“I don’t want—”

“You’ve always been good with numbers. You’d make a wonderful accountant. And I’ve told you we’ll pay your tuition.”

“I don’t want to be an accountant! And I don’t need my parents supporting me.”

“Living in Nana’s house doesn’t count, then?”

It was a knockout punch. Annabelle’s cheeks burned. Her mother had inherited Nana’s Wicker Park house. Annabelle was living in it, ostensibly to keep it from being vandalized, but really because Kate didn’t want Annabelle staying in some “dangerous urban neighborhood.” Annabelle lashed back. “Fine! Do you want me to move out? Is that what you want?”

Oh, God, she sounded like she was fifteen again. Why did she always let Kate do this to her? Before she could retrench, her mother went on, speaking in the same overly patient maternal voice she’d used when Annabelle was eight and had announced that she’d run away from home if her brothers didn’t stop calling her Spud.

“What I want you to do is go back to school and get your accounting degree. You know Doug will help you get a job.”

“I’m not going to be an accountant!”

“Then what are you going to be, Annabelle? Tell me. Do you think I enjoy nagging? If you could just once explain it to me…”

“I want to run my own business,” Annabelle said, sounding whiny even to herself.

“You tried that, remember? The gift shop? Then there was that awful dot-com. Doug and I both warned you. Then that tacky employment agency. You can’t stick with anything.”

“That’s not fair! The employment agency folded.”

“So did the gift shop and the dot-com. Did you ever think it’s more than coincidental that whatever business you attach yourself to goes bottom up? It’s because you deal in daydreams not in reality. Like that whole fantasy you had about being an actress.”

Annabelle sank lower in her seat. She’d been a decent actress, taking solid supporting roles in a couple of university productions and directing some studio plays. But by her junior year, she’d realized theater wasn’t her passion, just an escape into a world where she didn’t have to be Doug and Adam Granger’s incompetent little sister.

“And look what happened with Rob,” Kate went on. “Of all the—Well, never mind about that. The point is, you’ve bought into this New Age nonsense that all you have to do is want something badly enough, and you can get it. But life doesn’t work that way. It takes more than desire. Successful people are pragmatic. They make plans that are rooted in reality.”

“I don’t want to be an accountant!”

A long, disapproving silence followed this outburst. Annabelle knew exactly what her mother was thinking. That Annabelle was being Annabelle again, high-strung, overly dramatic, and impractical, the family’s lone failure. But no one could upset her like her mother.

Except her father.

And her brothers.

“Stop screwing around with your life, Spud, and settle on something practical,” Adam, the big-shot doctor, had written in his last e-mail, which he’d thoughtfully copied to the rest of the family plus two aunts and three cousins.