His letter was folded up in my pocket. It didn’t change anything right away. It took a day or so to think of Chris with a smile on my face, and another day or so to see the conditions I lived in. The patchwork of pipes and electrical work. The bare walls and barren floors. My clothes were in good shape because Ronnie was a seamstress who could repair anything, and my hair was decent because the Snip-n-Save needed every customer they could get.

I wiped down the green tile kitchen counter, seeing every encrusted piece of grime as if for the first time. A person got used to things. A bit of grime that didn’t come out on the first scrub just stayed there until new eyes saw it.

Harper flew down the stairs in the yellow polo shirt she had to wear at the Amazon distribution center where she and half the town worked, her blond hair tied into a loose ponytail.

“Hey,” she said when she burst into the kitchen and opened the fridge. “Taylor’s hanging out here today. You should put him to work.”

“Can he do anything?”

“Yeah.” She pulled out yogurt. “Surprisingly, for such a nerd.”

“He didn’t seem like a nerd to me.” I got a bowl and a box of granola from the cabinet. “He’s quite handsome and confident.”

She blushed a little, taking the granola and bowl. “He’s all right.”

Harper was a nerd herself, spending hours in front of a computer she’d built from parts. She’d gone to MIT for a year, but came home when Daddy got sick. She never went back. Staying in Barrington was a terrible waste of her mind. A brilliant, stubborn, loyal mind.

“Do you remember Chris Carmichael?” I asked. “From the country club? He gardened for us one summer. Lived in the trailer park by the station?”

“Yeah, duh.” The granola tinkled into the bowl.

“He sent me a letter.” I peeled the top off the yogurt container and plucked a spoon out of the rack.

Her eyes went as wide as her bowl. “Really? What did he say?”

“Lance died.” I dropped a lump of yogurt into her bowl and gave her the spoon.

“Aw,” she said, poking her spoon against the bottom of the bowl. “Percy’s the last of that litter.”

I didn’t give myself a second to doubt my next question. I just spit out what was on my mind, too late to sound casual. “I was wondering if you’d look Chris up on the computer? See how he’s doing?”

She put her back to the counter and held the bowl in front of her, swirling the granola into the yogurt. “Why?”

“Because I’m asking.”

“Yeah, but I don’t know what you’re asking for exactly? Do you want to know where he works or do you want his bank account info?”

“Harper Barrington!” I scolded. “You said you stopped that!”

She shrugged. Did I like that she was a hacker? No. But I could only make her promise she wouldn’t steal or cheat. She’d never promised to stop hacking. At this point, she was a grown woman and I was so ignorant of the digital world, I didn’t even know what the promise meant.

Besides, she needed to exercise her mind, not shut it down.

“I don’t want his bank information,” I said.

“Too bad.” She ate like a prisoner of war.

“What do you mean?”

She scraped the last of the yogurt out of the curve of the bowl. “He’s loaded.”

My heart twisted and my skin got hot. Not because he had money. She could have revealed that he was a schoolteacher and I would have had the same reaction. My body reacted to the fact that she, my sister, anyone in the same room as me, knew anything about him. It was like touching him from a universe away.

I didn’t know how much further I wanted to go, but Harper wasn’t one to slip through a door quietly; she burst through.

“Has his own hedge fund and a seat on the Exchange. Ex-wife but no kids.”

He’d gotten married? That seemed impossible. How could what we had be replicated in the same lifetime?

“Really?” I held up my chin. I didn’t want to show her that I was tripped up.

“Italian model. I forget her name. He’s got a sweet penthouse on Central Park West and a net worth around—”

“Stop!”

She obeyed, washing the bowl with a roll of her eyes. My own sister was closer to him than I was. And the ex-wife…

I had to swallow a lump of jealousy before I spoke again. “You’ve been talking to him?”

“Hell, no!” She put the bowl in the rack. “But I’ve been watching, more or less. He can’t see me do it and it’s mostly legal.”

“Mostly?”

“I won’t get caught and I don’t touch anything.”

“Fine, I guess.” I pulled a towel off the rack and dried the bowl. “He seems all right?”

“Yeah. Kinda. Healthy, wealthy. He doesn’t go out much. Just big events.”

“And he’s divorced?”

“Yeah. Recently. She’s dumb. I can tell.”

I laughed a little but not a lot. The jealousy was pushing its way back up my throat. “As long as you say so.”

“Why are you asking?”

I would have to tell her at some point. The minutes before she ran out the door were as good as any. “He’s coming back to bury Lance.”

“Wow.” She shook her head a little, staring at me as if the shock kept her from averting her gaze. “We have to clean up.”

“I can manage it.”

“And the thorn bush?” She indicated the backyard with a flip of her fingers. “That’s not going to go over well—oh.” She froze as if realizing something unpleasant. “Reg.”

“I keep telling you there’s nothing between Reggie and me.”

“But I keep hoping.”

“You’re sweet. But no.”

With a glance at the clock, she started out. She gave me a list of things to pick up when I went shopping, including a strange men’s toiletry item. I assumed it was for Taylor, and as she drove away, I felt that little bit of jealousy well up again. My sister was performing mundane tasks for a man she cared about. I longed to do the same.

I’d dated men since he left. I’d had some sex with those men, none of it memorable. There was no love like his. I’d tried to find it and come up emptyhanded enough times to give up. I’d given up on him coming back a decade ago, given up on doing more than treading water, given up on dating.

Most days, I didn’t think about him at all. Sometimes when the roses were blooming and the evening wind blew the right way, I’d remember how he made me feel, but not him in particular.

I went to the back of the house and looked at the backyard and the family cemetery. It had been there before the house, when the first Barrington Father bought land by the river and died before he’d amassed enough wealth to build on it.

When I was a girl, the plot had been lined with beautiful rosebushes. After our father died, we’d let them grow over the headstones that Harper had defaced when she was angry, and as the years went on, we’d let it grow into a bed of thorns. Sometimes, in the spring, they bloomed. But the bushes were too thick to be penetrated by a gardener, so they were wild and unpredictable. We just trimmed the edges so the thorns didn’t go past the short white fence around the plots.

Would Chris even care?

Would he laugh or be disappointed?

I didn’t know him or who he’d become, except that he was rich and lived a beautiful life. I lived with a dense thorn bush in my yard because my sister hated our father. The weight of shame I carried got denser and heavier. I could bear it inside Barrington, but in front of Chris, it would crush me.

The note crinkled in my pocket. For the first time since getting it, I thought I should tell him I wouldn’t see him.