Put the phone away, Jess. There’s nothing new to see. Don’t do it to yourself.

But it was too easy. All that information, all those photographs, just waiting for her to look at them. It wasn’t really stalking. It wasn’t as if she were checking the social media account of an ex-boyfriend. But Facebook hadn’t been invented when Iain had walked out on her two weeks before Mia’s first birthday, failing to give any explanation other than that he just couldn’t handle the relationship any more. Google-searching your own sister was different. Jess was only finding out the facts of Lily’s life that she’d already know if she ever let her mum talk about her. She knew it wasn’t rational, knew that hunting for information about someone you’d refused to see for years didn’t make sense. She knew that whatever she found would only burrow beneath her ribs and tap out a rhythm of envy for the rest of the day. But still she couldn’t stop herself. She had a compulsion to know, even though the knowing would hurt her.

Jess clicked on a link that Google informed her she’d last visited five days ago: a magazine article with the headline “Having It All.” As the piece opened, she stared, unblinking, at the lead photograph.

Lily, Daniel, Phoebe: the three of them sitting on a pale gray sofa against a backdrop of floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, multicolored spines providing wallpaper to a scene that spoke of confidence, culture, prosperity. It was the kind of room Jess might have chosen as the location for a drama series about an affluent metropolitan family. Except this wasn’t a TV set. This was Lily’s perfect home. Lily’s perfect life.

And in the center of the photograph sat Jess’s sister, looking a decade younger than her forty-three years, with her neat dark chignon, cap-sleeve fitted dress, and minimalist makeup, as though she were a model in the pages of a fashion magazine.

Jess skim-read the article, text she was so familiar with she could have recited it verbatim, searching for something—anything—she might have missed before.

Lily Goldsmith has had what many regard to be a meteoric rise. Winning her first international award at the age of just twenty-three, she is now one of the most revered marketing professionals on either side of the Atlantic. She is, to many in the industry, a symbol of the penetrability of the glass ceiling.

Jess exhaled loudly, watched her warm breath condense in the cold air around her.

Married to millionaire entertainment lawyer Daniel Goldsmith, Lily has managed to achieve what so many women aspire to but few successfully accomplish: a happy work-life balance. The couple share their Holland Park home with their teenage daughter, Phoebe, currently a sixth-form pupil at an exclusive all-girls school in west London.

“If I knew the secret of success, I’d bottle it and sell it,” Lily laughs. “What I do know is that I’ve worked incredibly hard and I’ve always set myself very clear goals. Sometimes the landscape changes and you can’t always predict where you’ll be in five years’ time, but knowing where you’d like to be gives you a much better chance of getting there, I think. And I’ve been incredibly lucky in having amazing support at home. I imagine it’s nigh-on impossible doing a job like mine if your family aren’t 100 percent behind you.”