up and moved with no warning. Even weirder? I can’t figure out where they went.”

“And if you can’t figure it out…” Michael plopped down beside Sloane and squeezed into the frame. “There’s a very good chance they’re off the grid.”

“A ninety-seven point four percent chance,” Sloane clarified. “Exactly,” Michael declared. “Now, on a somewhat unrelated note:

adorable onesies for the Sterling-Briggs Wonder Twins, yay or nay?”

He held up what appeared to be a custom-made infant onesie emblazoned with the words SPECIAL AGENT BABY.

“I was thinking of putting something inappropriate, but humorous and endearing, on the back,” he clarified.

There were nine and a half weeks left until Michael and Sloane would be home. Nine and a half weeks before I could look at Dean and know he wasn’t leaving the next day.

Three years until Mackenzie would join the program. Who knew how long to find the brothers.

But Briggs and Sterling’s twins were expected to make their arrival early—and that meant any day.

“I vote yes on the onesies,” I declared. “All in favor?” Sloane asked formally.

I leaned back against Dean, and Lia leaned against me before we all chorused in unison, “Aye.”

“This one’s all you, Rodriguez.”

“No way. I took the drunk tank after the Bison Day parade.”

“Bison Day? Try Oktoberfest at the senior citizen center.” “And who got stuck with the biter the next day?”

Officer Macalister Dodd—Mackie to his friends—had the general sense that it would not be prudent to interrupt the back-and-forth between the two more senior Magnolia County police officers arguing in the bullpen.

Rodriguez and O’Connell had both clocked five years on the force.

This was Mackie’s second week.

“I’ve got three letters and one word for you, Rodriguez: PTA brawl.”

Mackie shifted his weight slightly from his right leg to his left. Big mistake. In unison, Rodriguez and O’Connell turned to look at him.

“Rookie!”

Never had two police officers been so delighted to see a third. Mackie set his mouth into a grim line and squared his shoulders.

“What have we got?” he said gruffly. “Drunk and disorderly? Domestic disturbance?”

In answer, O’Connell clapped him on the shoulder and steered him toward the holding cell. “Godspeed, rookie.”

As they rounded the corner, Mackie expected to see a perp: belligerent, possibly on the burly side. Instead, he saw four teenage girls wearing elbow-length gloves and what appeared to be ball gowns.

White ball gowns.

“What the hell is this?” Mackie asked.

Rodriguez lowered his voice. “This is what we call a B.Y.H.” “B.Y.H.?” Mackie glanced back at the girls. One of them was standing

primly, her gloved hands folded in front of her body. The girl next to her was crying daintily and wheezing something that sounded suspiciously like the Lord’s prayer. The third girl stared straight at Mackie, the edges of her pink-glossed lips quirking slowly upward as she raked her gaze over his body.

And the fourth girl?

She was picking the lock.

The other officers turned to leave.

“Rodriguez?” Mackie called after them. “O’Connell?” No response.

“What’s a B.Y.H.?”

The girl who’d been assessing him took a step forward. She batted her eyelashes at Mackie and offered him a sweet-tea smile.

“Why, officer,” she said. “Bless your heart.”

NINEMONTHSEARLIER

Catcalling me was a mistake that most of the customers and mechanics at Big Jim’s Garage only made once. Unfortunately, the owner of this particular Dodge Ram was the type of person who put his paycheck into souping up a Dodge Ram. That—and the urinating stick figure on his back

window—was pretty much the only forewarning I needed about the way this was about to go down.

People were fundamentally predictable. If you stopped expecting them to surprise you, they couldn’t disappoint.

And speaking of disappointment… I turned my attention from the Ram’s engine to the Ram’s owner, who apparently considered whistling at a girl to be a compliment, and commenting on the shape of her ass to be the absolute height of courtship.

“It’s times like this,” I told him, “that you have to ask yourself: Is it wise to sexually harass someone who has both wire cutters and access to your brake lines?”

The man blinked. Once. Twice. Three times. And then he leaned forward. “Honey, you can access my brake lines any time you want.”

If you know what I mean, I added silently. In three…two…

“If you know what I mean.”

“It’s times like this,” I said meditatively, “that you have to ask yourself: Is it wise to offer to bare your man-parts for someone who is both patently uninterested and holding wire cutters?”

“Sawyer!” Big Jim intervened before I could so much as give a snip of the wire cutters in a southward direction. “I’ve got this one.”

I’d started badgering Big Jim to let me get my hands greasy when I was twelve. He almost certainly knew that I’d already fixed the Ram and that if he left me to my own devices, this wouldn’t end well.

For the customer.

“Aw hell, Big Jim,” the man complained. “We were just having fun.”

I’d spent most of my childhood going from one obsessive interest to another. Car engines had been one of them. Before that, it had been

telenovelas, and afterward, I’d spent a year reading everything I could find about medieval weapons.

“You don’t mind a little fun, do you, sweetheart?” Mr. Souped-Up Dodge Ram clapped a hand onto my shoulder and compounded his sins by squeezing my neck.

Big Jim groaned as I turned my full attention to the real charmer beside

me.

“Allow me to quote for you,” I said in an absolute deadpan, “from

Sayforth’s Encyclopedia of Archaic Torture.”

One of the finer points of chivalry south of the Mason-Dixon Line was that men like Big Jim Thompson didn’t fire girls like me no matter how explicitly we described alligator shears to customers in want of castration.

Fairly certain I’d ensured the Ram’s owner wouldn’t make the same mistake a third time, I stopped by The Holler on the way home to pick up my mom’s tips from the night before.

“How’s trouble?” My mom’s boss was named Trick. He had five children, eighteen grandchildren, and at least three visible scars from breaking up bar fights. He’d greeted me the exact same way every time he’d seen me since I was four.

“I’m fine, thanks for asking,” I said.

“Here for your mom’s tips?” That question came from Trick’s oldest grandson, who was restocking the liquor behind the bar. This was a family business in a family town. The entire population was just over eight thousand. You couldn’t throw a rock without it bouncing off three people who were related to each other.

And then there was my mom—and me.

“Here for tips,” I confirmed. My mom wasn’t exactly known for her financial acumen or the steadfastness with which she made it home after a late shift. I’d been balancing our household budget since I was nine— around the same time that I’d developed sequential interests in lock- picking, the Westminster Dog Show, and fixing the perfect martini.

“Here you go, sweetheart.” Trick handed me an envelope that was thicker than I’d expected. “Don’t blow it all in one place.”

I snorted. The money would go to rent and food. I wasn’t exactly the type to party. I might, in fact, have had a bit of a reputation for being

antisocial.

See also: my willingness to threaten castration.

Before Trick could issue an invitation for me to join the whole family at his daughter-in-law’s house for dinner, I made my excuses and ducked out of the bar. Home sweet home was only two blocks over and one block up.

Technically, our house was a one-bedroom, but we’d walled off two-thirds of the living room with dollar-store shower curtains when I was nine.

“Mom?” I called out as I stepped over the threshold. There was an element of ritual to calling her name, even when she wasn’t home. Even if she was on a bender—or if she’d fallen for a new man, experienced another religious conversion, or developed a deep-seated need to commune with her better angels under the watchful eyes of a roadside psychic.

I’d come by my habit of hopping from one interest to the next honestly, even if her restlessness was less focused and a little more self-destructive than my own.

Almost on cue, my cell phone rang. I answered.

“Baby, you will not believe what happened last night.” My mom never bothered with salutations.

“Are you still in the continental United States, are you in need of bail money, and do I have a new daddy?”

My mom laughed. “You’re my everything. You know that, right?”

“I know that we’re almost out of milk,” I replied, removing the carton from the fridge and taking a swig. “And I know that someone was an excellent tipper last night.”

There was a long pause on the other end of the line. I’d guessed right this time. It was a guy, and she’d met him at The Holler the night before. “You’ll be okay, won’t you?” she asked softly. “Just for a few days?”

I was a big believer 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.

But it was different with my mom.

“I reserve the right to assess the symmetry of his features and the cheesiness of his pickup lines when you get back.”

“Sawyer.” My mom was serious—or at least as serious as she got. “I’ll be fine,” I said. “I always am.”

She was quiet for several seconds. Ellie Taft was many things, but above all, she was someone who’d tried as hard as she could for as long as she could—for me.

“Sawyer,” she said quietly. “I love you.”

I knew my line, had known it since my brief obsession with the most quotable movie lines of all time when I was five. “I know.”

I hung up the phone before she could. I was halfway to finishing off the milk when the front door—in desperate need of both WD-40 and a new lock—creaked open. I turned toward the sound, running the algorithm to determine who might be dropping by unannounced.

Doris from next door lost her cat an average of 1.2 times per week.

Big Jim and Trick had matching habits of checking up on me, like they couldn’t remember I was eighteen, not eight.

The guy with the Dodge Ram. He could have followed me. That wasn’t a thought so much as instinct. My hand hovered over the knife drawer as a figure stepped into the house.

“I do hope your mother buys Wūsthof,” the intruder commented, observing the position of my hand. “Wūsthof knives are just so much sharper than generic.”

I blinked, but when my eyes opened again, the woman was still standing there, coiffed within an inch of her life and be-suited in a blue silk jacket and matching skirt that made me wonder if she’d mistaken our decades-old house for a charitable luncheon. The stranger said nothing to indicate why she’d let herself in or how she could justify sounding more dismayed at the idea of my mom having purchased off-brand knives than the prospect that I might be preparing to draw one.

“You favor your mother,” she commented.

I wasn’t sure how she expected me to reply to that statement, so I went with my gut. “You look like a bichon frise.”

“Pardon me?”

It’s a breed of dog that looks like a very small, very sturdy powder puff. Since absolute honesty didn’t require that I say every thought that crossed my mind, I opted for a modified truth. “You look like your haircut cost more than my car.”

The woman—I put her age in her early sixties—tilted her head slightly to one side. “Is that a compliment or an insult?”

She had a Southern accent—less twang and more drawl than my own.

Com-pluh-mehnt or an in-suhlt?

“That depends on your perspective more than mine.”

She smiled slightly, like I’d said something just darling but not actually amusing. “Your name is Sawyer.” After informing me of that fact, she paused. “You don’t know who I am, do you?” Clearly, that was a rhetorical question, because she didn’t wait for a reply. “Why don’t I spare us the dramatics?”

Her smile broadened, warm in the way that a shower is warm, right before someone flushes the toilet.

“My name,” she continued in a tone to match the smile, “is Lillian Taft.

I’m your maternal grandmother.”

My grandmother, I thought, trying to process the situation, looks like a bichon frise.

“Your mother and I had a bit of a falling-out before you were born.” Lillian was apparently the kind of person who would have referred to a Category 5 hurricane as a bit of a drizzle. “I think it’s high time to put that bit of history to rest, don’t you?”

I was one rhetorical question away from going for the knife drawer again, so I attempted to cut to the chase. “You didn’t come here looking for my mother.”

“You don’t miss much, Miss Sawyer.” Lillian’s voice was soft and feminine. I got the feeling she didn’t miss much either. “I’d like to make you an offer.”

An offer? I was suddenly reminded of who I was dealing with here.

Lillian Taft wasn’t a powder puff. She was the merciless, dictatorial matriarch who’d kicked my pregnant mother out of her house at the ripe old age of seventeen.

I stalked to the front door and retrieved the Post-it I’d placed next to the doorbell when our house had been hit with door-to-door evangelists two weeks in a row. I turned and offered the handwritten notice to the woman who’d raised my mother. Her perfectly manicured fingertips plucked the Post-it from my grasp.

“‘No soliciting,’” my grandmother read.

“Except for Girl Scout cookies,” I added helpfully. I’d gotten kicked out of the local Scout troop during my morbid true crime and facts-about- autopsies phase, but I still had a weakness for Thin Mints.

Lillian pursed her lips and amended her previous statement. “‘No soliciting except for Girl Scout cookies.’”

I saw the precise moment that she registered what I was saying: I wasn’t interested in her offer. Whatever she was selling, I wasn’t buying.

An instant later, it was like I’d said nothing at all. “I’ll be frank, Sawyer,” she said, showing a kind of candy-coated steel I’d never seen in my mom. “Your mother chose this path. You didn’t.” She pressed her lips together, just for a moment. “I happen to think you deserve more.”

“More than off-brand knives and drinking straight from the carton?” I shot back. Two could play the rhetorical question game.

Unfortunately, the great Lillian Taft had apparently never met a rhetorical question she was not fully capable of answering. “More than a G.E.D., a career path with no hope of advancement, and a mother who’s less responsible now than she was at sixteen.”

Were she not an aging Southern belle with a reputation to uphold, my grandmother might have followed that statement by throwing her hands into touchdown position and declaring, “Burn!”

Instead, she laid a hand over her heart. “You deserve opportunities you’ll never have here.”

The people in this town were good people. This was a good place. But it wasn’t my place. Even in the best of times, part of me had always felt like I was just passing through.

A muscle in my throat tightened. “You don’t know me.”

That got a pause out of her—and not a calculated one. “I could,” she replied finally. “I could know you. And you could find yourself in the position to attend any college of your choosing and graduate debt free.”

There was a contract. An honest-to-God, written-in-legalese, sign-on-the- dotted-line contract.

“Seriously?”

Lillian waved away the question. “Let’s not get bogged down in the details.”

“Of course not,” I said, thumbing through the nine-page appendix. “Why would I go to the trouble of reading the terms before I sell you my soul?”

“The contract is for your protection,” my grandmother insisted. “Otherwise, what’s to keep me from reneging on my end of the deal once yours is complete?”

“A sense of honor and any desire whatsoever for an ongoing relationship?” I suggested.

Lillian arched an eyebrow. “Are you willing to bet your college education on my honor?”

I knew plenty of people who’d gone to college. I also knew a lot of people who hadn’t.

I read the contract. I wasn’t even sure why. I was not going to move in with her for an entire year. I was not going to walk away from my home, my life, my mother for—

“Five hundred thousand dollars?” I may have punctuated that amount with an expletive or two.

“Have you been listening to rap music?” my grandmother demanded. “You said you’d pay for college.” I tore my gaze from the contract.

Even just reading it made me feel like I’d let the guy with the Dodge Ram tuck a couple of ones into my bikini. “You didn’t say anything about handing me a check for half a million dollars.”

“It won’t be a check,” my grandmother said, as if that was the real issue here. “It will be a trust. College, graduate school, living expenses, study abroad, transportation, tutors—these things add up.”

These things.

“Say it,” I told her, unable to believe that anyone could shrug off that amount of money. “Say that you’re offering me five hundred thousand dollars to live with you for a year.”

“Money isn’t something we talk about, Sawyer. It’s something we have.”

I stared at her, waiting for the punch line. There was no punch line.

“You came here expecting me to say yes.” I didn’t phrase that sentence as a question, because it wasn’t one.

“I suppose that I did,” Lillian allowed. “Why?”

I wanted her to actually say that she’d assumed that I could be bought. I wanted to hear her admit that she thought so little of me—and so little of my mom—that there had been no doubt in her mind that I’d jump at the chance to take her devil of a deal.

“I suppose,” Lillian said finally, “that you remind me a bit of myself.

And were I in your position, sweet girl…” She laid a hand on my cheek. “I would surely jump at the chance to identify and locate my biological father.”

My mom—in between alternating bouts of pretending that I’d been immaculately conceived, cursing the male of the species, and getting tipsy and nostalgic about her first time—had told me exactly three things about my mystery father.

She’d only slept with him once. He hated fish.

He wasn’t looking for a scandal.

And that was it. When I was eleven, I’d found a picture she’d hidden away, a portrait of twenty-four teenage boys in long-tailed tuxedos, standing beneath a marble arch.

Symphony Squires.

The caption had been embossed onto the picture in silver script. The year—and several of the faces—had been scratched out.

Money isn’t something we talk about, I thought hours after Lillian had left. I mentally mimicked her tone as I continued. And the fact that the man who knocked your mother up is almost certainly a scion of high society isn’t something I’ll come right out and say, but…

I picked the contract up again. This time, I read it from start to finish.

Lillian had conveniently forgotten to mention some of the terms.

Like the fact that she would choose my wardrobe. Like the mandatory manicure I’d have once a week.

Like the way she expected me to attend private school alongside my cousins.

I hadn’t even realized I had cousins. Trick’s grandkids had cousins. Half of the members of my elementary school Girl Scout troop had cousins in that troop. But me?

I had an encyclopedia of medieval torture techniques.

Pushing myself to finish the contract, I arrived at the icing on the cake. I agree to participate in the annual Symphony Ball and all Symphony Deb events leading up to my presentation to society next spring.

Deb. As in debutante.

Half a million dollars wasn’t enough.

And yet, the thought of those hypothetical cousins lingered in my mind.

One of my less random childhood obsessions had been genetics. Cousins shared roughly one-eighth of their DNA.

Half siblings share a fourth. I found myself going to my mother’s bedroom, opening the bottom drawer of her dresser, and feeling for the photograph she’d taped to the back.

Twenty-four teenage boys.

Twenty-four possible producers of the sperm that had impregnated my mother.

Twenty-four Symphony Squires.

When my phone buzzed, I forced myself to shut the drawer and look down at the text my mom had just sent me.

A photo of an airplane.

It may be more than a few days. I read the message that had accompanied the photograph silently and then a second time out loud. My mother loved me. I knew that. I’d always known that.

Someday, I’d stop expecting her to surprise me.

It was another hour before I went back to the contract. I picked up a red pen. I made some adjustments.

And then I signed.

Mackie kneaded his forehead. “Are you sure none of you wants to call your parents?”

“No, thank you.”

“Do you know who my father is?”

“My stepmother’s faking a pregnancy, and she needs her rest.”

Mackie wasn’t touching that with a ten-foot pole. He turned to the last girl, the one who’d successfully picked the lock mere seconds after he’d arrived.

“What about you?” he said hopefully.

“My biological father literally threatened to kill me if I become inconvenient,” the girl said, leaning back against the wall of the jail cell like she wasn’t wearing a designer gown. “And if anyone finds out we were arrested, I’m out five hundred thousand dollars.”

EIGHTANDAHALFMONTHSEARLIER

I arrived at my grandmother’s residence—a mere forty-five minutes from the town where I’d grown up and roughly three and a half worlds away—on the contractually specified date at the contractually specified time. Based on what I knew of the Taft family and the suburban wonderland they inhabited,

I’d expected my grandmother’s house to be a mix of Tara and the Taj Mahal. But 2525 Camellia Court wasn’t ostentatious, and it wasn’t historic. It was a nine-thousand-square-foot house masquerading as average, the architectural equivalent of a woman who spent two hours making herself up for the purpose of looking like she wasn’t wearing makeup. This old thing? I could almost hear the two-acre lot saying. I’ve had it for years.

Objectively, the house was enormous, but the cul de sac was lined with other houses just as big, with lawns just as sprawling. It was like someone had taken a normal neighborhood and scaled everything up an order of magnitude in size—including the driveways, the SUVs, and the dogs.

The single largest canine I’d ever seen greeted me at the front door, butting my hand with its massive head.

“William Faulkner,” the woman who’d answered the door chided. “Mind your manners.”

She was the spitting image of Lillian Taft. I was still processing the fact that the dog was (a) the size of a small pony and (b) named William Faulkner, when the woman I assumed was my aunt spoke again.

“John David Easterling,” she called, raising her voice so it carried. “Who’s the best shot in this family?”

There was no reply. William Faulkner butted his head against my thigh and huffed. I bent slightly—very slightly—to pet him and noticed the red dot that had appeared on my tank top.

“I will skin you alive if you pull that trigger,” my aunt called, her voice disturbingly cheerful.

What trigger? I thought. The red dot on my torso wavered slightly. “Now, young man, I believe I asked you a question. Who’s the best shot

in this family?”

There was an audible sigh, and then a boy of ten or so pushed up to a sitting position on the roof. “You are, Mama.”

“And am I using your cousin for target practice?” “No, ma’am.”

“No, sir, I am not,” my aunt confirmed. “Sit, William Faulkner.” The dog obeyed, and the boy disappeared from the roof.

“Please tell me that was a Nerf gun,” I said.

It took my aunt a moment to process the question, and then she let out a peal of laughter—practiced and perfect. “He’s not allowed to use the real thing without supervision,” she assured me.

I stared at her. “That’s not as comforting as you think it is.”

The smile never left her face. “You do look like your mother, don’t you? That hair. And those cheekbones! When I was your age, I would have killed for those cheekbones.”

Given that she was the best shot in this family, I wasn’t entirely certain she was exaggerating.

“I’m Sawyer,” I said, trying to wrap my mind around the greeting I’d gotten from a woman my mom had always referred to as the Ice Queen.

“Of course you are,” came the immediate reply, warm as whiskey. “I’m your Aunt Olivia, and that’s William Faulkner. She’s a purebred Bernese mountain dog.”

I’d recognized the breed. What I hadn’t recognized, however, was that William Faulkner was female.

“Where’s Lillian?” I asked, feeling like I’d well and truly fallen down the rabbit hole.

Aunt Olivia hooked the fingers on her right hand through William Faulkner’s collar and reflexively straightened her pearls with the left. “Let’s get you inside, Sawyer. Are you hungry? You must be hungry.”

“I just ate,” I replied. “Where’s Lillian?”

My aunt ignored the question. She was already retreating back into the house. “Come on, William Faulkner. Good girl.”

My grandmother’s kitchen was the size of our entire house. I half expected my aunt to ring for the cook, but it quickly became apparent that she considered the feeding of other people to be both a pastime and a spiritual

calling. Nothing I said or did could dissuade her from making me a sandwich.

Refusing the brownie might have been taken as a declaration of war.

I was a big believer in personal boundaries, but I was also a believer in chocolate, so I ignored the sandwich, took a bite of the brownie, and then asked where my grandmother was.

Again.

“She’s out back with the party planner. Can I get you something to drink?”

I put the brownie back down on my plate. “Party planner?”

Before my aunt could answer, the boy who’d had me in his sights earlier appeared in the kitchen. “Lily says it’s bad manners to threaten fratricide,” he announced. “So she didn’t threaten fratricide.”

He helped himself to the seat next to mine and eyed my sandwich.

Without a word, I slid it toward him, and he began devouring it with all the verve of a little Tasmanian devil wearing a blue polo shirt.

“Mama,” he said after swallowing. “What’s fratricide?”

“I imagine it’s what one’s sister very pointedly does not threaten when one attempts to shoot her with a Nerf gun.” Aunt Olivia turned back to the counter. It took me about three seconds to realize that she was making another sandwich. “Introduce yourself, John David.”

“I’m John David. It’s a pleasure to meet you, madam.” For a trigger- happy kid, he was surprisingly gallant when it came to introductions. “Are you here for the party?”

I narrowed my eyes slightly. “What party?”

“Incoming!” A man swept into the room. He had presidential hair and a face made for golf courses and boardrooms. I would have pegged him as Aunt Olivia’s husband even if he hadn’t bent to kiss her cheek. “Fair warning: I saw Greer Richards making her way down the street on my way in.”

“Greer Waters, now,” my aunt reminded him.

“Ten to one odds Greer Waters is here to check up on the preparations for tonight.” He helped himself to the sandwich that Aunt Olivia had been making for me.

I knew it was futile, but I couldn’t help myself. “What’s happening tonight?”

Aunt Olivia began making a third sandwich. “Sawyer, this rapscallion is your Uncle J.D. Honey, this is Sawyer.”

My aunt said my name in a way that made me 100 percent certain they’d discussed me, probably on multiple occasions, possibly as a problem that required a gentle hand to solve.

“Is this the part where you tell me I look like my mother?” I asked, my voice dry as a desert. My uncle was looking at me the same way his wife had, the way my grandmother had.

“This,” he told me solemnly, “is where I welcome you to the family and ask you, quite seriously, if I just stole your sandwich.”

The doorbell rang. John David was off like a rocket. All it took was a single arch of my aunt’s eyebrow before her husband was on their son’s heels.

“Greer Waters is chairing the Symphony Ball,” Aunt Olivia murmured, clearing away John David’s plate and depositing sandwich number three in front of me. “Between you and me, I think she’s bitten off a bit more than she can chew. She just recently married the father of one of the debs.

There’s trying and then there’s trying too hard.”

This from a woman who had made me three sandwiches since I’d walked in the front door.

“In any case,” Aunt Olivia continued, lowering her voice, “I am just certain she’ll have Capital O Opinions about the way your grandmother has arranged things.”

Arranged things for what? This time, I didn’t bother saying a word out loud.

“I know you must have questions,” my aunt said, brushing a strand of hair out of my face, seemingly oblivious to the fact that I had been asking them. “About your mama. About this family.”

I hadn’t expected this kind of welcome. I hadn’t expected affection or warmth or baked goods from a woman who’d spent the past eighteen years ignoring my mother—and my existence—altogether. A woman that my mom had never even once mentioned by name.

“Questions,” I repeated, my voice catching my throat. “About my mom and this family and the circumstances surrounding my highly inconvenient and scandalous conception?”

Aunt Olivia’s lips tightened over a pearly smile, but before she could reply, Lillian Taft entered the room wearing a gardening hat and gloves and

trailed by a pale, thin woman with brown hair knotted severely at her neck. “Always grow your own roses,” my grandmother advised me without

preamble. “Some things should not be delegated.”

It’s nice to see you, too, Lillian.

“Some things shouldn’t be delegated,” I repeated. “Like party planning?” I asked facetiously, eyeing the woman who’d followed her in. “Or like greeting the prodigal granddaughter when she arrives at your home?”

Lillian met my eyes. Her own didn’t narrow or blink. “Hello, Sawyer.” She said my name like it was one that people should know. After an elongated moment, she turned to the party planner. “Could you give us a moment, Isla?”

Isla, as it turned out, could.

“You look thin,” Lillian informed me once the party planner had exited.

She turned to my aunt. “Did you offer her a sandwich, Olivia?”

Sandwich #3 was literally still sitting on the plate in front of me. “Let’s stipulate that I have been sufficiently sandwiched.”

Lillian was not deterred. “Would you like something to drink?

Lemonade? Tea?”

“Greer Waters is here,” my aunt interjected, keeping her voice low. “Horrid woman,” Lillian told me pleasantly. “Luckily, however…” She

removed her gloves. “I’m much, much worse.”

That, more than the advice about roses, felt like a life lesson à la Lillian Taft.

“Now,” Lillian continued, as the sound of high heels clicking against the wood floor announced the impending arrival of the apparently infamous Greer Waters, “Sawyer, why don’t you run on upstairs and meet your cousin? Lily’s staying in the Blue Room. She can help you get ready for tonight.”

“Tonight?” I asked.

Aunt Olivia took it upon herself to shoo me out of the room. “Blue room,” she echoed cheerfully. “Second door on the right.”

I counted the steps as I made my way up the spiral staircase and got to eleven before I paused to take in the artwork lining the wall. A blond-haired little girl blew a dandelion in one portrait and sat astride a horse in the next. I watched her grow, mahogany-framed picture by mahogany-framed picture

until a baby boy joined her in the yearly portrait, their outfits color- coordinated, her smile sweet and practiced and his served with increasingly large sides of trouble.

When I made it to the top of the stairs, I came face-to-face with a family portrait: Aunt Olivia and Uncle J.D.; the blond girl, now a teenager, sitting beside John David; and the elegant Lillian Taft standing with one hand on her daughter’s shoulder and one hand on her grandson’s. To the right of the family portrait, there was one of Aunt Olivia in a white dress. At first, I thought it was a wedding dress, but then I realized that my aunt wasn’t much older in this picture than I was now. The teenage Olivia wore elbow- length white gloves.

My eyes flitted to the left of the family portrait. A frame hung there, empty.

Maybe they were waiting for a new portrait to be finished.

Or maybe, I thought, staring at the blank space, this frame used to hold a picture of my mother.

“I am on the verge of using some very unladylike language.” The voice that issued that statement was sweet as pie.

“Lily…”

“Unladylike and creative.”

As I made my way toward the second door on the left, the person who’d said my cousin’s name spoke up again, tentatively this time. “On a scale of one to bad, is this really so awful?”

The reply was delicate and demure. “I suppose that depends on how one feels about felonies.”

I cleared my throat, and the occupants of the room turned to look at me. I recognized my cousin Lily from the portraits: light hair, dark eyes, small waist, big bones. Every hair was in place. Her summer blouse was freshly

pressed. The girl next to her was stunningly beautiful and also, based on her expression, on the verge of projectile vomiting.

Then again, I probably would have been nauseous, too, if I were lying on my stomach with my back arched and the tips of my toes touching the back of my head.

“Hello.” Cousin Lily did an admirable impression of someone who had decidedly not been discussing felonies a moment before. For a girl who looked like she’d just stepped out of a magazine spread entitled “Tasteful Floral Prints for Virginal Ivy League Hopefuls,” she had balls.

This girl and I share one-eighth of our DNA.

“You must be Sawyer.” Lily had her mother’s way of saying the word

must: two parts emphasis, one part command.

The contortionist on the floor unfolded herself. “Sawyer,” she repeated, her eyes wide. “The cousin.”

She sounded just horrified enough to make me wonder if she considered

cousin synonymous with axe murderer.

“Our grandmother sent me up,” I told Lily, as her friend attempted to stand very still, like I was some kind of bear and any motion might be taken as reason to attack.

“I’m supposed to help you get ready for tonight,” Lily said. She caught the gaze of the doe-eyed girl next to her, who was literally wringing her hands. “I’m supposed to help her get ready for tonight,” Lily repeated.

Clearly, she was trying to get some kind of message across.

“I can go if you two are in the middle of something.” I echoed Lily’s emphasis.

My cousin turned her dark brown eyes back to me. She had a way of looking at a person like she was considering dissecting you or giving you a makeover or possibly both.

I did not like my chances.

“Don’t be silly, Sawyer.” Lily took a step toward me. “You aren’t interrupting a thing. Sadie-Grace and I were just having a little chat. Did I introduce you to Sadie-Grace? Sadie-Grace Waters, meet Sawyer Taft.” Lily had clearly inherited our grandmother’s penchant for rendering her own questions rhetorical. “It is Taft, isn’t it?” She plowed on before I could reply. “I apologize for not being there to greet you downstairs. You must think I was absolutely raised in a barn.”

I’d spent six months at age thirteen learning everything there was to know about gambling and games of chance. I was willing to lay good odds right now that my oh-so-felicitous cousin hadn’t been particularly enthused about the idea of a blood relation from the wrong side of the tracks being suddenly foisted upon her. Not that she’d admit to a lack of enthusiasm.

That, I thought, would be almost as ill-mannered as threatening fratricide.

“I was pretty much raised in a bar,” I replied when I realized Lily had finally paused for a breath. “As long as you can refrain from breaking a chair over someone’s back, we’re good.”

Emily Post had apparently not prepared either Lily or Sadie-Grace for offhanded discussions of bar brawls. As they searched for an appropriate response, I drifted toward a nearby window. It overlooked the backyard, and down below, I could see shimmery black tablecloths being spread over round-top tables. There were easily a half-dozen workers and three times that many tables.

There was also a catwalk.

“Were you really raised in a bar?” Sadie-Grace came to stand beside me. She was tall and willowy thin and bore a striking resemblance to a certain classic beauty best known for marrying into the royal family. Her delicate fingers worried at the tips of ridiculously thick and shiny brown hair.

Wide-eyed. Anxious. Prone to yoga. I catalogued what I knew about her, then answered the question. “My mom and I lived above The Holler until I was thirteen. I wasn’t technically allowed in the bar, but I have a slight tendency to take technicalities as a challenge.”

Sadie-Grace nibbled on her bottom lip, looking down at me through impossibly long lashes. “If you grew up like that, you must know things,” she said very seriously. “You must know people. People who know things.”

A quick glance at Lily told me that she didn’t like the direction this conversation was going.

I turned back to Sadie-Grace. “Are you, by any chance, fixing to ask me what my stance is on felonies?”

“We need to get you a dress for tonight, Sawyer!” Lily smiled brightly and shot laser eyes at Sadie-Grace, lest the latter even think about answering my question. “We’ll hit the shops. And goodness knows we could stand to do something about those eyebrows.”

I took that to mean that Lily had come down on the side of makeover over dissection, but I got the feeling that it had probably been a pretty close call.

Beside me, Sadie-Grace assiduously avoided eye contact, her bottom lip caught between her teeth.

I don’t want to know, I decided. Whatever my cousin’s gotten herself into, whatever I overheard, I really and truly do not want to know.