“But you ended up getting your prince and your happily ever after,” Alice said. “That’s what’s really important, right?”

Maggie smiled a self-pleased smile, nodded.

“All you had to do was wait a few years and for a few bodies to fall. No biggie.”

Maggie’s smile quickly reversed into a frown. “That’s not a very nice thing to say.”

Alice let out a short, snorting laugh, but otherwise refrained from comment. For a long time she was silent, her brain straining to process certain details. For example, Maggie’s passion for set design. Since when? Since where? And she wasn’t just passionate about set design; she was gifted at it, too, had to be if she was accepted by Yale and on scholarship. So that’s where Alice got her artistic talent from, not from Phil, like she’d always thought. And now she understood the origins of Richard’s irrational hatred of stick-it-to-the-Man politics, as well. It was rooted in jealousy of Phil. No wonder he had fits over Alice’s interest in the Occupy Wall Street movement. He perceived it as a threat to him, a direct challenge. And then there was the peculiar matter of her bedroom, Richard’s giving her Camilla’s when there were other free rooms in the house. Again, his behavior made complete sense now that she knew the backstory. Why wouldn’t he think it perfectly natural for his two daughters to share a room?

The biggest details to process concerned Camilla’s letter. Camilla had known that she and Alice were sisters. That’s why she’d written only to Alice, not Alice and Charlie. And that weird jab about Alice’s jeans—“I have a pair just like them”—wasn’t a jab at all. She was teasing Alice rather than insulting her. She really did have those jeans, too, jeans as in genes. They shared DNA.

At last Alice regained her bearings enough to speak. “When did you find out you were pregnant with me?”

“About a month after Richard and I broke up,” Maggie said. “It could’ve been Richard’s or Phil’s. I chose to believe it was Phil’s.”

“Yes, I suppose he was the more convenient option at the time, the other one basically being off the table.”