So why did I bolt from the nursery and head for the stairs? The doorbell chimed. Greer went to open it just as I arrived. She froze when she saw who was on the other side.

“Greer,” my mom drawled. “You look fantastic. Why, you’ve barely put on a pound. If it weren’t for that baby bump, I’d swear you weren’t pregnant at all.”

Subtle, Mom. Real subtle.

As if she’d heard my thoughts, my mom turned to look at me. I could see her wanting to say something, on the verge of saying something—but she didn’t get the chance.

“Ellie.” Greer’s grip on the door tightened, but she didn’t shut it.

One did not slam the door in the face of one of Lillian Taft’s daughters—in front of witnesses.

My mom had grown up in this world. She knew how the game was played, but as she maneuvered her way through the room, chitchatting with other guests, she kept at least half of her attention on me. When the party moved to what the Waters family referred to as “the Great Room,” she fell in beside me and spoke. “You look good, Sawyer. Happy.”

Happy? She thought I looked happy? Happy that you’re here? Happy that you slept with Uncle J.D.? Happy to have recently discovered a decades-old corpse?

I couldn’t even muster a proper response.

The Great Room furniture had been removed and replaced with a cluster of eight-top tables, each set with different china. I only half heard Greer telling people that this set was her mother’s, and that set was her grandmother’s, and oh, that one belonged to Great-Grandmother Waters.

Why are you here, Mom? What do you want?

My mother took a seat at the table with the Waters china and stared up at me expectantly. Before I could decide whether to join her or back away, Aunt Olivia appeared beside me and steered me into a seat, placing herself squarely between my mom and me.

She must have sensed that this could go to hell in a handbasket—fast.

A woman I recognized took a seat across from Aunt Olivia. “It’s been an age,” Julia Ames—Boone’s mother—declared. “How have you been, Liv?”

“She goes by Olivia now.” My mom could weaponize smiles with the best of them. She’d told me once that after their father had died, Aunt Olivia had run away. Back then, she’d gone by Liv. When she’d come back, she was Olivia, practically perfect in every way and not interested in sharing her sister’s grief in the least.

She abandoned you, so you slept with her husband. If my mom was here to give me excuses, I didn’t want to hear them.