I had no idea what Victoria was majoring in, but somehow, I wasn’t surprised that she seemed to be landing on her feet. I wondered briefly what the chances were that the other potential investors were former White Gloves.

“What did you say to Lily?” my mom asked Ana.

Lily’s biological mother glanced back to the bar, which Lily was wiping down maniacally with a damp rag, going back over the same spots again and again.

“That’s between my daughter and me.”

“She almost lost me.”

Lily and I were lying in the field behind our house. It was unseasonably warm for December, but still cold enough that we should have been wearing jackets.

We weren’t.

“That’s what Ana said,” Lily continued. “Late in her second trimester, she almost lost the pregnancy. She couldn’t afford the hospital bills, and she said she just kept thinking—what if something happened to me after I was born? What if I got sick? What if I needed medicine she couldn’t afford?”

“She could have gone to her family,” I said, thinking back to my conversation with Victor Gutierrez.

“She would have,” Lily said softly. “And they would have controlled her entire life—and mine.” She paused. “She thought about going back to Davis Ames, too, but Ellen found her first.”

The rest of the story came pouring out of Lily’s mouth—how Ellen had sold Ana on the idea of a loving couple who couldn’t have children of their own, a couple who would pay Ana’s expenses, who would give the baby everything, who wanted to make sure their baby’s biological mother had a real shot at life, once she’d given birth.

Ana hadn’t found out who that couple was—or that said couple’s infertility was a lie—until later. Once she’d discovered that, once she’d realized all the ways she’d been lied to, she’d decided that the price she’d been paid wasn’t nearly enough.

“She said that she went to Daddy when I was twelve,” Lily continued. “She told him the truth, and he told her that he’d give her whatever she wanted, do anything she wanted, if she’d just leave me where I was.”

Beside me, Lily closed her eyes. I kept mine open and skyward.

“He used to bring her pictures,” Lily murmured. “That was part of their deal. He gave her money, and he told her all about me.”

Neither one of us had heard a word from Uncle J.D. in the past four months.

“I feel like I stole him from you,” Lily said suddenly, opening her eyes and turning to face me. “If he’d known I wasn’t his from the beginning, he wouldn’t have—”