“Done yet?” Campbell demanded. I barely had time to wrap a towel around myself before she pulled the curtain. “Try this luminizer.” She slapped a container into my hand.

“What the hell is luminizer?”

Without answering, Campbell left the room and returned with a dress she’d selected for me: white cotton, with a gathered neckline and spaghetti straps. “I’ll send the dress home with you in a watertight bag. I’d recommend a bright-colored bathing suit to go underneath. You’re not trying to hide the fact that you’re wearing one, so you might as well go big or go home.”

I reached for the suit I’d worn here.

Campbell blocked my arm. “Not that one.” Having issued that edict, she disappeared back across the hall.

With a roll of my eyes, I studied the “luminizer” she’d handed me, determined it to be some kind of glittery lotion, and mentally filed it under hell no.

“What is she doing here?”

I turned to see Charlotte Ames standing in the doorway. Campbell’s mama wasn’t wearing makeup, and I could smell the alcohol on her breath from four feet away. Her question was clearly directed toward Campbell, but she stood facing me.

I could not help feeling that wearing nothing but a towel didn’t put me in the best position for a standoff.

“Isn’t it enough that your father’s in prison, Campbell? Do you really hate me so much that you would invite this . . .” Even inebriated, Charlotte Ames was not the type to fling about vulgarities or slurs, so she settled on simply referring to me as this. “. . . into my home?”

Maybe I should have felt attacked or degraded or, at the very least, condescended to, but the only thing I could bring myself to actually feel in that moment was pity.

This woman’s husband had cheated on her. Repeatedly. He had knocked up a teenager years ago. And even though that baby wasn’t me, I was one of the people responsible for her husband’s arrest. Campbell, Lily, Sadie-Grace, and I had planned his disgrace down to the last detail, and as a result, Charlotte Ames had spent much of the past month splattered on front pages right alongside her husband.

“I’ll go,” I said.

“No.” Campbell stepped into the hallway and blocked my exit. “Stay, Sawyer. After all, you’re my sister.” Given that she knew now that I wasn’t, I could only assume that Campbell and her mother were not currently on the best terms. “Blood is thicker than water—isn’t that what you always say, Mama?”

Charlotte’s sharp intake of breath was audible. “I didn’t raise you to talk to me that way, Campbell Caroline.”