I knew, the same as Lily did, that there was no normal now. And while she’d had Walker to lean on, I’d been left out in the cold. She wasn’t talking to me. Nick hadn’t returned any of my

texts.

“You know what the doctors said,” Walker told me.

“They said she might be irritable.” I parroted the interpretation Lillian had been trying to sell me. “They said she might behave in uncharacteristic ways.”

They’d said it was temporary—but they didn’t know what Lily had seen in the woods.

“If you ask me, it’s good that she’s feeling things this strongly,” Walker said. “You’re taking this personally, Sawyer, but it’s not you. It’s everyone and everything.”

“Except for you,” I replied.

Whatever problems Walker and Lily had been having, whatever issues and emotions he’d been dealing with since his father had been arrested—those had been put on hold. Now that Lily needed him, he was there.

“Give it time, Taft.” Walker looked like he was on the verge of saying something else, but then his phone rang. He looked down at caller ID and then dismissed the call.

“Campbell?” I asked. She’d been calling me almost every day. “Or your mama?”

“Neither,” Walker replied. “I should go before traffic hits.”

This time, my phone was the one that went off—not a call. A text. On the other side of Lily’s door, I heard her phone buzz as well. I expected the message to be from Sadie-Grace, who’d taken to sending both Lily and me random pictures of puppies four or five times a day, but as I went to check the message, three others arrived, back-to-back.

@) - -‘ - , - - -

~ ~ ~ ~ ~8<

Tonight.

Stay tuned.

CHAPTER 25

Lillian’s preferred method of coping involved tending the garden, drinking wine, and continually drafting me into joining her at the former.

I would have preferred the latter—if tequila could have been substituted for the wine.

“Do you know what today is, Sawyer?” my grandmother asked me.

“Tuesday?” I replied dryly.

“The third of July.” Lillian leaned forward to prune a rose with the exact same sense of determination with which she was tending to our conversation. “The last time this family missed the Fourth of July celebration at Regal Lake was the year your grandfather got sick and passed on.” Trim. Trim. Trim. Clip. Clip. “I did what I could for the girls, but I was mourning, too. By the end of the summer, your aunt was gone and your mama had taken to dressing only in black.”

According to my mom, Aunt Olivia had run away for almost a year in the wake of their father’s death, and once she’d returned, my grandmother had refused to acknowledge that she’d ever gone missing.

Denial wasn’t just a stage of grief; it was practically a family tradition.