Her sister scrambled to her feet, the man standing up beside her. They held hands. The man looked familiar, but it took her a few seconds to place him: Elodie’s boyfriend.

“Hey. Sorry to just show up like this. I left you a message on your machine.”

Sensing the tension, Nathan continued inside, leaving the three of them alone.

Standing in the moonlight, urging Paulina to keep her voice down so they didn’t disturb the Barroses, Celeste listened calmly while the story came pouring out: They were in love, neither of them planned this, they tried to stop it but they were soul mates.

They both kept saying the same thing: “It just happened.”

Now they needed to tell Elodie. And they wanted her help.

“I’m not okay with this,” Celeste said, looking up at the stars and wondering what to do. As the eldest, she’d always felt removed from the scrum of competition between her younger sisters. Although, if she was being honest, it was really a one-way competition: Elodie had always been jealous of Paulina and never the reverse. It was their mother’s fault; Constance fawned over the baby, never failing to mention her beauty while always chiding Elodie for being bookish and dowdy.

Her first instinct was to tell Paulina to back off—to throw this particular fish back into the sea when there were so many others readily available to her. But confronted with the pair, their hands entwined, the palpable energy sparking between them, she knew it was a lost cause.

“I don’t want to hurt Elodie,” Paulina said. “That’s why we waited so long. We both hoped this would pass, that we’d get it out of our system.”

“I knew it wouldn’t pass,” Liam said, gazing at her adoringly.

Celeste shifted uncomfortably. “Look, things happen. Fine. But why are you dragging me into this?”

She already knew the answer. Elodie adored Celeste. She looked up to her more than she respected her own mother. Celeste was the one who turned her on to Virginia Woolf and Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Who introduced her to great works of art and the importance of history. Celeste and Elodie were the only two in the family who had true intellectual curiosity, and that had always been Elodie’s escape from the demands of life in the Pavlin orbit.

“I thought if you told her, if you somehow suggested that we can all get through this . . .” Paulina said.

“I’m sorry,” Celeste said. “I can’t condone this. And I don’t want to be a part of it. I love you, but you’re on your own with this one, kiddo.”

She let Paulina and Liam crash in her room for the night under the condition that they go back to New York the following day and talk to Elodie. “No matter how difficult the truth is, a lie is always worse.”