Charlie spun around, ready, Alice could see, to just unload. Then she caught the pleading look in her mom’s eye. Her expression softened. She knew as well as Alice did what a hard time their mom had had when their dad left, how tough it had been financially and emotionally. Richard was a godsend. The worry lines had all but disappeared from her mom’s face, and when she laughed it was that full-throated laugh that they hadn’t heard in so long. Without a word Charlie did as asked.

“We’re all ready then,” Richard said. And when no one contradicted him: “Good, let’s do this.”

He started toward the clubhouse, Maggie right alongside him, matching him stride for stride. As soon as he was out of earshot, Charlie cocked her hip and snapped the strap of her thong at him. The valet guy laughed as he got in the car. Charlie, not realizing that she had an audience other than her sister, looked over at him in surprise. She smiled.

“You think he knows where we can buy weed?” she asked as he drove off, expertly negotiating the hairpin turn at the top of the road.

“The night hasn’t started and you’re already feeling the need to get high?”

“The weed isn’t for me. It’s for Richard. That guy’s wound so tight. He needs to relax. I figured I’d bake some into his morning scones.”

“He eats brioche,” Alice said, with a laugh. She was so happy to have Charlie with her. There was no way she would have been able to face this party, face any of it—Richard, fembot Maggie, Serenity Point—without her. In fact, that had been the best part of the last ten days, this period of forced isolation: she and Charlie had gotten even closer. They’d always been close, close even for sisters, maybe because they’d shared a bedroom all their lives or maybe because their personalities were so different that they’d never been competitive, engaged in any of that rivalry stuff that Alice knew from friends was so common among siblings. Still, back in Cambridge, each girl had her own social set, her own interests, activities that took up her time and attention. Stuck at Richard’s, they were truly stuck, since they had no car. (Richard was strangely touchy about his Mercedes, like possessive of it, and town was miles away and across a bridge, too far to walk. Plus Alice and Charlie didn’t want to push him, suspecting that his aversion to teenagers behind the wheel had everything to do with the manner in which his daughter had died. Illogical but understandable.) Consequently, they’d been thrown back on one another for amusement and company, Richard and Maggie being totally wrapped up in each other.