I glanced at her. “I texted you about going to Two Arrows. You didn’t answer.”

“You went.” Aunt Olivia spoke over me. “And so did Lily. You told her about Ellen, Sawyer. My little girl shouldn’t have been there. She shouldn’t have ever gone there.”

“Why?” Sadie-Grace asked.

Why was it okay for me to go to Two Arrows, but not Lily? Why did my aunt care that I’d pushed and pushed about the baby?

I remembered something then, a tiny, seemingly meaningless detail that Lillian had told me when I’d confronted her with the truth about my father.

Lily was just two months younger than me.

Years ago, when my mom had gone to tell her mother that she was pregnant, Aunt Olivia had beaten her there. She’d already told Lillian that she was pregnant.

With Lily.

“Lily is two months younger than me,” I said out loud. And so is Ana’s baby. Lily has blond hair and dark brown eyes. Ana came to the hospital when Lily was injured.

There was a reason that Aunt Olivia hadn’t wanted Lily to go to Two Arrows, why she hadn’t taken kindly to me asking Ellen questions about Ana.

“Ellen said she didn’t take a dime from the people who adopted Ana’s baby,” I told Aunt Olivia. “Ana got paid, but Ellen didn’t.” I paused. “Ellen wouldn’t take your money.”

“Wait a second,” Campbell interjected. “Are you implying . . .”

That Lily is Ana’s baby.

“I went to Ellen.” Olivia spoke before I could. “To my mama. Do you know how hard that was, Sawyer? How humbling? When I left Two Arrows, she said Good riddance. And if she’d known where I was going—what I was planning to do . . .” Aunt Olivia shook her head. “I never wanted to go back there, but I’d told Lillian and my husband that I was pregnant. I’d beaten Ellie to the punch. Back then, J.D. would have left me if I’d given him half an excuse. But if he thought I was pregnant with his child? If Lillian thought her beloved oldest daughter was pregnant, when she heard about the mess Ellie had gotten herself into?”

“You lied,” I translated.

“I protected myself,” Olivia countered. “You should understand that better than anyone, Sawyer. People like us—we have to protect ourselves. No one else is going to do it for us.”

I thought of Lillian, telling me that I was a fighter, telling me that neither of her daughters ever had been.

I thought about Nick and the way I’d always seen both of us as people who could take care of themselves.

“You lied about being pregnant,” I repeated. “And then you needed a baby.”