Sam shrugs and hugs her arms to her chest. “No. Not all of it.”

“Then what?”

“You were their favorite,” she whispers. “Mama and Daddy. They were always so proud of you.” Her voice takes on Mama’s tone. “Our Delilah got straight As again. Did you taste Delilah’s casserole; I declare it’s the best in five counties. Delilah is such a special child.”

I’m poleaxed. Unable to breathe for a long moment. “They had to say all that. Because I was fucking miserable, and they knew it!”

Her silvery-blue eyes, so like my mother’s, flash in outrage. “They said it because they meant it, Dee. You can’t be that clueless. They loved you best.”

“I wasn’t even their child!” My shout comes out of nowhere, hurting my chest, my throat.

“What?” Sam asks, bewildered. “What are you talking about?”

“I’m adopted.” It’s a ridiculous thing to say, given that she knows this.

Sam swallows hard, then takes a hesitant step closer. Her voice softens. “Do you honestly think they loved you less?”

“Not anymore.” My conversation with Mama eased the last strands of those worries. “But back then? It was always on my mind. Oddball Delilah, sticking out like a sore thumb amid the rest of you.”

Sam shakes her head. “Hell, Dee. They picked you. I was an unexpected arrival; they had to love me.”

My laugh is unhinged. “I can’t believe this. All this time you were jealous of our parents’ love for me, and I was jealous of the same?”

In our mother’s cheery kitchen, Sam and I stare at each other, and then she starts to snicker. “I guess we were.”

We both laugh; it isn’t really in amusement. I’m too battered, but it feels good to let it go. Sam finishes with a shaking breath and then sobers. Tentatively, she reaches out, and I accept her hug. She smells of Chanel and cigarettes that I know she still smokes on the sly. “I’m sorry, Dee. So sorry.”

“You hurt me.” I still hurt.

“I’m sorry,” she says again. I know she means it. But it doesn’t feel like enough.

“And you let Macon take the fall.”

Her nose wrinkles. Red faced and teary eyed, she’s still beautiful. Still guarded. “He insisted. The night he dumped me, he said he’d do that for me because of all we’d been through together, but he was done with the Baker sisters.”

It wasn’t exactly what Macon said to me. In Sam’s version, Macon was protecting her, not me. This again. The same old manipulations and twisted truths. I pull out of her embrace. “You should have told me.”

“I know.” Sam worries her bottom lip.

“What’s done is done.”

She brightens at that. “And hey, I returned and brought the watch back as promised.”