I’m the only Olivia Taft there’s ever been.

I remembered everything my mom had ever told me about her sister, including the way Aunt Olivia had run away during her own Debutante year, right after their father had died.

Twenty-five years ago. Liv Taft ran away twenty-five years ago, and when she came back . . .

She’d told everyone to call her Olivia. My mom had several go-to descriptors for the woman her sister had become. Ice queen had been one of them.

Another was fake.

“The Lady of the Lake is Liv Taft.” I said the words out loud, still trying to wrap my mind around them. “She never ran away. My mom said her sister was gone almost nine months, but really . . .”

“I was preparing,” Olivia said. “Learning. I’d been watching Liv for years, but that wasn’t enough. If I was going to take her place, people’s memories needed time to fade. They needed to be able to tell themselves that she’d changed, and I had to make myself into something new. I had to be perfect.”

Perfect. I thought about the way Lily had described her mama to me, back at the beginning of our Debutante year. Mama just likes things to be perfect.

“You took her place,” I said, swallowing hard. “You killed the real Liv, and nine months later—”

“I didn’t kill her!” That was the first flash of real emotion I’d seen out of “Olivia.” There was a depth of feeling in her voice—wild, unconstrained grief. “I never would have hurt Liv. I just watched her, that’s all. I wanted to find a way to introduce myself. We were supposed to be like sisters! But . . .”

“But you killed her.” I pressed again. Since Olivia had started ranting, she hadn’t looked at the gun even once.

She seemed to have forgotten she held one.

What was it I’d said to Sadie-Grace in the hole? The name of the game is stall.

“I did not kill Liv.” Olivia stepped toward me. “J.D. did.” She turned to Campbell. “And so did your mother. And your father. I was there. I saw them. They pushed her. She went over the edge. I heard her body hit the side of the cliff on the way down. J.D. dove in. Sterling, too. And all useless, vapid Charlotte could do was stand on the edge and scream. Eventually, Julia woke up. Thomas, too. And I watched.” She shook her head, closed her eyes. “I watched her friends drag her out of the water. I watched J.D. try to revive her. I heard them all agree, when he couldn’t, that it was an accident.”

It was an accident. I could hear Lily’s father saying those words on John David’s recording. I could hear him telling Aunt Olivia to say her name.