“He raised you,” I interrupted her. “You’re his, Lily. He clearly feels that way, and I don’t need a father.” She was on the verge of objecting, so I continued. “With a sister/cousin/pregnancy-pact buddy like you, I’m good.”

Lily snorted—quite possibly the most unladylike sound I’d ever heard her make.

Catching sight of movement near the house, I sat up. “What’s my mom doing here?” I asked as she started striding across the field toward us. “And why is she carrying formal dresses?”

CHAPTER 62

The previous December, my mom had shown up unannounced on Lillian’s front porch, moments before the whole family had left for the annual Christmas party at the club. Why Ana’s visit had convinced her to pull a repeat performance, I couldn’t say, but there was no talking her out of it, and she was dead set on dragging Lily and me along.

“Hold still,” Lily gritted out as she twisted my French braid—which she’d just finished—into some kind of updo and jabbed a half-dozen bobby pins directly into my skull.

“That hurts,” I told her.

“Pain is beauty,” Lily retorted. She stepped up behind me in the mirror, and her expression shifted. The dresses my mom had bought us matched. Hers was navy, mine a brighter, cerulean blue.

“You know,” I said, thinking back on the past year, “I never really understood that phrase—pain is beauty—until now.”

I expected my mom to drive straight to Lillian’s house—or to Northern Ridge Country Club itself. Instead, she took a detour by the cemetery first. Lily and I followed her down a gravel path to a small wrought-iron fence. Inside the fence, there were two tombstones—small cement crosses.

And in front of each tombstone stood a woman wearing heels and diamond earrings and, in Lillian’s case, pearls.

“You came.” Aunt Olivia sounded surprised. “We’ve been leaving messages for weeks, Ellie. We didn’t think you’d—”

“I had a change of heart,” my mom said, but Aunt Olivia wasn’t looking at her anymore.

She was looking at Lily and me.

“The last time I was here,” I said, making a mental note to kill my mom for bringing us into this unprepared, “there was only one tombstone.”

Lillian stepped to the side. “Your hair looks good like that,” she told me. “One barely notices the bangs.”

I looked past her to the writing on the tombstone she’d just stepped away from. There was no name on the cross, no year, but an inscription had been added.

May her memory be eternal.

“People will think that tombstone is yours,” my mom told Lillian. “They’ll say you have a big head, writing your own epitaph like that.”

My grandmother gave an elegant little shrug. “People will think what they want. I daresay they always do.”