When Sue moved in with her father, Brynn moved upstairs to get away from her, camping with her brothers until she went to college. Her girlhood quarters are still intact down here, right down to the high school photos tacked to the bulletin board. It’s the one room in the house Sue hasn’t dared to change.

  Brynn crosses the recently installed tile floor—Mom always longed to exchange the worn linoleum for tile—and glances out the window where a pair of frilly white Priscillas once hung. Now there are only vertical blinds.

  Marie Costello hated blinds, vertical, horizontal…all blinds, Brynn remembers as she sees the sun’s promising glint on an array of golden branches, and notes that it’s going to be a beautiful day.

  A beautiful day for a funeral.

  She turns away, toward the stove, and realizes there’s no tea kettle on the back burner.

  “Can I help you find something?” Sue asks, behind her.

  “I was going to make some tea.”Since I can’t drink coffee again until next summer, she thinks grumpily.

  “Oh, you’re going to love this. Look.” Sue turns a lever at the sink, and steaming water comes out of a side tap. “I just had this put in. See? Boiling water on demand.”

  Brynn murmurs an appropriate comment, opens the cupboard, and begins hunting through a row of boxes for something herbal: chamomile, or apple…

  “We’ve got all kinds of tea in there.”

  “Any decaf?”

  “Decaf? I don’t think so…” Sue comes to look over her shoulder. “But, oh, try this one. It’s really good. Your father doesn’t like tea, but even he—”

  “No, thanks.” Brynn turns away from the box her stepmother proffers.

  I know my father doesn’t like tea. You don’t have to tell me that. He’s never liked tea.

  She feels a gentle touch on her arm. “Honey, I’m so sorry about your friend. What a terrible, tragic thing to go through.”

  To her horror, Brynn is overwhelmed by a sudden impulse to cry. Because of Tildy, because of her pregnancy hormones, because of Sue’s kindness, because she’s the wrong person standing here offering comfort and sympathy.

  It should be my mother, not you.

  “Do you want me to go to the memorial service with you today?” Sue offers, her hand now weighty on Brynn’s shoulder. “I hate the thought of you driving there alone and going through that ordeal by yourself.”

  “I won’t be by myself. My friends will be there, Fiona and Cassie.”

  She hasn’t seen either of them in over a week, nor have they spoken other than to make brief arrangements to meet in Brookline today. Brynn has thought more than once of calling each of them, not just to discuss Tildy and Rachel but to unburden her pregnancy news. But she couldn’t bring herself to do it.

  “Well, you’ll be in good hands if you’re with your sorority sisters, then,” Sue says, lifting her hand from Brynn’s shoulder at last.

  Brynn is surprised—and, all right, touched—that Sue remembers their names and that detail about Brynn’s relationship with them.

  “I was never in a sorority but I always considered my friends to be my true sisters. I was closer to them than I ever was to my blood sisters,” Sue adds, and Brynn’s temporary spark of warmth toward her evaporates.

  Right. Sue was close enough to one friend in particular that she moved right into her life the moment she was gone.

  Brynn tries to imagine one of her own “sisters” doing that, should anything ever happen to her.

  Nah. Workaholic Fiona would never want to deal with the kids. Cassie is embarking on her own domestic adventure with Alec. Tildy—

  Oh, God. Tildy is gone.

  The ugly truth hits her all over again, and with it, the fear that her own life might still be in danger.

  She’s been trying to convince herself that the chances of that are remote. But she can’t ignore the dead cardinal, the card…

  Or that Tildy died on her own birthday.

  If the Boston police knew what Brynn and the others know, they wouldn’t be looking among Tildy’s coworkers for the killer.

  They’d be looking for a woman who supposedly died ten years ago.

  Dressed in a black suit, Isaac stands over the bed, watching Kylah sleep.

  This lying and sneaking around can’t go on any longer. He’s going to tell her the truth. Tonight.

  After he gets back from Matilda Harrington’s memorial service this morning in Boston.

  He wasn’t planning to go, at first. Especially when Puffy told him it’s being held today, of all days. Kylah’s cousin Amy is getting married this afternoon; she’s in the wedding party, of course.

  But he’ll make it back to New York in time for the reception later. He booked a round-trip flight on the shuttle. After boarding the plane this morning, he’ll be in Boston in less time than it takes him to make it across the Triborough Bridge during rush hour.

  “I’m glad you’re coming,” Puffy told him. “Tildy was a good friend of Rachel’s.”

  No, she wasn’t. Not really.

  Rachel never clicked with Matilda Harrington the way she did with her other sorority sisters. Isaac remembers Rachel mimicking her snobby airs…but only for him, of course. To Matilda’s face—and in the presence of the other sisters—she was always her warm, upbeat self.

  That’s the best thing about Rachel. Having weathered her parents’ bitter divorce and subsequent multiple remarriages, she learned not to make waves. She treated everyone in her life as though she was crazy about them, regardless of how she really felt inside.

  That’s also the worst thing about Rachel.

  You could never really be sure where you stood.

  It’s different with someone like, say, Kylah. She wears her heart on her sleeve.

  I should appreciate that about her,Isaac tells himself,instead of always comparing her to Rachel. It isn’t fair to her.

  With a twinge of guilt, he turns away from his sleeping girlfriend and makes his way through the early-morning shadows to the door.

  He’ll tell her tonight about Rachel.

  And maybe, he thinks hopefully as he strides toward the elevator, Matilda Harrington’s memorial service will be cathartic.

  Maybe it will even enable him to let go at last, after ten years.

  Ten years of keeping his own weighty secret…

  And Rachel’s.

  Ashley Hagan likes to sleep in on weekend mornings, but her mother never lets her. When she wakes up in her own bed at home on a Saturday or Sunday morning, it’s to a bleating alarm clock, same as on weekdays.

  Mom doesn’t believe in lazy self-indulgence.

  Daddy does.

  And, luckily for Ashley, she wakes, lazily, to find herself in the brand-new, almost-bedroom he built into a corner of his apartment.

  “I had to make it so that the wall can come down when I move out,” he explained last weekend, when he first revealed her new quarters.

  “When are you moving out?” Ashley asked, momentarily alarmed.

  “Probably never, so don’t worry,” Daddy said. “At the rate I’m going, I’ll never be able to afford a condo.”

  “It’s okay, I like this place,” Ashley lied.

  Well, she does like it better since he put up the new wall and bought her all new bedding and a new dresser where she can keep her things. She used to just have a drawer in his—which was fine, because Daddy doesn’t have tons of clothes, like Mom does.

  Ashley can hear him rattling pots and pans beyond the new partition, and something smells good: butter…and batter.

  Pancakes!

  She stretches and gets up, walking barefoot into the little kitchenette.

  “Sleeping Beauty! There you are.” Daddy is standing at the griddle on the stove, a spatula in one hand and a can of Red Bull in the other. He drinks one every morning, to wake up.

  He has a stubbly face, his dark hair is standing straight up the way it does before his shower in the morning, and he’s wearing his weekend-morning uniform: T-shirt and boxer shorts.

  On the counter, beside the box of Hungry Jack mix, she sees a telltale empty plastic produce container. Peering into the mixing bowl, she sees that the creamy batter is studded with sliced red berries.

  “Strawberry pancakes?” she asks excitedly.

  “Your favorite. What do you feel like doing today?”

  “I don’t know…What do you want to do?” That’s the great thing about Daddy. He doesn’t schedule things way in advance, like Mom does. He likes to play it by ear.

  “How about if we go to the movies?”

  “Okay.”

  “Want to ask Meg and her mom to come along?”

  “Yes!”

  “Good. That’s what we’ll do, then.”

  Ashley smiles as she watches him heap her plate with golden-brown silver-dollar-sized pancakes, then dab them with butter and smother them in maple syrup.

  Mom makes her eat boxed cereal for breakfast at home.

  Unsweetened cereal, like horribly dry shredded wheat or those disgusting fiber pellets that look like cat food. She refuses to buy the good stuff like Cap’n Crunch and Lucky Charms, especially since Ashley needed a filling at her last dental checkup.

  “There you go.” Daddy hands the plate back to Ashley. “Dig in.”

  “What about you?”

  “I’m making mine now. Eat those while they’re hot.”

  Ashley perches on a stool at the breakfast bar that separates the kitchen from the living area. She has to clear a space for her plate; the counter is covered with mail and stacks of legal documents from Daddy’s job.

  Ashley isn’t sure exactly what he does…He’s some kind of lawyer, she thinks.

  “But lawyers are rich,” her friend Meg said when Ashley mentioned that once. “How come your dad isn’t rich like my dad?”

  Ashley has no idea, but she’s glad her dad is nothing like Meg’s dad, who is divorced from Meg’s mom. He’s snooty and he lives in a fancy house in Stockbridge with his snooty new wife and their two bratty little kids. He just had a heart attack not too long ago, from working too hard. Meg’s stepmother said Meg can’t spend the night there anymore because they’re trying to reduce stress. Like Meg would cause extra stress compared to his bratty other kids who are there all the time.

  Meg hates her stepmother, who wears clothes only from Ralph Lauren and Calvin Klein, and other expensive designers Ashley has never even heard of.

  Ashley doesn’t blame Meg for hating her. She herself would probably hate having a stepmother, too.

  Unless it was somebody nice. Like Meg’s mom, Cynthia.

  “Wouldn’t it be cool if we could get my mom to marry your dad?” Meg asked once. “Then we could be sisters.”

  Ashley agreed that it would be cool, and she and Meg spent a couple of days cooking up matchmaking plans.

  They gave up, eventually. Her dad and Meg’s mom are friendly, but they don’t seem like they’re in love. Meg’s mom isn’t that pretty, either. Not like Ashley’s mother. So maybe that’s why Daddy isn’t interested in her.

  Anyway, as much as Ashley would like to have Meg as a sister, if she was going to have a stepmother, she would rather have Brynn than anyone else.

  Too bad Brynn is married to Mr. Saddler.

  If she wasn’t, Ashley would definitely try to get her to marry Daddy.

  Mom probably wouldn’t like that, though. Even though she hates Daddy. Something tells Ashley she wouldn’t want her friend marrying him.

  Especially if Ashley would rather live with Brynn than with her. Which she would.

  “What are you thinking about, Ash?” Daddy asks, glancing up from the griddle.

  “I’m thinking sometimes I wish I didn’t live with Mom,” she blurts.

  Daddy immediately sets aside the spatula. “Why is that?”

  “No, I…” Ashley shrugs. “I don’t know. She’s just not home that much.”

  This weekend, of course, Mom has a good reason to be away. One of her old friends died in Boston. Ashley doesn’t know the details, but it must have been a car accident or something, because it seems like it happened unexpectedly.

  Even Daddy was nice to Mom about it. He actually hugged Mom when he picked up Ashley last night.

  Mom looked pretty stiff when he did it, though.

  Like she didn’t even want him to touch her.

  Which Ashley thought was rude, because Daddy was only trying to be nice.

  “Ash, do you want to come here and live with me?” Daddy asks now. “Is that what you’re saying?”

  Not really. Well, maybe she wants to livesomewhere with him—not necessarily here. And maybe she wants Brynn to be her stepmother…

  Anything you want in this life can be yours, Ashley,Mom always says.All you have to do is be willing to work for it.

  But she’s talking about careers. Not impossible fantasies.

  Daddy is still watching her, waiting for an answer.

  Behind him, on the stove, the griddle is starting to smoke.

  “Dad!” Ashley points toward it.

  He turns away, but he doesn’t change the subject.

  “If you want to live with me, Ashley, you can,” he tells her, as he slides the tip of the spatula beneath a singed pancake and flips it. “All you have to do is say the word.”

  She remains silent, once again hearing her mother say,Ashley will live with you, Pat, over my dead body.

  Fiona marvels at the irony that she’s driving to Boston on this glorious October morning, while James Bingham is traveling in the opposite direction. She knows his current whereabouts because he called her as he was leaving his house in Wellesley about an hour ago, just as she was leaving hers in Cedar Crest.

  At some point, she’s sure, they’ll pass each other on the Massachusetts Turnpike.

  In fact, she’s actually been keeping an eye on the oncoming traffic, hoping for a glimpse of his sleek black Mercedes.

  Which is ludicrous, because there are hundreds of black Mercedes driving on the Mass Pike this morning.

  And because you’re a grown woman, not a high school girl. Or did you forget?

  There’s just something about James that makes her feel decidedly girly-giddy.

  Right,a sardonic voice pipes up in her head,that would be his power and money.

  She won’t deny that those things first drew her to him, but it’s beyond that now. She’s falling for him, for real.

  Next thing you know, you’ll be calling his house and hanging up.

  Rolling her eyes, she lights a cigarette and cracks the window. Then, realizing it’s warm enough out there to lower it further, she does, relishing the wind in her hair.