“Your deal is done; there is no undoing it,” I said as I stood up to leave. “But I think it’s important for you to know something.”

“Okay,” Evan responded, wary.

“You asked the wrong question,” I said, slipping my tablet back into its case. “What you should’ve asked was which son.”

PART III

LILY

THE NIGHT SARAH KELLY died went like this.

Lily came in from the lake just as the boys got back from the state liquor store. Being three and a half years older, Philip had an ID, but his bike couldn’t carry the supplies, so they took Evan’s old truck. Lily could hear it from the outdoor shower, where the loose door brought on memories of the afternoon before. Loose because Silas had picked her up and shoved her against it, his body following hers, their skin starving collectively and fed the same way.

Lily was no stranger to hunger.

“What did we get?” she asked when she walked into the kitchen, looping her arms around Silas’s waist from behind as he unloaded beers into the fridge. She loved the way he smelled, like laundry and body spray and just a hint of pot.

“ ‘What didn’t we get?’ is more like it,” he said, reaching around to cup her ass in her shorts before she squealed and wriggled away.

“This is what you wanted, right?” Phil asked, holding out a bottle of Malibu as he hoisted a cardboard box full of liquor onto the kitchen counter.

“Phil, you’re my hero!”

She pitched up on her toes and kissed him quickly on the cheek. Lily was gleefully adjusting to her new role in the Harrison family. A few months ago, she never would’ve been brave enough to talk to Philip like that. But she was practically family now, she thought as she cradled her own personal bottle. And that made this house her domain.

“I’m going to hide that,” Madeline said, coming up behind her.

“Like hell you are.”

“Not from you, bitch. From everybody else. We can’t trust these animals.”

As Madeline dragged her out of the room, Lily looked over her shoulder just long enough to see Philip unload three bottles of tequila.

Let’s see what Sarah thinks of that, she thought.

“Shall we do a shot or two, just to get the party started?” Madeline asked when she and Lily had found the right planter, tall enough to conceal the bottle but close enough to keep them in the action.

Lily put one hand over her belly button, over what some faraway part of her knew was growing there. But only for an instant. Then she shook her head—hard, as if she could dislodge the thought—and opened her mouth.

—