“It’ll be okay,” Graham assured her. “We’ll work through this together. But you have to promise to do the work, too. Will you promise?”

“Of course I promise,” Lauren said.

Now, the smell of coffee turned putrid in Lauren’s nostrils. She was a failure. She’d made a promise to Graham in the summer, and she hadn’t followed through, and now this had happened. Leave her son? No. There had to be another way.

“I need an aspirin,” she said miserably. And then she stood and walked back to the bedroom to retrieve one from the bedside drawer. The bed looked inviting, the sheets still in a jumble. Maybe she’d lie down again. Maybe she’d sleep forever.

As she bent to open the bedside drawer, her phone was lit up in the darkness, a bright rectangle on the nightstand. Lauren picked it up, half expecting it to be something damning about her—a call from the police, maybe, ready with questions about that email she’d sent to Piper, ready to arrest her. Maybe they should arrest her.

But it was a text from Ronnie. I need to meet. Something’s happened. Something bad.

Seventeen

It took Andrea thirty minutes to leave her house, and that was only after making Martina promise not to open the door for anyone, after two outfit changes to ensure her face was fully covered, and after checking the security cameras to see that a surveillance car wasn’t staked out past the trees. When she finally reversed out of her driveway, there wasn’t a single long-lensed camera in sight that she could see. But that was even more unnerving than if there’d been a pack of paparazzi at the curb. Bizarre, she thought.

Her mother had been inconsolable on the phone last night. Cynthia said that “everyone was going to know soon” and that this was going to probably give Andrea’s father a coronary. She also said Andrea’s father would most likely take this out on Cynthia because Cynthia knew all along and didn’t tell him.

Andrea understood the burden of her mom keeping this secret to herself, and she appreciated it. Who knew what he might do once he learned the truth? He might try to cut off her and Arthur’s trusts. He’d try to take Arthur away, possibly putting his whole legal team on the matter, saying it was for the moral health of his only grandson.