9. The March girls find themselves reverting to their childhood roles when they are together. How does that compare with your own experience? What is your family role? Has it changed over time?

Keep reading for an excerpt from Virginia Kantra’s next novel

Beth & Amy

Coming soon from Berkley!

Amy

It’s always a mistake to sleep with a man who’s in love with your sister. Even in Paris. Even if they’d broken up again—for good this time, he said. Even though I’d been in love with him since I was eleven years old.

But I was young and dumb and homesick. So. Whatever. I had a one-night hookup in a foreign city with Trey Laurence, the rich boy next door, after my sister broke his heart.

Three years later, I was older and a whole lot wiser. But returning home for my sister’s wedding was still going to be all kinds of awkward.

Not that I hadn’t been back to North Carolina before. For holidays, and that awful time when Momma got sick, and when my nephew Robbie was born. But even though my sister was about to be married to another man, I still couldn’t face her without a squirm of guilt. I’d had sex with Jo’s ex—a clear violation of the Sisters’ Code. As for the other guilty party, Trey . . . Well. Just because he’d found a way to forgive himself didn’t mean I had to forgive him. Or myself. Mostly I avoided him.

Which was going to be a lot harder to do now that we were members of the same wedding party. (And no, my heart wasn’t holding on to some pathetic hope that now that Jo was finally marrying somebody else, Trey would pull his head out of his ass and realize it was me he loved, after all.)

But maybe being a bridesmaid in Jo’s wedding would bring me and my sister closer. Maybe this was my chance to prove to Trey—or at least to myself—that I was over him. I had better things to do with my life than obsess over a stupid childhood crush. My handbag business, Baggage (“Own It”) had taken off. Meghan Markle herself had recently been photographed carrying one of my totes, and demands for the rechristened “Duchess” bag were pouring in, threatening to flood my Bedford Park apartment.

“It’s like a goddamn rainbow puked up in here,” my assistant, Flo, had said before I left New York. She zipped tape across the top of a carton, adding to the boxes of custom orders packed and stacked for pickup by the door.

I glanced from her Frida Kahlo T-shirt (ASK ME ABOUT MY FEMINIST AGENDA, read the cartoon bubble from the artist’s mouth) to her natural hair, tipped this month in fiery red. “Yeah, I know how much you hate color,” I said, making her laugh.

I skirted a rack of bins to get to my worktable, piled high with wallets waiting for snaps and trim. Purses, totes, and cross-body bags in bright colors and various stages of assembly overflowed every surface. I was already renting storage from the dry cleaner’s downstairs. My bedroom was so filled with bolts of vinyl and leather, I couldn’t find my mattress. Not that I had much time to sleep anyway.