Alice, realizing that she’d been staring the whole time, felt her cheeks burning up. She turned. It was Charlie, her younger—younger by one year and one day—sister. Charlie had been listening to her iPod, eyes closed. They were open now, though, and sparkling with mischief. She looked more and more like their mom every day. Same slinky brown, almost-black hair and eyes the color of smoke, same impish grin and curvy body. Alice had always been more like their father, light-haired and light-eyed, skinny build, brooding personality. Also like their dad, Alice was an artist, a different kind of artist, true—he was a musician, a horn player, jazz mostly; she was a painter, oil and acrylic her specialty—but an artist just the same. Alice only hoped she had better luck than her dad. It had been a tough road for him: playing too many dives for too little money, sidemanning for bands, mainly rock ones, whose music he didn’t respect, taking any paying job he could get, which meant he was out of town more than he was in it. It really bothered him that he couldn’t support his family even in a modest capacity without Maggie’s help. And though he never said it, Alice knew he regarded himself as a failure.

“Here we are,” Richard said.

Alice glanced up as they approached a set of massive iron gates. As they passed through it, Alice thought of the other set of massive iron gates they’d recently passed through for the first time together: the set belonging to Richard’s beach house.

It was a week and a half ago. They’d arrived at the house late, almost the middle of the night. Richard had insisted on driving straight down from Boston after an evening wedding at City Hall and a fast celebratory dinner following, just the four of them, plus Richard’s lawyer and Richard’s lawyer’s wife. Alice and Charlie had both fallen asleep during the ride, their bodies tangled up in the backseat. Their mom’s soft voice had roused them. “Wake up, you two, we’re home,” she’d said. Still cobwebby with dreams, Alice and Charlie had tumbled out of the backseat, dazedly, disorientedly. Rubbing the sleep from their eyes, they’d looked up. They’d never seen anything like it. Against the black sky Richard’s house resembled nothing so much as a castle in a storybook with its turrets and pikes and high stone walls, a place bought by a man with infinite wealth, the kind of money only a king would possess, a place where a beautiful princess might live, locked up and under the spell of a wicked witch. Standing there, heads tilted nearly all the way back, Alice remembered that she and Charlie had instinctively linked hands, lacing their fingers together, as if they were afraid of getting separated, like children in a fairy tale.