Amy’s heart burned. Everybody always thought Jo was so awesome, interesting, and important, and Amy was just a kid. Shallow. Spoiled. But she had dreams, too. One day she would show them.
“It’s a nice dream,” Meg said kindly.
The surf rippled in, foam fanning over the hard-packed sand. Water breached the wall, filled the moat, and drained away.
“I wonder if any of our dreams will come true,” Jo said.
Beth sighed, resting her head on her sister’s shoulder. “I guess we’ll have to wait to find out.”
Amy scratched at a bug bite. “I hate waiting.”
A guard tower slumped as another chunk of the facade slid into the water. The sisters watched as the tide rolled in, wave by wave, and washed their castle away.
“Time to pack up,” Meg said at last, and so they did, arriving home in time for supper.
But the memories lingered.
And the dreams never wentaway.
CHAPTER 1
Amy
It’s always a mistake to sleep with a man who’s in love with your sister. Even in Paris. Even if they’d broken up again—for good this time, he said. Even though I’d been in love with him since I was eleven years old.
But I was young and dumb and homesick. So. Whatever. I had a one-night hookup in a foreign city with Trey Laurence, the rich boy next door, after my sister broke his heart.
Three years later (Thirty-three months, if I were counting. I was totally counting), I was older and a whole lot wiser. But returning home for my sister’s wedding was still going to be all kinds of awkward.
Oh, I’d been back to North Carolina before. For holidays, and that awful time when Momma got sick, and when my nephew Robbie was born. I still saw my sister occasionally when she came to New York to visit her publisher or the restaurant where she’d once worked. But even though Jo was about to be married to another man, I still couldn’t face her without a squirm of guilt. I’d hadsexwith herex—a clear violation of the Sisters’ Code. As for the other guilty party, Trey... Well. Justbecause he’d found a way to forgive himself didn’t mean I had to forgive him. Or myself. Mostly I avoided him.
Which was going to be a lot harder to do now that we were members of the same wedding party. (And no, my heart wasn’t holding on to some pathetic hope that since Jo was finally marrying somebody else, Trey would pull his head out of his ass and realize it was me he loved after all.)
But maybe being a bridesmaid in Jo’s wedding would bring me and my sister closer. Maybe this was my chance to prove to Trey—or at least to myself—that I was over him. I had better things to do with my life than obsess over a stupid childhood crush. My handbag business, Baggage, had taken off. Meghan Markle herself had recently been photographed carrying one of my totes, and demands for the rechristened “Duchess” bag were pouring in, threatening to flood my Bedford Park apartment in the Bronx.
“It’s like a goddamn rainbow puked in here,” my assistant, Flo, had said before I left New York. She zipped tape across the top of a carton, adding to the boxes of custom orders packed and stacked for pickup by the door.
I glanced from her Frida Kahlo T-shirt to her natural hair, tipped this month in fiery red. “Yeah, I know how much you hate color,” I said, making her laugh.
I skirted a rack of bins to get to my worktable, piled high with wallets waiting for snaps and trim. Purses, totes, and cross-body bags in bright colors and various stages of assembly overflowed every surface. I was already renting storage from the dry cleaner’s downstairs. My bedroom was so filled with bolts of vinyl and leather, I couldn’t find my mattress. Not that I had much time to sleep anyway.
The truth was, we needed a bigger workroom. A second sewing machine. More shelving. More light. Maybe even a little retail space, although a storefront in Manhattan was totally out of my price range, at least for now.
I reached for a punch tool. “You sure you’re all right filling these orders while I’m gone?”
“Mamey.”Easy. Flo Callazzo was a real New Yorker, a proud Afro-Dominican-Puerto-Rican daughter of the Bronx.
Me? Not so much. In Paris, my schoolgirl French had marked me as irredeemably “other.” I’d thought being back on American soil would feel like home. But my first week in the city, I’d realized my down-home accent made me stick out among the fast-talking Yankees all around me. Waitresses asked me to repeat myself. Buyers assumed I was uneducated. Guys figured I was easy. Or naive. A dumb hick blonde.
Which worked to my advantage, sometimes.
“You’re not getting out of your sister’s wedding on account of me,” Flo said.
“I’m not trying to get out of anything.” I busied myself inserting a snap. “I already rented a car and everything. I drive down Wednesday.”
“Faster to fly.”
“I thought I’d stop along the way. Take a day to do some store checks.”
