“Sure you do. What about a hand with those stairs?”

Iris hesitated. “All right.”

Ruth lent her a steadying hand down the stairs and held the doors for her. Iris thanked her and started off down the sidewalk.

Ruth called after her, “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do!”

IRIS COULDN’T REMEMBER A time when Ruth wasn’t the prettiest, the cleverest, the most athletic of the Macallister twins. It simply went without saying!

Although people said it anyway. They’d remarked on it all the time, when Ruth and Iris were growing up. The twins would sit side by side at the dinner table or on the beach or astride their ponies, and Ruth’s blond hair would catch the light and just shimmer, or she would open her mouth and say something brilliant, or she would leap off somewhere gracefully and long leggedly, and Iris would be left behind with her frizzy curls the color of dirt, her tied tongue, her pale and chubby limbs.

A couple of months before the day that would mark the end of their old lives, Ruth and Iris had gone out sailing with their father and Grandpa Walker, who was their mother’s father. (Harry had been forced to stay at home and polish the silver, on account of some misdemeanor.) Iris had always liked her grandfather. He didn’t talk much—leaving most communication to the women in his life—but he was calm and thoughtful and seemed to find the same things funny that Iris did. He had been in the garment business and made a killing during the war, and he and Granny Walker had invested some of their spoils in a rambling, half-timbered, brand-new pile in Glen Cove, Long Island, so their daughters could learn to sail and play tennis and meet all the right sorts. And it worked! The oldest had duly married a nice stockbroker from a good family—Harry and Ruth and Iris were born—the stock market set records practically every day. Nobody could say that the Walkers’ investment hadn’t made a solid return, indeed.