Chapter 1 #2
“I can hardly wait to hear it.”
“Well, it starts with you forgetting your cell phone when you went to France.”
Peaches shrugged. “I left it behind on purpose.” She had left her phone behind because when one was having a time-out from life, it was best to do it unplugged. Tess had had the holiday rental office’s number for emergencies, which had seemed like more than enough accessibility.
Tess shifted uncomfortably. “Well, I didn’t think your phone should go unanswered.” She paused. “So I answered it.”
Peaches resisted the urge to scratch her head.
She knew her sister was gearing up to tell her something she obviously considered important, but she couldn’t for the life of her figure out what that something might be.
She didn’t have a boyfriend to dump, or a landlord to appease, or rational clients to deal with.
All she had was a collection of loonies who had apparently decided to jettison her en masse via the aforementioned faxes.
None of that explained what had left Tess looking so green.
She studied her sister for another moment or two, then frowned again. “Did you say something to a client?”
“I didn’t say anything,” Tess said quickly. Then she paused. “Well, I tried not to say anything.”
Peaches sat down abruptly on the trunk, crunching the parts of the faxes her sister hadn’t already done damage to. Things were getting clearer, but not more pleasant. “Who did you not say anything to?”
“Whom,” Tess said miserably.
Peaches found it in her to glare. “Whom did you not say anything to?”
“Brandalyse Stevens.”
Peaches felt the room begin to spin. She suddenly found herself with her head between her knees. That didn’t help any, and it was exacerbated by Tess’s unwillingness to let her up.
“I tried my best,” Tess said, sounding rather faint herself, “I really did. But when she started in on your coming back to England and not being there to help her sort her thongs … well, I had to say something.” Tess paused.
“I suppose I probably shouldn’t have started off by telling her she had a stupid name. ”
“Probably not,” Peaches wheezed. So much for hoping all the communiqués she was sitting on were just a bad joke. “And?”
“I told her it was probably about time she learned to sort her own damn thongs.” Tess began to pat her absently on the back. “And really, Peach, once I started, I couldn’t seem to stop myself.”
Peaches fumbled behind her for her sister’s hand only because Tess was getting a little too enthusiastic in her patting.
She thought she might have bruises soon.
She sat up, waited until the stars cleared, then leaned her head carefully back against the stone and looked at her sister.
It was difficult to believe that Tess had been the catalyst for the utter ruination of a very large part of her life, but it was very hard to deny.
“You couldn’t stop yourself?”
Tess shook her head slowly.
“What else did you say?” she managed.
“I’m afraid I might have expressed an opinion or two on how many great guys Brandalyse has stolen from me—er, you, rather, because I was pretending to be you. That took a while.”
Peaches closed her eyes briefly. “Great.”
“I also might have insulted her blog.”
“Did you criticize font or content?”
“I told her that her font was ugly and the pictures of all the interiors she’d designed were Photoshopped.” Tess swallowed convulsively. “She asked me if that was it.”
“And you told her no, that wasn’t it, because she had the single worst highlight job you’d ever seen and that it really showed up on camera during every morning show she did.” Peaches looked at her sister. “Is that about right?”
Tess’s eyes widened. “How’d you know?”
Peaches pulled the stack of papers from beneath herself and her sister, then handed the top one to Tess. On it was scrawled, My roots don’t show on camera, you stupid—
Tess frowned. “Her language is rather salty.”
“You should see the others.”
“I’m not sure I want to.” She looked at Peaches. “I’m so desperately sorry.”
“So am I,” Peaches said. “That I didn’t get to hear it.”
“I recorded it.”
“Then what’s there to complain about?” She thought about tossing all the faxes into the air in a defiant gesture of freedom, then thought better of it because the only thing that would accomplish would be leaving her a mess to clean up.
Tess took the faxes from her, then flipped through them. That took quite a while, but that was because Peaches had quite a long client list.
Had had, rather.
She leaned back against the cold stone wall of her sister’s guardroom and contemplated her life. There were several truths to examine at present, and since she had quite a bit of time on her hands—that stack of faxes was rather thick, after all—she thought she would take advantage of it.
The thing was, she needed a change. She’d known for quite some time that she’d needed a change. She just hadn’t expected that she would get the particular level of help she was getting at the moment to make that change.
Tess looked up. “Peach, these are all your clients—”
“I’ll find new ones,” Peaches said with a casualness she didn’t feel. “No problem.”
“I don’t want to pry,” Tess began slowly, “but—”
“I have plenty of money,” Peaches said, hoping to cut Tess off before she asked for any details. Unfortunately, her sister was who she was and details were her specialty.
“How much is plenty?”
Peaches took a deep breath. “Almost three thousand dollars.”
Tess blinked. “You mean almost thirty thousand.”
“No,” Peaches said, trying to sound cheerful but failing. “You know how I always tell people, Never do business with friends? Well, apparently there really is something to that.”
“Peaches,” Tess said, aghast. “What happened?”
“Oh, this and that,” Peaches said. “A few bad investments in start-ups. The occasional dip into retirement funds to help out a friend in need.” Giving my PIN to a trusted guy friend who wasn’t a husband. “The usual.”
Tess bowed her head for a moment or two, then looked at Peaches. “You’ll stay here until you decide what to do, for as long as it takes.”
“I can’t,” Peaches said miserably. “I thought my visa was a done deal, but I got a letter yesterday—”
“John knows a guy who knows some guys,” Tess interrupted her. “They’ll take care of it.”
Peaches imagined they would. John did, after all, have some particular immigration issues that would have definitely required the services of a guy.
“I’m going back to the house now,” Tess said, sounding suddenly very far away. “I’ll go stir up some powdered grass drink for you.”
Peaches looked at her sister. She was standing within reach, but somehow she sounded like she was in another world.
She nodded, because she knew that was what she was supposed to do.
What she wanted to do was burst into tears, but she knew that wouldn’t accomplish anything.
And she wasn’t a crier; she was a gulper.
If she had a nickel for every time she’d gulped, put her shoulders back, and soldiered on, she wouldn’t have minded at all that she was holding on to a stack of faxes that spelled the end of her comfortable, balanced life in the States.
The only client she had left was Roger Peabody, who only hired her to come clean out his office so she would be forced to look at the illustrated charts hanging on his walls detailing the benefits of her becoming his wife.
She looked again to find Tess gone. She wasn’t sure when that had happened, which probably should have worried her. She couldn’t even bring herself to look through the stack of faxes again. Anyone who believed Brandalyse Stevens probably wasn’t really the client for her.
And perhaps, in the end, Fate was shoving her in the right direction.
She pushed herself to her feet, ignored the final twitch of hanger, then walked toward the door.
It was open from where Tess had gone through it, which struck her as spooky for some reason.
She would have paused to analyze why, but decided it was a bad idea.
Maybe later, when she had gone at least twelve hours without seeing any sort of paranormal activity.
She walked through the barbican tunnel and stopped on the edge of Tess’s courtyard. It was nothing out of the ordinary, that stopping. She had stopped either in the same place or near to it dozens of times before and spent an equal number of times looking at the courtyard in front of her.
Only during none of those dozens of times had she ever had the feeling of destiny come over her as it was coming over her now.
What if … what if she had the courage to acknowledge what it was she really wanted?
Audentes Fortuna Juvat.
The thought of it almost stole her breath. She stood on the edge of her sister’s medieval courtyard, struggling to breathe normally, and realized that the time had come for her to make a decision.
Her dream, or more of her life spent putting that dream off.
It wasn’t what she should have been thinking about given the fact that her life was lying in ruins around her.
She should have been coming up with a life plan, not thinking about the residual effects left in her heart from too many of Aunt Edna’s Barbara Cartland romances hidden behind dust jackets of Dostoyevsky and Voltaire.
Of course she’d taken none of it truly seriously—
Not until one particular evening in spring when she’d been studying for the last finals of her undergrad career.
It had been a lovely night and she’d taken her notes out onto a bench near the quad in front of the library.
A couple had been standing there in the middle of that space, bickering lightly about something, when the girl had turned and walked away.
Peaches hadn’t wanted to eavesdrop, but if they were willing to carry on their affairs in public, she hadn’t supposed they cared who watched them.
The guy had run after the girl and caught her by the hand.
And time had slowed to a crawl.