Vivi's POV:

By eleven-thirty Friday morning, I have identified six things wrong with the hotel lobby.

None of them are actually wrong.

This is how I know I’m irritated.

The floral arrangement on the registration desk is centered on the desk but not on the room, which means it reads as off-center from every angle except the one where the desk clerk stands. The welcome bags are stacked behind the concierge station instead of beside it, so guests will have to ask, and guests who have to ask will feel like they’re imposing. The luggage cart is parked where the bell staff can see it but the arriving families can’t, which means the first impression of the weekend is a woman in a navy blazer standing in front of nothing. The seating card box is on the table by the stairs when it should be on the table by the elevators, because people come down the elevator, not the stairs, and the first thing a guest should see when they step off is their own name in calligraphy. A florist in a canvas apron is still fussing with the ferns by the terrace doors, which means a vendor is visible, which means the illusion of effortless wealth has a seam. And the itinerary in my hand—printed, folded, tucked into the welcome bags by someone who did not consult me—lists the welcome cocktails as beginning at seven when the bar has been confirmed for six-forty-five.

None of this matters.

I know none of this matters.

My mother would have fixed all six in the time it takes me to list them, probably without ever appearing to move, and she is currently somewhere between London and Paris and has absolutely nothing to do with this wedding.

I am standing in a hotel lobby on a Friday morning two days before my father’s fourth wedding cataloguing ferns.

“You’re doing the forehead thing.”

I turn.

Charlie is beside me, in jeans and a thin white shirt with the sleeves pushed to her elbows, her hair already escaping whatever she did to it this morning, a coffee in one hand that she definitely did not get from the hotel.

“I don’t have a forehead thing.”

“You absolutely have a forehead thing.”

“What does that even mean.”

“It means—”

She sets her coffee on the registration desk, which is exactly where a cup should not go, and arranges her face: brows drawn down, mouth flattened, chin lifted about two degrees.

It is a grotesque exaggeration.

It is also, unfortunately, recognizable.

“I look nothing like that.”

“No, you look like that but prettier and meaner.”

“That’s not a thing.”

“It’s a thing.” She picks the coffee back up. “It’s your thing. You do it when you’re counting problems that aren’t problems.”

I look at her for a second longer than I mean to.

Two weeks ago she would have been guessing.

Now she’s not.

“The seating cards are in the wrong place,” I say, because it’s easier than answering.

“Where should they be?”

“By the elevators.”

“Then move them.”

“I can’t just—”

“Vivi.” She says it flat, no music in it. “You’re the daughter of the groom. You have more authority in this building than the man at the desk. Move the cards.”

I move the cards.

It takes ninety seconds.

The concierge watches me do it and says nothing, which is the correct response.

When I come back, Charlie is leaning against the marble column with her coffee, watching me like she’s just won something small.

“Better?” she says.

“Marginally.”

“You’re welcome.”

“I didn’t thank you.”

“You will.”

Cate has arranged the rooms.

Of course she has.

Cate arranges everything, which is one of the things I have decided not to find exhausting, because my father is happy in a way I have not seen him in years, and if that happiness requires me to be handed a key card with a flourish, I will be handed a key card with a flourish.

“You girls are practically across from each other,” Cate says, pressing a card into my hand and another into Charlie’s. She is wearing cream silk and her honey-brown hair is doing something complicated and beautiful, and she is glowing, actually glowing, the way people only glow in movies and in the first two days of a wedding weekend. “I thought it would be nice. So you don’t get lonely.”

“We’re grown women,” Charlie says.

“You’re my grown women,” Cate says, and kisses her on the cheek.

Charlie makes a face at me over her mother’s shoulder that means help.

I look down the hallway instead.

It’s a long hallway.

Deep carpet the color of old wine, sconces every four doors, a window at the far end with light coming through it.

My room is the third on the left.

Charlie’s is the seventh.

I count without meaning to.

Four doors between us.

One window.

One housekeeping cart parked at the far end near the service elevator.

“See?” Cate says, following my gaze. “Perfect.”

“Perfect,” I agree, and hand my key card to the bellman.

My father comes up behind Cate and puts a hand on the small of her back.

She leans into it the way people lean into things they’ve decided to trust.

He catches my eye over her head and gives me a small nod—nothing more, just the nod, the one he’s given me before every important thing in my life.

I nod back.

That’s the whole conversation.

He’s happy.

He’s allowed to be happy.

I want him to be happy.

I want it so much that I have to look away, which is when I catch Charlie watching them too.

She’s got her coffee in both hands now, and her face has gone quiet in a way I’ve only seen a few times—on the porch with the lighter, in the car when she mentioned Vermont.

She looks at my father’s hand on her mother’s back and something moves across her face and then is gone.

I don’t ask.

She doesn’t offer.

We both look away at the same time, which is its own kind of conversation.

There are four hours between check-in and cocktails, and I use them the way I use everything:

By working.

Emails to the planner.

A call to the florist about the ferns, which I let go before I dial, because the ferns are fine, the ferns are always going to be fine, and the woman in the apron has probably been doing this for thirty years and does not need me.

A text to Nadia:

at the hotel. surviving.

Her reply is immediate.

you hate hotels. you love hotels. which is it today

I don’t answer.

I don’t know.

And Nadia reads my silences better than anyone alive.

I am not in the mood to be read.

At six, I dress.

I choose the black dress with the high neck and the slit that stops exactly where it stops, and I put on the small earrings my mother sent from Paris three birthdays ago, the ones that don’t announce themselves.

I do my own hair because the stylist Cate booked isn’t arriving until tomorrow.

I do my own makeup because I’ve been doing my own makeup since I was fourteen and my father was too distracted to notice I’d started.

I look at myself in the mirror for a moment longer than necessary.

Then I open my door to go downstairs.

Charlie is standing in the hallway.

She’s already dressed.

Deep green, the color of a forest floor, sleeves to the elbow, the neckline square and low and—

The dress fits her the way the burgundy one fit her, which is to say it doesn’t just fit her.

It agrees with her.

It moves when she moves.

It makes her waist a fact.

Her hair is up, or mostly up, a few pieces falling loose at her temples because Charlie’s hair has never once in its life done what it was told.

She’s got the small gold hoops she wears when she remembers to wear earrings, and her mouth is the dark red she puts on when she wants to be taken seriously.

She is standing in the middle of the hallway of a hotel like she owns it.

I stop for half a beat.

She notices.

Of course she notices.

“Well?” she says.

“It fits.”

“You’ve used that one.”

“It remains accurate.”

“Coward.”

And there it is.

The word she sent me Sunday night.

The word I didn’t answer.

The word that’s been sitting in my phone for five days like a coin I keep flipping without deciding what to buy.

She says it lightly.

She says it like it’s nothing.

But her eyes hold mine for one second past the joke, and I understand that she knows exactly what she’s doing, and that she’s been doing it for a week, and that I have been letting her.

I had typed both.

Sunday night.

In my bed.

the dress or me

My thumb had hovered over the send button.

I had typed both.

I had deleted it.

I had put the phone face-down on the nightstand and stared at the ceiling until I fell asleep.

She never saw it.

She doesn’t know.

She smiles like she knows anyway and walks past me toward the elevator.

I follow her because that is apparently what I do now.

The welcome reception is in the hotel’s winter garden—glass ceiling, marble floor, enormous arrangements of white roses and eucalyptus, a bar along one wall and a terrace opening off the far end onto a garden lit with small warm lamps.

There are maybe eighty people here.

Family, mostly, and the kind of friends who’ve known my father since before I was born, and a scattering of Cate’s people, who are louder and warmer and drink more.

I stand near the bar and watch the room the way I always do.

It takes me about ten minutes to realize I’m not watching the room.

I’m watching Charlie.

She’s across the garden, talking to my great-aunt Margaret, who is ninety-one and terrifying and has not spoken to anyone at a family event in four years without finding fault.

Charlie is leaning in.

She’s laughing at something Margaret said.

Margaret is laughing back.

Margaret, who once told me at Christmas that my posture was “ambitious.”

Charlie moves on.

She stops at the bar and says something to the bartender that makes him grin and hand her two glasses of something.

She carries one to a woman standing alone near the terrace doors—one of Cate’s friends, I think, someone’s second wife, someone who has been standing alone for twenty minutes—and hands it to her and says something and stays for the length of one drink.

The woman’s shoulders come down.

She finds a group of my father’s cousins and remembers something one of them told her last weekend at the house, something small, something no one would remember.

The cousin’s face opens.

I make rooms orderly.

Charlie makes them alive.

I dislike how quickly I understand the difference.

I also notice—and this is the part I file away for later—that the society voice is gone.

At the atelier, when she tried on the burgundy dress, she did a version of herself that was all Cate: the smooth, warm, unbothered daughter of a woman who has been married three times and knows exactly which fork.

That voice is not here tonight.

Tonight she is just Charlie.

Irreverent and quick and a little bit messy.

She is better at this room than anyone in it.

I like this version better.

I do not examine why.

“Vivienne.”

Margot appears at my elbow with two glasses of champagne and a look on her face I have known since I was six.

“You’re staring,” she says.

“I’m observing.”

“Of course you are.”

She hands me a glass.

“What are you observing?”

“The ferns.”

“They’re slightly off.”

Margot looks at the ferns.

She looks at me.

She takes a long sip of champagne and says nothing.

This is the most dangerous thing Margot has ever done, because Margot’s default is to say everything.

Then Charlie finds us.

“Margot Sinclair,” Charlie says, in a voice like she’s reading from a file. “Childhood friend. Absolutely inseparable one summer. Kissed exactly once at nineteen.”

Margot’s eyebrows go up.

“You’ve been briefed.”

“I have sources.”

“What sources?”

“Vivi.” Charlie grins at me. “She volunteers information when she’s uncomfortable.”

“I do not—”

“You told me about the kiss in a pantry.”

“That was—”

“In a pantry,” Margot says, delighted. “Vivi. In a pantry.”

I take a drink of champagne and say nothing.

Margot and Charlie look at each other.

I watch the two of them decide, in the space of one second, to become friends.

It is mildly horrifying.

“So,” Charlie says, turning fully to Margot, bright as a coin. “Tell me something embarrassing.”

“About Vivi?”

“Obviously about Vivi.”

“Margot,” I say.

“What?” Margot has the face of a woman who has been waiting fifteen years for this exact question. “Charlie, did she ever tell you about the gala?”

“No.”

“She was nineteen. Family thing. Black tie. Her father was giving a speech and she decided, about forty minutes in, that she would rather die than sit through it—”

“It was a long speech.”

“—so she climbed out a window.”

Charlie’s mouth opens.

“You climbed out a window.”

“It was a French window. It opened.”

“In a gown.”

“Vivi.”

Charlie is laughing now.

Actually laughing.

The real laugh.

The one that comes out of her chest.

“You—”

“I maintain it was the correct decision.”

“I’m sure you do.” Charlie looks at me, and her face is bright and open and entirely on me.

Something in my chest does a small, inconvenient thing.

“Tell me more.”

“No.”

“Margot.”

Margot takes a sip of champagne.

“There was also the minibar.”

“Margot.”

“She alphabetized it.”

“Margot.”

“Tipsy. Family Christmas. She alphabetized the entire minibar and then wrote a note to the hotel about their inventory system.”

Charlie is doubled over.

She has one hand on Margot’s arm now, steadying herself, and she’s laughing so hard she has to put her champagne down on the nearest table.

Margot is laughing with her.

The two of them are standing there in the middle of my father’s welcome reception laughing about me.

I should be annoyed.

I am not annoyed.

I am watching Charlie’s hand on Margot’s arm.

I am watching the way Charlie gives Margot her full attention—the bright, focused, singular attention that has, for the last two weeks, been pointed at me.

Across the breakfast table.

In the car.

From the passenger seat with her feet on my dashboard.

That attention, that specific warm weight of it, is now landing on Margot Sinclair.

Something under my ribs goes very still and very cold.

I do not like this.

I tell myself I dislike being discussed.

That explanation is adequate.

For approximately thirty seconds.

Charlie has been here forty-three minutes.

I have lost track of her four times.

The first time, I was talking to my father’s business partner and I looked up and she was gone from the bar.

The second time, she was supposed to be near the roses and she was on the terrace instead, standing with one of Cate’s friends.

The third time, she was with my aunt.

The fourth time, she was with Margot again.

I had to remind myself that Margot is my oldest friend and that Charlie is allowed to like her.

I do not need to know where Charlie is.

Charlie is twenty-one.

She is safe.

She knows half the room.

There is no logistical reason for me to be tracking her through the winter garden like a woman checking a stock price.

I continue doing it anyway.

It is not jealousy.

I do not get jealous.

I am not a jealous person.

I have never been a jealous person.

I walked away from every relationship I’ve ever had without a single backward glance because I am, according to Nadia, “an emotionally unavailable control freak with excellent taste,” which is the nicest thing Nadia has ever said to me.

It is simply that Charlie is new here.

It is simply that she is my future stepsister, and it is my responsibility to make sure she is comfortable, and it is my responsibility to make sure she is not cornered by anyone boring, and it is my responsibility—

No.

I stop.

I am doing the forehead thing.

I can feel it on my own face now.

Charlie has ruined me for my own expressions.

“Alexander’s daughter, Vivienne,” someone says, “and Catherine’s daughter, Charlotte.”

I turn.

A woman I don’t recognize is introducing us to a couple near the roses.

Charlie is beside me.

She appeared beside me out of nowhere, the way she does, and neither of us has acknowledged that we’ve both been circling the same small orbit all night.

“The soon-to-be sisters,” the woman adds warmly.

Charlie’s smile does not change.

But it does something.

A tiny adjustment.

A fraction of a degree.

The way a compass needle corrects.

Most people would never notice.

I notice.

I have been noticing Charlie’s face for two weeks and I have gotten good at it.

This is information I intend to do nothing with.

“Congratulations,” the woman says.

“Thank you,” Charlie says in the polished voice.

The Cate voice.

I watch her put it on like a coat.

Later, when the woman has moved on and we’re standing near the terrace doors with no one in earshot, I say:

“You hate when they say it.”

Charlie turns.

“Say what?”

“Sisters.”

She shrugs.

“It’s weird.”

“Yes.”

She looks at me for a second.

My answer lands somewhere in her, I can see it—the small surprise of being agreed with instead of managed.

She opens her mouth like she’s going to say something else.

Then doesn’t.

Takes a sip of champagne instead.

Neither of us says anything about why it’s weird.

We both know.

We’re not going to say it.

Twenty minutes later, I find Charlie trapped beside the fireplace.

Not literally.

There is no door.

No locked room.

No physical barrier of any kind.

Charlie could leave.

Charlie will not leave because the woman speaking to her is seventy, knows Cate from Palm Beach, and has just asked whether Charlie thinks her mother has “finally gotten it right this time.”

I know exactly how badly this is going because Charlie is smiling.

Charlie has several smiles.

The crooked one means she’s amused.

The bright one means she’s about to cause trouble.

The small private one she gives me across rooms means something I have decided not to investigate.

This one is perfectly polite.

This one means someone is going to die.

“…and of course it must be such an adjustment,” the woman is saying when I reach them. “A new house, new family, a sister after all these years. But I’m sure you’re thrilled.”

“Ecstatic,” Charlie says.

Her voice could cut glass.

The woman does not notice.

I do.

“Charlie,” I say.

She looks at me.

“My father needs us for photographs.”

The relief appears and disappears so quickly I would miss it if I were anyone else.

“Oh,” she says. “Right. Sorry.”

“Of course, darling,” the woman says. “Go.”

We make it halfway across the room before Charlie says, under her breath:

“Your father does not need us for photographs.”

“He will eventually.”

“Vivi.”

“I’m aware.”

She turns her head toward me.

“You rescued me.”

“You looked like you were considering homicide.”

“I was.”

“I know.”

We walk three more steps.

“You’re getting disturbingly good at reading me.”

“You’re not subtle.”

She gives me a look.

“Neither are you.”

I decide not to ask what that means.

This is growth.

The photographer finds us near the fireplace five minutes later.

I consider this vindication.

Cate and Alexander first, against the mantel, his hand on her hip, both of them laughing at something the photographer says.

Then Alexander alone with me, his arm around my shoulders, and I feel the weight of it the way I did at ten, when he taught me to ride.

Then Cate with Charlie, and Charlie does the Cate voice again and it works, and Cate’s face goes soft.

Then all four of us.

Then the girls.

“Closer together,” the photographer says.

We move slightly.

“A little closer.”

“This feels threatening,” Charlie murmurs under her breath, only for me.

“Stand still,” I murmur back.

“Vivienne,” the photographer says, “put your arm around Charlotte. Hand at the waist—yes, like that.”

I put my arm around her.

My palm settles against her waist, above the hip, exactly where it was on Sunday, in the drawing room, in the thirty seconds neither of us has mentioned since.

The deep green of her dress is cool and smooth under my hand.

Her body goes very slightly still.

A small pause.

A held breath.

The kind of stillness that only happens when someone is trying not to react.

She knows I remember.

I know she knows.

Neither of us moves.

My father and Cate are ten feet away smiling at us.

The photographer is saying something about the light.

My hand is on Charlie’s waist.

It means nothing.

It means everything.

It is about to be printed and framed and hung somewhere in a house that will belong to both of us.

“Perfect,” the photographer says.

My father catches my eye and smiles like he has just been given a gift.

I smile back.

The bar gets busier as the night goes on.

I collect a fresh glass of water and stand near the terrace doors.

That is when I see her.

A woman, mid-twenties, dark hair cut sharp at the jaw, black dress, laughing at something Charlie has just said.

She’s got a hand on Charlie’s forearm.

Light.

Casual.

The touch of someone who touches people easily.

Charlie is laughing back.

The real laugh.

Her head tipped.

Her whole face open.

I don’t know her.

She must be someone’s daughter.

One of Cate’s friends’ children, or one of my father’s partners’.

It doesn’t matter.

What matters is that she has Charlie’s attention.

And Charlie’s attention, when it is fully given, is a bright and specific thing.

I have apparently grown used to being where it lands.

Charlie is an adult.

Charlie can speak to whomever she wants.

Charlie is not my responsibility.

Charlie is about to become part of my family.

It is good that she is meeting people.

It is good that she is comfortable.

It is good that she is enjoying herself.

There is absolutely no reason for my mood to have dropped two degrees in the last forty seconds.

It has dropped two degrees in the last forty seconds.

I take a sip of water and turn deliberately toward the roses.

Then Charlie looks up.

Across the room.

Over the woman’s shoulder.

Across the noise and the light and the eighty people between us.

Charlie finds me.

It takes her a second.

She scans.

Locates.

Lands.

And when she lands, she gives me a look.

Just the eyebrow.

Just the crooked half-smile.

Just the small private thing that belongs to us and no one else in the building.

My mood improves.

Immediately.

This is unacceptable.

“You’re staring,” Margot says, appearing at my shoulder with a fresh glass.

“I’m observing.”

“Of course you are.”

She follows my gaze.

She finds Charlie and the woman.

She finds my face.

She takes a sip of her drink and says nothing at all.

This is the second most dangerous thing Margot has ever done.

Then she changes the subject to the seating chart.

I let her.

I hate that everyone in my life has apparently learned the word observing.

Later—half past ten, the reception thinning out, the older guests peeling off toward the elevators—I go looking for the terrace.

The hotel’s terrace is off the winter garden, a long stone balcony overlooking the back gardens, lit with small lamps along the low wall.

It’s cool out here.

The noise of the party is muffled by the glass doors.

Charlie is at the far end.

She’s leaning on the wall, looking out at the dark garden.

She has a cigarette in her hand.

She hasn’t lit it.

She’s rolling something between her fingers.

The matte-black lighter.

My lighter.

The one I gave her the second week she lived at the house.

Turning it over and over without flicking it.

The cigarette is unlit between her other fingers.

She is rolling the lighter and looking at the garden and not smoking.

I stand in the doorway for a moment and watch her do it.

Then I walk over and lean on the wall beside her.

“You haven’t lit it.”

She looks down at her hands, like she forgot she was holding either of them.

“Maybe I’m growing.”

“Unlikely.”

She laughs.

Quiet.

Through her nose.

She doesn’t put the cigarette away.

She doesn’t light it either.

She keeps rolling the lighter, thumb over the wheel, thumb over the wheel.

I don’t ask what’s wrong.

I’ve learned that Charlie will tell me things in her own time.

Asking makes her close.

We stand there.

The garden below is dark and orderly.

Hedges.

Gravel paths.

A fountain with no water in it.

Somewhere inside, a woman laughs.

“Everyone keeps saying it,” Charlie says eventually, “like they’re trying to teach us the word.”

“Sisters.”

“Yeah.”

“They’re excited.”

“I know.”

“That doesn’t mean you have to like it.”

She looks at me.

It’s the same look from earlier.

The small surprise.

The being-agreed-with instead of managed.

I hold it without looking away because there is nothing to look away from.

“Do you?” she says.

“Do I what?”

“Like it.”

I know exactly what she means.

She knows I know.

She makes me say it anyway.

“Being my sister.”

Silence.

The fountain with no water.

A car somewhere beyond the hedge.

I cannot answer that question honestly because I do not know what the honest answer is.

I could say yes and mean it.

I do like the idea of Charlie being in my life.

Charlie in my kitchen every morning.

Charlie’s mug beside mine on the shelf.

I could say no and mean it.

Because sister is the wrong word.

It has been the wrong word since the first morning in the car.

I have been avoiding the question of what the right word is for two weeks.

So I say the true thing that is also not the answer.

“We aren’t yet.”

Charlie watches me.

“That wasn’t the question.”

“It’s the answer you’re getting.”

She holds my eyes for one more second.

Two.

Then lets it go, the way she lets most things go when she decides they’re not worth the fight.

Turns back to the garden.

She does not light the cigarette.

After a while, she puts it back in the pack.

I notice.

I don’t mention it.

We stand there in the cool air for another minute.

Then she pushes off the wall.

“I’m going up.”

“I’ll come.”

Neither of us says anything about any of it.

The elevator is quiet.

We ride up side by side, not touching, the numbers ticking overhead.

Charlie watches the doors.

I watch the numbers.

Then she says:

“Your hand was on my waist again.”

I turn my head.

“The photographer put it there.”

“I know.”

“Then why are you telling me?”

She looks at me.

“Observational.”

The doors open.

Charlie walks out first.

I stay where I am for half a beat before following.

The hallway is nearly silent compared with the reception.

Just the hum of the ice machine at the far end.

The soft click of a door somewhere.

We walk.

Charlie’s room comes first.

She stops at her door, key card in hand, and turns to me.

“Night, Vivi.”

“Goodnight, Charlie.”

She goes inside.

The door shuts.

The lock clicks.

I keep walking.

One door.

Two.

Three.

Four.

I stop at my own door and stand there with the key card in my hand.

I have counted them.

I counted them on the way down this morning.

I have counted them again now.

Somewhere between check-in and this moment, I have acquired a piece of information I did not ask for and do not need.

Charlie’s room is four doors from mine.

This is not information I need.

I remember it anyway.

I unlock my door.

Somewhere behind me, four doors down, I hear Charlie’s footsteps cross her room.

Then nothing.

I stand in the doorway for one second longer than necessary.

Then I go inside.