Alice began moving quicker, climbing the steps two at a time, eager to get into the house and up to her room, shut the door behind her. She wanted very badly to be in a private, secure space where she could be by herself with her thoughts. She’d just reached the deck when she nearly collided with Charlie, moving equally fast in the opposite direction. Charlie was dressed for the beach, bikini top, cutoff shorts, flip-flops. Alice was so happy to see her sister’s pretty, suntanned face, smell her clean coconut-y smell, she had to restrain herself from jumping into her arms.

Charlie didn’t seem quite as overjoyed at the chance run-in. “Oh,” she said, shifting the strap of her bag from her left shoulder to her right, “hi.”

“Hi, yourself. Guess you’re going to change at the club.” Off Charlie’s blank look: “Your afternoon tennis clinic. It starts soon, right?”

Charlie blinked, then nodded. “Yeah, really soon. And I’m a little late. Like you said, I still have to change first.”

When Charlie started to move past her, Alice said, with a laugh, “Hey, space cadet, you forgot your racquets. Tough to play without those.”

“Actually, I’m skipping today. We’re focusing on serves and I can practice serves on my own, so . . .” Charlie trailed off, began looking at her nails, her flip-flops, the horizon. Anything to avoid eye contact.

At first Alice just thought that Charlie was being moody and weird, but then she looked at her sister’s face, saw the shifty-guilty expression on it, the gaze that didn’t want to be pinned down, that kept trying to slip away. Alice turned, spotted Jude and Cybill stretched out on a towel on the beach below. And in that instant Alice understood that Charlie had been lying to her, or at least had been hiding the truth from her—just as bad—that Charlie was still seeing Jude. Suddenly, the anger Alice had been feeling all day and keeping a lid on, through her scene with Tommy at Redbone’s, then with her mother in the garden, boiled up, got so intense she started to physically tremble, her breath coming out in little sharp gasps, her brain dizzy. At last she had a target: her sister. And everything she needed to bring that target down: Richard’s true identity, her true identity, Charlie’s outsider status.