Maybe there was something to the supposed magic of March twentieth, because Kate hadn’t fully loved another man since her promise under the willow tree. Kate often joked to her best friend, Norah, that on that first day of spring, after that first kiss, she should have made Jack also promise to always love her. A one-sided promise hadn’t done Kate any good at all.

“It could be that a girl only loves like that once,” Kate had told Norah. “Only once and then after that, love is more sensible.”

Norah had completely disagreed. But Norah was a romantic; Kate was now a realist. Or so she said.

And now there was Rowan.

Kate knew that Tara and Molly would be waiting downstairs, wandering the racks and asking to open the new boxes in the back room. The biggest perk when your sister owned a clothing store? First pick of the new shipments.

But Kate was wrong. Tara and Molly were sitting on stools behind the checkout counter, talking to Norah and holding their ever-present Starbucks cups.

“Kitty-Kat,” Molly said.

“Katie-Latey,” Tara said.

Kate laughed and pointed at the imitation Paris Train Station clock hanging on the back wall. “Two minutes. I’ve got two minutes until late is late.”

“Your definition of late and our definition aren’t quite the same,” Molly said.

“Just today, can we take a break from pointing out my faults?” Kate asked, trying to smile at her sister. That was the thing with Molly—she knew what dug the deepest and hurt the most, and sometimes she couldn’t help but use that superpower.

Norah, always the peacemaker, always knowing when the sisterly jabs were building, quickly interrupted and changed the subject. “We were talking about tonight, and wondering why we, the most important people in your life, weren’t invited.”

Norah stood between Molly and Tara. She was a light, a candle, a beacon really. Kate and Norah had been best friends since third grade and whenever Kate felt lost, she looked to Norah exactly as she did when she asked, “Do you really want to sit through a dinner with the Vaughn and Irving parents?”

The three of them looked at each other in alternate glances and laughed. “Um, no,” Tara said, standing.