Outside, the deck sent a cold chill up through the bottom of her feet. She placed her camera on the side table next to her empty wineglass from last night and Clare’s journal, then sat down to pull the socks over her feet. She had sat outside reading and drinking until her brain became too fuzzy from exhaustion, alcohol, and grief that she couldn’t keep her eyes open any longer. Clare’s journal had surprised her. She had no idea Clare and Adam had been engaged.

She grabbed her camera off the table and stood up. The balcony was enclosed in a glass half-wall. Eileen remembered Clare showing her and Eric the room three years ago. “It’ll keep you from stumbling to your death while not impeding your view when you sit and have your morning coffee,” Clare had joked. In that moment, standing here, with Eric gazing around and adding it all up, and her children off in other rooms marveling at their aunt Clare’s unbelievable wealth, a jealousy unlike anything she had ever experienced had settled like a stone in her mind. Eileen had looked at her sister, her long auburn hair blowing away from her beautiful face in the ocean breeze, her slim, lithe body, long bones, tasteful clothes, perfect skin, her beautiful full smile—every aspect of her perfect older sister made Eileen feel small, painfully common by comparison. It always had.

She had always been a little envious of Clare, but that moment, with the material evidence of Clare’s success, wealth, and fame surrounding her and sinking in for the first time, her simple jealousy had mushroomed into something larger, darker, a feeling much closer to hate. Eric and her children were so clearly impressed by Clare. No, not just impressed—awed. Because Clare hadn’t simply fallen ass-backward into money or married it; Clare had built this. All of it. Clare had harnessed her talents and constructed a life, a world for herself. All this was hers. And no one else, not Simon, not their mother, not even Eileen, could say they had any real part in what Clare had accomplished.

“Do you like it?” Clare had asked her.

Eileen had nodded. “It’s nice. A little sterile, and certainly not kid-friendly, but that’s not an issue for you and Simon.” She had smiled at Clare and pretended to not notice the hurt in her sister’s eyes. “Speaking of that—I better go find my three monsters before they drag their grubby hands all over your perfect walls.”

Haunted by her own words that day, sickened by her capacity for cruelty, Eileen raised her camera’s viewfinder to her eye and snapped several photos of a lone gull picking over a tangle of seaweed on the rocks below. She had known full well Clare couldn’t have children.