At the same time, I said, “Have you even brushed your hair, Lace? You look like me.”

“You wish,” Lacey said. “But I do spend like 70 percent less time on my head here than I ever did in London.” She sighed contentedly. “The elephants are so smart. I got to give the baby a bath yesterday and she really likes me. Olly says he’s worried she’ll try to follow me home.”

“Olly says that, does he?” I asked. “What else does this Olly say? Maybe we should ask Olly how to handle Eleanor.”

“Unless you want him to suggest an electronic collar to study her migratory patterns, better leave it alone,” Lacey said, but she was blushing. “Push back at her, Bex. Crack her first. What’s she going to do? It’s not like she can have you killed.”

“Debatable.”

“I think it’s a test of your moxie,” Lacey insisted.

“I don’t think Eleanor is interested in other people’s moxie,” I said. “I think I just have to be patient. Except, historically, I’m shitty at it.”

“Correct,” Mom said. “Which is why Lacey is right.”

“Yay!” Lacey pumped her fist.

“It’s time to force a reaction out of Eleanor,” Mom continued. “As your father used to say, make yourself big and the world can’t ignore you.”

She hugged herself for a moment, as if basking in a memory too private to share aloud. I gazed at the laptop screen, my entire immediate family in one LCD frame—Mom, with my chin and my hair but Lacey’s nose and blue eyes; Lacey, once the fancy twin, suddenly shoving her hair into messy ponytails and looking a lot more like I used to when I was running cross-country through the back roads of Iowa. And me, sporting both hair and eyelash extensions, because I was now a person with image architects (though not, thankfully, a person who used the phrase image architects with a straight face). It was comforting to know that we could bridge the miles and the time differences to keep our threesome tight. Even as it still broke my heart, one piece every day, that we were no longer four.

“Okay, girls. I’ve got to shower. Bed Bath and Beyond is taking me to lunch,” Mom said, breaking my reverie. She’d been running Coucherator, Inc., to great acclaim since my dad died. “SkyMall closing has led to so many meetings, I cannot even tell you.”

“And I have to go meet Ol—uh, Oliver, er, Dr. Omundi about some data entry, and…”

“Please say slide into some spreadsheets next,” I said.

Lacey rolled her eyes. “Fix your eyebrows,” she said.

“I love you guys,” I said. “I’ll keep you posted. Pray for me.”

I closed my computer heavily. Back to the emotional grind. Since returning from Scotland, my primary job (other than being summoned to Eleanor’s chamber) had been going through Georgina’s old stuff to decide what Nick and I wanted to consign to storage. This was usually interesting, but it was also overwhelming and dusty, and it bummed me out that the contents of Georgina’s entire life were the responsibility of someone who’d never met her. I’d done some online digging, too, into the enigmatic woman who’d called this place home before I did, but the results were unsatisfying. Her Wikipedia entry was complete but dry, a long litany of only the most elemental facts. At least the Daily Mail had written about a minor scandal in the ’70s when Georgina went on a twelve-hour craps marathon in Monte Carlo. A few fashion stories popped up about Georgina’s outrageous taste in hats, but were all pegged to the same photo of her at Ascot wearing what looked like a feathered swim cap and gesturing with a bejeweled cigarette holder. And her obituaries painted her as a party girl eliding the last reclusive chunk of her life. None of it helped me know the whole story, or her true self, any better.