Page 80 of Deadly Little Scandals

“I’m not going to chase you,” he told me. “If you’re too damned scared to let this be real, if I don’t get to matter to you, if I have to let this benothingfor you to stay—then go.”

Go.

He called after me as I fled. “I’m done playing, Sawyer. If you’re too much of a coward to stay? Don’t come back.”

have to go.I played the words I’d said to Nick over and over again in my mind. I made it halfway through dinner before thinking about what he’d said in return.

Don’t come back.

“Lily, sweetheart, you’ve barely eaten.” Aunt Olivia’s attention was blessedly focused on her daughter. Lillian’s, too. Neither one of them had clued in to the fact that there was a damned thing wrong with me. “Can I get you something else?”

Beside me at the table, Lily picked up a steak knife and began meticulously slicing her meat.Slice. Slice. Slice.She used her fork to spear a delicate piece. “I hear the local authorities are bringing in a forensic sculptor,” she said primly, sounding almost like her former self. She dabbed a napkin against her lips. “To identify the body we found.”

Focus on that,I told myself.Think about that.

Aunt Olivia’s reaction to the termforensic sculptorwas completely predictable. “Lily,” she said, aghast, “we do not discuss forensics at the dinner table.”

“That’s right,” John David chimed in. “If I can’t politely entertain the idea of zombies who eat their own flesh, you can’t talk about dead people.”

And that was that. Aunt Olivia didn’t seem alarmed. She didn’t seem to find the idea of the Lady of the Lake being given a face particularly worrisome. She exhibited no behavior out of the ordinary whatsoever.

Until she invited Uncle J.D. over that night.

He wasn’t allowed inside the house—Lillian’s orders. So he sat on the back deck, talking to John David and waiting for Lily.

I wondered, when I couldn’t keep myself from it, if my response to Nick would have been different if J.D. had responded differently to me. How much of who I was came from years of watching my mom—and how much of it was something, the only thing, he’d given me?

Three hours later, Lily was still in her room, and her father was still out on the back deck. I’d stopped wondering, stopped replaying the conversation with Nick.

Mostly.

But I couldn’t keep from thinking about the way Nick had said that the reason I hadn’t pushed Lily to say something, do something,feelsomething, was that I was terrified of losing her.

Hell, that’swhy you wanted to find Ana’sbaby in the first place.

Eventually, John David went to bed. Eventually, Aunt Olivia stopped coming by to nudge Lily to go out and talk with her daddy.

I found myself standing outside Lily’s door. Somehow, she knew that I was there.

“I don’t want to talk to him,” she said.

“I know,” I replied. “But I do.”

The last time I’d talked to J.D. Easterling had been in the hospital, the night Lily and I had discovered his affair. He’d told me that it was neither the time nor the place to discuss our relationship. He hadn’t made any attempt to contact me since.

“Hello, Daddy.” Lily had woven her hand through mine, and she squeezed it a little tighter as she said the words.

I’d pushed. She’d let me. She’dstayed.

“Lily.” J.D. smiled. “Sweetheart, I’ve missed you so much. Thank you for...”

“Talking to you?” Lily’s voice was a little wobbly. She let go of my hand and rested both of hers on the deck railing. “I’m not here to talk to you. Maybe I’ll be ready for that someday. Maybe I won’t. But right now, Sawyer is.”

“Sawyer is what, honey?”

“Ready to talk to you,” I elucidated.

He was an affable person. He’d treated me fondly—as his niece. But now?