“Even if she had,” Lily replied, “John David’s version of being ‘party’ to a conversation apparently doesn’t involve being a participant in that conversation, so much as eavesdropping while eating cake and/or pie to fulfill the ‘party’ quotient.”

I read between the lines there. “Aunt Olivia has been grief-baking a lot lately.”

“Not just lately,” Lily replied quietly. She held up a phone. I recognized immediately that it wasn’t hers. Lily’s phone didn’t have a camouflage cover. “He’s been spying on my parents and recording their conversations. For more than a month.”

More than a month. As in, since before we discovered the affair?

“Sawyer?” Lily held the phone out to me. “You have to listen to this.”

With no further ado, she played the audio files for me—not all of them, but three in particular.

“Could you grab the other end of the sheet?” Aunt Olivia’s request on the tape sounded absolutely ordinary. She waited a second, and then added, “I think I’ve figured out why we’re having so much trouble finding the money to finish the remodel.”

She still sounded pleasant enough, but before this summer, the one argument I’d ever heard them have was on this topic.

“I told you,” J.D. said on the recording, “we’re fine, Olivia. It’s going to be fine. Our assets—”

“Just aren’t liquid right now. So you’ve said, repeatedly. But I had a bit of time between projects with the girls, and I took a peek at the books—ours and your company’s.”

On the bed, Lily sat perfectly still. I knew this wasn’t her first time hearing these recordings, but she was listening the way a starving person ate.

“Leave my job out of this,” Uncle J.D. snapped.

“Certain filings are a matter of public record. You know that.”

“Stop telling me what I know, Olivia.”

“You’ve exercised a lot of stock options in the past six years.” Aunt Olivia’s voice had taken on just the slightest hint of an edge.

“We agreed that was the right call. We used my trust—from my family—to do it.”

“At first,” Aunt Olivia said firmly.

There was a long pause. “No matter where the money came from, we agreed about buying the stock, Olivia.”

“That’s the thing, John. We agreed about exercising your options, but when I compared the public filings to our balance transfers, every single time you convinced me to fund a stock buy, you took a little off the top. And by a little, I mean a very large sum.”

“I’m not talking about this.”