“You left after your fight with Lillian,” I pointed out. “And Greer had hung both of you out to dry.”

“I tried to get in touch with Ana on my way out of town,” my mom said defensively. Then she wilted. “Maybe I didn’t try hard enough. I felt like she’d abandoned me. This whole time, what if she’s felt the same?”

I shouldn’t have felt for her, not about this. Maybe I wouldn’t have, if Lily and I were still speaking. Greer and Ana were Mom’s people, and then they were gone.

“I still don’t understand why she didn’t look for me,” my mom continued. “Maybe someone threatened her. The baby’s father or his father or his wife . . .”

Before my mom could continue to speculate, there was a knock at the door. I recognized it immediately: light, crisp, three taps.

My stomach twisted.

“Lily,” I told my mom, assuming that she’d know that meant that we should stop tossing around words like baby and pact and, most of all, Ana.

The last thing I needed was to throw gasoline on that particular fire.

“Come in,” my mom called.

Lily opened the door. She looked thinner than she had two weeks ago. Her hair clearly hadn’t been conditioned in a while. Her entire face was makeup-free, and though her skin had tanned early in the summer, right now, she looked wan.

“May I speak with Sawyer?” she asked my mom. “Alone?”

An hour earlier, if you’d told me that Lily wanted to talk to me, I would have felt a mix of trepidation and hope. But after a one-on-one with my mom, I couldn’t afford either. If you don’t expect anything of anyone, people can’t disappoint you.

When my mom left, Lily sat in the exact spot she had just vacated. “It’s John David,” she said without preamble.

That was all it took to snap me out of my head and into the moment. “What’s wrong with John David?”

“Picture this,” Lily told me, her gaze focused on her own hands. “We’re in Walmart with an overflowing cart of supplies. My brother is elbow-deep in streamers and trying to convince me that he needs a minimum of two thousand sparklers to truly bring his golf cart vision to life. And then, out of nowhere, he says, ‘Hey, Lily? You know how Mama says little pots have big ears?’ And I say yes. And then he says, ‘And you know how she also says that eavesdroppers never hear any good of themselves?’ And I say yes, and then he continues with ‘And how Mama always says that this is a one-party consent state with respect to audio recordings, so it’s completely legal to record any conversation you’re a party to?’”

“Pretty sure Aunt Olivia has never said that last one,” I opined.