“Aunt Candy says you’ll love him. He helped Philo get into Yale.” Aunt Candy is not really my aunt; she’s been my mom’s best friend for the last thirty years, since they met doing off-off-Broadway in New York. Candy quit acting when she married a hedge fund billionaire and moved into a town house on the upper east side of Manhattan. Now when anyone asks her what she does, Aunt Candy calls herself a “philanthropist” and likes to joke that her wrists get tired from writing so many checks.

I blame Aunt Candy for the fact that no matter how much I complain about my lack of aptitude when it comes to foreign languages, my parents won’t let me quit taking Mandarin. A few Christmases ago, when we were all vacationing at her house in Mystique, she casually mentioned that Philo was fluent. Not a week later, Isla and I both had a private tutor.

If my mother’s gifts are her ability to mesmerize people with her looks and to elevate bad TV dialogue, Candy’s is her unerring confidence and the fact that she always knows a guy.

Actually, not a guy. The guy.

“Seriously? This is a done deal?”

“What?” My mom drops a kiss on the center part in my hair and smooths my flyaways with her hands. “It can’t hurt.”

CHAPTER THREE

Now

Isla and I sit in stunned silence as my father paces and shouts into his cell phone.

“No, this isn’t like the time we bailed Hudson out for that ounce. These are felony charges. She could go to jail.” My dad’s voice breaks, and Isla and I both involuntarily shiver. My brain had not gone there yet. Apparently, neither had all-knowing Isla’s.

I don’t know who he’s talking to. Aunt Candy, maybe, or perhaps Aunt Candy’s husband, Charles, who probably keeps a team of lawyers on retainer. My mom always says that it’s impossible that anyone could have gotten as rich as Charles has by doing everything on the full up and up. I’ve always assumed that was sour grapes on my mom’s part—as cushy as my mom’s life is, Aunt Candy’s is significantly, outrageously cushier. Even with my mediocre math skills, I know a billion dollars is, after all, a thousand million—but maybe she’s right.

“I know,” my dad says. “I know.”

Isla and I watch him, our eyes moving back and forth as he crosses the room. This feels only slightly better than watching CNN, which we’ve consumed for three hours straight already, injecting their endless, breathless coverage of what they are calling the “college admissions scandal” straight into our eyeballs. The footage played on a loop: my mom ducking into that cop car and being driven away, the tie of her robe flapping out the door, like a broken hand waving goodbye.