(The partners at Chester’s firm told him how lucky he was, how fortunate, and went home to their own daughters, and watched them race around the backyard playing games of their own choosing, and never considered that Jillian Wolcott might not have any say in her own activities.)

The girls still shared a room; the girls were still friends, for all that the space between them was a minefield of resentment and resignation, always primed to explode. Every year, it got harder to remember that once they had been a closed unit, that neither of them had chosen the pattern of their life. Everything had been assigned. That didn’t matter. Like bonsai being trained into shape by an assiduous gardener, they were growing into the geometry of their parents’ desires, and it was pushing them further and further away from one another. One day, perhaps, one of them would reach across the gulf and find that there was no one there.

Neither of them was sure what they would do when that happened.

On the day our story truly starts—for surely none of that seemed like the beginning! Surely all of that was background, was explanation and justification for what’s to come, as unavoidably as thunder follows lightning—it was raining. No: not raining. It was pouring, bucketing water from the sky like an incipient flood. Jacqueline and Jillian sat in their room, on their respective beds, and the room was so full of anger and of silence that it screamed.

Jacqueline was reading a book about fashionable girls having fashionable adventures at a fashionable school, and she thought that she couldn’t possibly have been more bored. She occasionally cast narrow-eyed glances at the window, glaring at the rain. If the sky had been clear, she could have walked down the street to her friend Brooke’s house. They could have painted each other’s nails and talked about boys, a topic that Jacqueline found alternately fascinating and dull as dishwater, but which Brooke always approached with the same unflagging enthusiasm. It would have been something.

Jillian, who had been intending to spend the day at soccer practice, sat on the floor next to her bed and moped so vigorously that it was like a gray cloud spreading across her side of the room. She couldn’t go downstairs to watch television—no TV before four o’clock, not even on weekends, not even on rainy days—and she didn’t have any books to read that she hadn’t read five times already. She’d tried taking a look at one of Jacqueline’s fashionable girl books, and had quickly found herself baffled at the number of ways the author found to describe everyone’s hair. Maybe some things were worse than boredom after all.

When Jillian sighed for the fifth time in fifteen minutes, Jacqueline lowered her book and glowered at her across the room. “What is it?” she demanded.