“You just couldn’t leave well enough alone.” Aunt Olivia stepped toward us, her grip visibly tightening over the firearm in her hand. “I didn’t kill Liv. I loved her. I think, if she’d had the chance, she would have loved me. She would have wanted me to . . .”

“Become her?” I thought back to what Lily and I had heard on the tape. “You blackmailed her boyfriend into marrying you.”

That’s all I ever was to you? A charade? I flashed back to the recordings, to the questions Aunt Olivia had tossed at her husband. When are you going to understand that I’m better for you than she ever was?

“J.D. wanted to marry me,” Aunt Olivia insisted. “He wanted to forget what had happened. He wanted me to be her.” She paused. “The others just wanted him to keep me happy, because I knew.”

At the Fourth of July picnic, when Uncle J.D. had brought Ana, Boone’s father had been the one to tell him to leave. Charlotte and Julia Ames had closed ranks around Aunt Olivia.

“You blackmailed all of them,” I realized, thinking back to the message that Campbell’s mother had drunkenly instructed me to deliver to my aunt, back before she’d had reason to worry that J.D.’s infidelity might push Olivia over the edge.

It doesn’t matter how they dress you up, Charlotte had said, or what little tricks you learn, or how well you think you can blend. You are what you are, sweetheart, and you’ll never be anything else.

“You should have seen their faces when I showed up,” Aunt Olivia reminisced, “days before our debutante ball. I looked like Liv. I sounded like her. I spun the right story, and Lillian was so glad to have me back.” She smiled. “They couldn’t tell anyone the truth. Who would have believed them? They had no idea who I was or where I’d come from, and it wasn’t like they could go to the police and tell them they knew I was an impostor, because they’d killed the real Liv.”

She looked at me for a moment. “Did you know that, genetically, I am Lillian Taft’s daughter? Genetically, there’s no difference between her and Ellen. I thought Lillian might do a DNA test when I showed up, but I knew that mine would come back as a match for hers. As long as she didn’t try to test me against Liv’s little sister’s DNA, I knew I would be fine.”

Liv’s little sister. “My mom knew,” I said. “She might not have known known, but she sure as hell knew you didn’t feel like her sister anymore.”