Making her way to the laundry room, she pauses outside Josh’s room. The door is ajar, the bedside lamp on, dousing the room in soft light. Showered and dressed in her old Nine Inch Nails concert shirt and Blaze’s gray sweats, Josh flips through the coffee-table book he’s been attached to since he stepped into her house. He skims through the pages like he’s glossing over the words and photos. Is he looking for something? What if he can’t read? Can he even write? Her questions sound ridiculous about a thirteen-year-old, but if he mixes words and has trouble with numbers, he reasonably could have other issues, too.
Olivia eases away from the door so she doesn’t burst in and bombard him with questions. She upset him earlier, and frankly, she’s a little freaked he’ll flip out again.
She starts a load of laundry and retreats to her office, where three life-size prints of her superheroes lord over her workstations: Ruby, Titian, and Dahlia, fully suited in their red-and-silver superhero outfits. Two sisters and a brother, each capable of wielding energy in their own way. They’re close like she and her siblings used to be. And very protective of each other, in a way the Carson kids never were.
They should have been.
The thought fills her with remorse. Instead of waking her computer to tweak her panels and fine-tune her digital art frames, she veers to the cabinet behind the drafting table where she sketches her rough layouts and removes the well-worn Juicy Couture shoebox from the bottom drawer. Inside are Lily’s letters, all twelve of them. They arrived every September without a return address, postmarked from various cities throughout the western states. Lily either moves around a lot or someone mails the letters on her behalf. She doesn’t want to be found.
But Lily always found Olivia. Somehow, she learned that Olivia now owned their parents’ first house. She always sent the letters here, and the current tenant kindly forwarded the letters to Olivia in San Francisco.
This year, the letter never came. But now that Josh is here, she wonders if there’s a connection between his sudden arrival and the lack of a letter. What if Lily is missing? It explained why she didn’t send one.
The letter and photo should have arrived two weeks ago, around Josh’s birthday and the beginning of the school year when Lily would get Josh’s school picture. At first, Olivia thought the letter was late. She reasoned her sister finally came to her senses and stopped shoving pictures of her and Ethan’s little family in Olivia’s face. Every year Lily would drift to the back of Olivia’s mind, no more than an echo of a previous life, and then wham. A letter would arrive with Josh’s latest photo, along with a note where Lily expounded on everything about their son. When he was younger, Josh loved to build forts and act out fantastical adventures, much the way they used to do summers at the Whitmans’. Josh’s interests shifted to the outdoors as he entered his tween years. He spent most of his free time at the nearby skate park. Olivia has resented Lily for fourteen years. She’s resented her parents and Lucas because nobody will talk about the stains that, according to Dwight, smeared her dad’s reputation and ended any further chances of a political career. But she’ll always remember the little girl who held her hand when she thought their mom was abandoning them that first summer at the lake house.
And her letters.
They’re a constant reminder that her relationship with Lily isn’t fractured. It’s nonexistent. They’re an annual reminder that Olivia seals herself off from everyone.
Because she’s masochistic, she opens an envelope from the middle of the small pile and Josh’s picture floats to the floor. Leaning over, fingers stretching as they walk along the hardwood, she picks it up. It’s his third-grade school portrait. He was a cute kid. She remembers thinking when she first saw the photo that when he grew into his looks, he’d be striking like Ethan.
She wishes she could pick up the phone and call Lily. She also wishes, looking up at the prints on her wall—stunning and powerful—that she and Lily had a relationship different from what it was. But Lily wasn’t the easiest person to get along with once the lake house summers ended. Olivia had gone from dating Blaze to Ethan, and Lily gravitated toward Lucas since Olivia was rarely around. They drifted further apart than their five-year age difference. But Lily did have a knack for spoiling Olivia’s plans, and even her possessions. The prom dress incident was one event Olivia refuses to forget. It left enough of an impression that Olivia wonders what she’d done to Lily for her to act so carelessly with a dress she knew wasn’t only expensive, but would be a highlight of Olivia’s senior year.
She can picture the embellished light-blue dress she never had the chance to wear as clearly as Josh’s arrival this evening. Floral embroidery decorated the plunging neckline bodice and floor-length A-line skirt. The dress sparkled, and when Olivia found the dress at a boutique online, Charlotte took her to the exclusive bridal shop on State Street in Santa Barbara.
For months the dress hung in her closet, tailored and pressed and ready for her big night. She was going with Ethan but secretly hoped Blaze, who would have Macey on his arm, would see what he’d lost. Her. But three days before the event, Olivia came home from school and found the dress missing.
Lily, who’d been gawking at the dress like an obsessed fan of Zac Efron, denied taking it, even though their mom had seen her in Olivia’s room trying it on.
“I told her to take it off and put it back,” Charlotte said, leaning into the mirror as she applied the mascara their neighbor Jean St. John had recommended. She jammed the wand into the bottle and lifted a shoulder. “You know how your sister is.”
Charlotte thought Lily looked up to Olivia. Rather, she looked up to Lucas. Her sister was also a liar, because Olivia asked Dwight about the dress when she didn’t find it in Lily’s closet. Her dad tilted his head toward his home office window that looked out onto the yard, the garage with the overhead apartment visible to the side. “That wasn’t you outside wearing a dress a bit ago?”
“No!”
“I swear I saw you a few hours ago, twirling about. You looked real pretty. You ran upstairs to the apartment. Blue dress, right?”
Olivia about died. “That wasn’t me.”
She ran across the yard and up to the one-bedroom apartment where the furniture left behind by her grandmother Val sat unused under a blanket of dust. Olivia stood in the center of the main room looking for where Lily could have hidden the dress. The sun shifted and light leaked through the blinds, spilling across the floor. A shimmer of blue across the room caught her eye.
“No!” Her sister had crammed her $350 prom dress into grandmother Val’s antique shipping crate.
Olivia stumbled across the room and threw open the lid. She clutched the dress to her chest and inspected every square inch, from the sequined, embroidered bodice to the torn, mud-stained skirt hem. “Nooo. No, no, no.” Fat, ugly tears dripped off her chin. How could Lily be so cruel? Prom was in two nights. There wouldn’t be time to salvage the dress.
Olivia flew down the stairs and ran to Lily’s room, the dress clutched in her arms. She threw open the door. “How could you?” She shoved the dress between them. “It’s ruined!”
“I . . . I . . . ,” Lily stammered. Colored pencils rolled from her hand onto the floor. Her eyes sheened.