As she walked, she threw a quick glance over her shoulder. At a distance—up close, too—Richard’s house appeared jaw-droppingly, eye-poppingly, heart-stoppingly grand. When she’d first seen it, she’d thought it looked like a castle in a fairy tale, beautiful but forbidding at the same time, the people inside it leading charmed lives that had been cursed. She was one of the people inside it now, and a cursed charmed life sounded about as accurate an assessment of her situation as she could imagine: it turns out she was really of noble birth, a princess disguised as a peasant girl, but with a father who may or may not have been an evil king; and though her mother was still her mother it was possible she was also a wicked witch, too; and as for the handsome prince who’d come to rescue her, well, he was still handsome and still princely, only he seemed in need of rescuing himself.

Speaking of which, here he was, on his white horse. Or, rather, in his cream-colored Volvo.

And it was as he was pulling up to her that it occurred to her wonder: should she tell him that she and Camilla were half sisters or not? Until this moment, she’d just assumed she would. After all, she’d been honest with him about everything else, even the ugly, shameful stuff like Maggie and Richard’s affair, which had been going on while Martha Flood was dying of stage four breast cancer. Alice had put her trust totally in Tommy. And it wasn’t a lack of trust that made her hesitate now. It was a fear of rejection. His feelings toward Camilla, his ex-girlfriend—his dead ex-girlfriend—were so powerful and so, largely, negative. What if the thought of being with someone who was so intimately connected to her, shared blood with her, turned him off? Like, what if he found himself repelled by Alice in ways that were instinctive and involuntary and thus un-get-over-able? That would be it for their romance. And Alice loved Tommy. She hadn’t told him yet, had only just figured it out herself, but she did. The thought of losing him was painful to her to a degree that was almost unbearable.