There was a dog lying at her feet, a mix, by the look of it—part pit bull, part Lab. The dog lifted his head as we were shoved forward.

“He likes me,” Boone declared beside me. “The dog,” he clarified, in case that was unclear to anyone. “Dogs always like me. They’re very good judges of character.”

“We found these three sniffing around up front,” the person behind me said, lowering her shotgun. I hadn’t processed until this moment, listening to her voice for a second time, that she was female.

“Beth don’t need this,” the other one commented—also female, also not particularly fond of the lot of us. “She’s having a hard enough time already.”

“Is that her name?” Sadie-Grace asked. “The girl having the baby? Beth?”

The woman in the chair stood. Given that I was in possession of every ounce of street smarts that the three of us had to share, I prepared myself to handle this and shot Sadie-Grace and Boone looks that I hoped they would interpret to mean that they should cease talking, full stop.

Then the woman in charge turned around, and I realized that I was completely unprepared to handle anything at all.

“You have the look of our family about you,” she said, assessing me.

I barely heard a single word, because all I could think was She has Lillian’s face.

LABOR DAY, 3:35 A.M.

“You’re sitting up, Sawyer! That’s good.”

“You propped me up.”

“And you didn’t fall over this time. Glass, full!”

“Did you hear that?”

“I would like to say that I didn’t, but . . .”

“You did.”

SIX WEEKS
(AND TWO DAYS) EARLIER

CHAPTER 42

The woman with my grandmother’s face gestured for us to sit. Dumbly, I did, and Sadie-Grace and Boone followed suit.

All three of us stared at her.

“I take it my beloved sister never mentioned that she had a twin?”

Lillian and Davis Ames had both referenced the town they grew up in. I knew that Lillian had met my grandfather at a party at the Arcadia hotel, but I hadn’t connected the dots that the town where she’d grown up was probably close to Regal Lake.

I hadn’t spent much time, if any, thinking about my grandmother’s family.

“Lillian never shared that little tidbit,” I confirmed. She never mentioned any siblings at all.

“You didn’t grow up in the city,” came the reply. “Accent gives you away. You have to work to lose it, and you haven’t.”

Neither had she.

“I don’t mean to be forward,” Boone said politely, “but holy shizzballs, this was not how I pictured this conversation going.”

The doppelgänger across from us stared at him. Hard. Hard enough that the dog at her feet jumped up, ears back, and gave a token growl.

“Boone’s socially awkward,” Sadie-Grace said helpfully. “It’s part of his charm.”