Page 114 of The Debutantes
And then I step toward the officer.
“What do you want to know?” I ask.
This time, it will be the truth.
5 Months LaterLILY
The Queen dress still hangs in my closet where I left it, wrapped in plastic to keep out the dust. It feels weird, to be eighteen and already owning one of those dresses—overly expensive, sentimental, the kind I’ll never wear again.
I have two of them, actually.
I step in front of the full-length closet mirror and smooth out my graduation dress, enjoying the way it hugs my hips, the white lace fluttering over the corseted top like snow. Beaumont has this weird tradition where we don’t graduate in caps and gowns. Instead, we wear white—the girls in long dresses, the boys in suits, like we’re at some kind of Southern child wedding. Or a debutante ball.
I twist one of the loose curls hanging around my face, making sure it has that artful accidental look instead of something I intentionally crafted. When I’m satisfied, I move to my necklace, the diamond teardrop Mom and Dad got me for my thirteenth birthday. It feels right, having it back where it’s meant to be, framed by my collarbone.
“You’re tangled in the back.” Mom has materialized in the doorway in her graduation outfit, a designer linen jumpsuit, lightweight to withstand the heat, which is supposed to climbup to the nineties today. Why Beaumont insists on holding graduation outside, I’ll never know. Unless it’s a calculated move to torture its students one last time.
“Fix it?” I ask her.
“Of course.” Mom steps behind me, her cool fingers brushing my neck as she straightens out the necklace chain.
Watching us there in the mirror, I’m hit with a memory: Mom sitting next to me on that gross mattress in the storage room, the necklace in her hand.
The girls found this here,she told me.They’re suspecting things.
I didn’t respond. I was still angry back then. I still didn’t understand why they’d done it—even though some part of me knew, even before I walked into the Den on the night of the ball and found them waiting there, that it was my parents on the other side of those anonymous texts. That they’d known about my plan all along.
Vivian was right, in the end, with her weird little lie detector. There was something I was keeping from her. But can she really blame me? I learned it from the best.
The truth is, I never found the burner phone in Coach’s office. I was kind of surprised when Vivian bought that it was just conveniently in his desk, sitting there like a smoking gun. But sometimes, I guess we’d all rather accept the easy stories.
The real one is much harder to swallow.
It happened when I looked through Dad’s stuff. I wasn’t lying about that. I broke into his computer, checked the emails, the texts, looking for anything about the Pierrot.
And then I opened his safe.
I knew where he kept it in the closet, locked with a passcode I’d seen him punch in countless times. He didn’t have to be secretive around me. I was his perfect daughter. He trusted me.
I figured I’d just find his guns, maybe Mom’s jewelry, nothing out of the ordinary. Still, it couldn’t hurt to be thorough.
When I punched in the code and cracked the safe open, it was like the whole room started to sink.
Inside was not only the burner, but evidence. Piles of it. Printed emails and text exchanges between my dad and Marty on the night Margot died, explaining it all. Proving what maybe I should have guessed all along: Dad was in on it. After Coach killed her, Marty went to my dad for help, and he agreed.Anything for our brothers,Dad had said. It was his idea to implicate Dr. Johnson, to make him write the fake report. And he’d kept the proof—maybe a sick kind of souvenir, I thought. Or more likely a plan B, just in case he had to throw hisbrotherunder the bus.
Whatever the reason, that was the moment it all changed. When I knew I had to run.
If only I’d known how impossible that really was.
This isn’t you,Dad had told me the night they caught me at the Den.You just need to stay here for a while. Take some time to become yourself again.
I wanted to scream. I wanted to throw it in his face, what I knew he’d done. But the words wouldn’t come.
Because he was right, I realized. What was I thinking? My plan was ridiculous. Even if I had run away, my parents would have found me, or the money would have run out, or I would have realized what I already knew deep down: LeBlancs always win. We’re untouchable, no matter how dark things get. No matter how many sins we commit.
This city is our kingdom, and here they were, offering me a life raft. A chance to come back home.
So I told them everything—where I’d hidden the burner forthe Maids to find, what I’d been planning, all of the evidence I’d gathered and how to destroy it.
