“Lie to her,” Lily said softly. She turned back but looked down at the deck, at the water-marked wood beneath our feet. “You’re good at that.”

That shot proved true. It hit its target and stopped him in his tracks.

“I know you don’t love Mama.” Lily couldn’t stop now that she’d started. “Maybe you never did. But did you ever even love me?”

I could see the shell she’d retreated into these past weeks starting to crack.

“More than anything on the face of this earth,” her father said. “Everything I’ve done, I have done for you, Lily. There’s nothing I wouldn’t do for you and your brother. You and John David are my world.”

“Ouch,” I muttered, under the mistaken impression that treating his words cavalierly might make them hurt less.

“Then tell us about the body,” Lily whispered. “Or tell us about the blackmail. Tell me something that’s true.”

“I love you.” He looked at her like she was the most precious thing on this planet, then turned to me. “And, Sawyer, I care for you, too. I do. That’s why I’m asking you to just leave well enough alone. This family has been through enough. I’ve put this family through enough.”

“It’s never enough,” Lily said, and the emotion in that abbreviated sentence took me aback. This was the Lily who’d hit the wall. This was the kind of angry that didn’t know how to be anything else.

This was what she’d been keeping under lock and key.

“Ask me something else,” J.D. begged her. “Lily—if there’s something else you want to know, anything else—just ask me.”

I expected her to turn around and walk back inside. She’d come out here for me, and it was clear by this point that I wasn’t going to get anything resembling closure—or answers.

Instead, Lily asked, “How long have you and Ana been having an affair?”

This was exactly the conversation she hadn’t wanted to have. I wished that I could protect her from this. I almost wished I hadn’t pushed.

“We got to know each other when you were twelve.” J.D.’s answer was immediate and without frills. I knew instinctively that it was true. “It wasn’t physical for a few years.”

“How long have you been paying her?”

“You don’t need to know that.”

She stared at him, impassive, until he answered.

“Since you were twelve.”

It took me a second to register the fact that J.D. Easterling had just claimed that he’d been giving Ana money before he’d had a physical relationship with her at all.

As far as I knew, he’d never given my mother a dime.

“Why were you paying her?” I asked. “If you weren’t sleeping with her, if you were just getting to know her—why give her money?”