“That’s part of it.” This was all so much more messed up than she knew. Hell, given what we’d just heard on those recordings, there was a good chance that this situation—and this family—were way more messed up than I had previously thought, too.

“Who else knows that my father is also yours?” Lily asked quietly. “You didn’t tell me. You didn’t feel like you could. Who did you tell?”

I’d only told one person.

“Nick,” I said. Before the gala, before he’d called in any favors, back when I could count the total number of times we’d had anything resembling a conversation on one hand, I’d told him something that no one outside of this family had any business knowing.

“Are you two . . .” Lily trailed off, then course-corrected. Right now, what Nick and I were—or more accurately, given his radio silence, what we obviously weren’t—was beside the point. “He’s the only one who knows?” Lily asked instead.

I pressed my lips together and shook my head. “Lillian knows, too, but I didn’t tell her.”

Lily brought a hand to cover her mouth, like she could take whatever she was feeling and snuff it out. After several seconds, she lowered her hand. “And Campbell? You two have been thick as thieves this summer, whispering every chance you get.”

I hadn’t realized that she’d noticed—or cared. “I told Cam that her father wasn’t mine. That’s all.”

“Okay. Tell me everything,” Lily said, her voice hollow and her eyes strangely bright. “And, Sawyer? Don’t you dare leave a damn thing out.”

CHAPTER 29

Explaining the circumstances surrounding my conception took a while. But once Lily seemed to have wrapped her mind around the abbreviated version of Sawyer’s Messed-Up Origins 101—the pact, Greer’s involvement, exactly what I’d been talking to Ana about at the hospital—the decision to go back through the recordings with a fine-tooth comb didn’t take us long.

We started back at the beginning—not just the three recordings Lily had played for me, but every conversation John David had caught. The rest of them were fairly run-of-the-mill—no mention of bodies or blackmail or how and when Aunt Olivia had discovered that her husband was my father.

“I can’t stay here,” Lily told me once we’d finished. “I just… I can’t be in this house right now, Sawyer.”

I let my gaze travel to the roses the White Gloves had left us—and the envelopes.

“I’m with you,” I told Lily. “Let’s get the hell out of Dodge.”