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ChapterOne
As early September sunlight streamed through the convertible windows, Oriana Coleman realized that her little sister, Meghan, had begun to look almost exactly like their mother, Mia. With her head flung back, laughing at a joke Oriana had just made, her eyes danced just as their mother’s had; the long sweep of her neck was the same, and even her laugh was like an echo of Mia’s. A swell of nostalgia overcame Oriana, and she struggled to breathe for a moment. They’d lost their mother many years ago now. Oriana and Meghan were all that was left of her memory.
“What are you thinking about?” Meghan had noticed Oriana’s reverie.
Oriana twitched into a smile. “Nothing! Nothing. Just nervous about tomorrow, I guess.”
Meghan adjusted her glasses on the bridge of her nose. “It’s hard for me to believe you ever get nervous.”
“Don’t tell anyone,” Oriana joked. “I try to maintain sophistication in all things.”
“Your secret is safe with me,” Meghan said.
Oriana and Meghan were halfway to New York City, where Oriana had several meetings with important clients, plus a party where she planned to rub shoulders with artists and other potential buyers. For more than twenty-five years, Oriana had worked as a high-end art dealer and had been responsible for some of the most towering sales of the twenty-first century. After her first few years cutting her teeth in New York City, she’d made enough of a name for herself to move home to Martha’s Vineyard to be near Meghan, her father, and her mother and raise her children. Although she’d occasionally missed the hustle and bustle of the city, being an “island art dealer” had come in her favor, as she’d had a bit of mystique. Plus, plenty of New Yorkers vacationed in Nantucket or Martha’s Vineyard, and they required her assistance to decorate their homes with exquisite art to impress their friends.
“I can’t remember the last time we were off the island together,” Meghan said. “Miami, maybe? Or that trip to Seattle?”
“It must have been Nashville,” Oriana remembered. “I met that client to sell an Aronski sculpture.”
“That’s right! And after you sealed the deal, we went out and sang karaoke.” Meghan snapped her fingers.
“Oh. That hangover nearly killed me,” Oriana said. “What song did I sing at the end of the night?”
“You sang Prince!” Meghan cackled. “‘When Doves Cry.’ You brought down the house.”
“My finest moment,” Oriana added, rolling her eyes. “Thank goodness none of my clients saw me up there. They would never trust a crazy woman like that to handle their art deals.”
“On the contrary, I’d trust someone like that even more,” Meghan quipped.
Outside the convertible windows, a glistening September day surged past, fields tinged with brown yet still clinging to the fertile greenery of summer. There was something so devastating about the end of summer, a reminder that life was limited, that you only had so much time to love, feel, and breathe.
“I got a text from Sam,” Meghan interrupted Oriana’s reverie again. “She says Hilary’s surgery went well. She’s out and resting at home.”
Oriana breathed a sigh of relief. “I’m so glad to hear that.”
“Can you imagine losing your vision? What a nightmare.”
“Especially because she works in design,” Oriana added, stricken.
Hilary Coleman, who’d just had surgery to treat her glaucoma, was Meghan and Oriana’s half-niece, the daughter of their half-brother Roland Coleman. For a very long time, Meghan and Oriana had known of the existence of their older Nantucket half-brothers, Roland and Grant— yet they’d also known they weren’t to approach them. Their father, Chuck Coleman, had cheated on his first wife to such a degree that he’d begun a second family with Meghan and Oriana’s mother— without divorcing her. When Roland and Grant had discovered his secret, Chuck had bribed them not to tell. But as a result, Roland and Grant decided to cut Chuck out of their lives forever. Roland and Grant’s best-laid plans had blown up in their faces, however, when Roland’s daughter, Samantha, had found a series of diaries from her Great Aunt Jessabelle, in which Jessabelle had written the dramatic details of Chuck’s affair.
Over the previous summer, the two sides of the Coleman Family had slowly come together— everyone except Roland and Grant, of course, who still partially blamed Oriana and Meghan for their mother’s death. This, of course, wasn’t fair, as, back then, Oriana and Meghan had been children, unversed in family dramas and heartache.
Oriana had booked them two suites in the gorgeous Dominick Hotel in Greenwich Village, the hotel she frequented on her many trips to New York per year. The fact that Meghan could tag along this time pleased her. Traveling was better with someone you loved by your side. So often, Oriana had sat all by herself in Central Park, at a beautiful restaurant, or in a museum, wishing she could talk about her experiences with someone.
Oriana and Meghan got out of the convertible at the hotel entrance, where Oriana handed off the keys to a valet driver, and a bellhop took their suitcases. Around them, the city was alive, loud, and panic-stricken. Taxis beeped and honked as the street seemed to shake, possibly with the weight of a subway train underground, and the smells were a mix of garbage, hot dogs, and concrete. There was a reason Oriana wanted to live in Martha’s Vineyard— she remembered it every time she came into the city. Still, there was no refuting the city’s magic. It was everywhere you looked.
Oriana and Meghan parted when they reached their suites, deciding to rest up for an hour before they grabbed dinner and went for a walk. Inside her room, Oriana stretched out on the king-sized bed, thinking how nice it was sometimes to stay in hotels and feel anonymous in a huge city.
Oriana grabbed her phone and called her husband, Reese. His deep baritone voice came through the speaker a moment later, her anchor in any storm.He sounded happy.
“Hi, honey. Did you make it?”
“We did.” Oriana curled into a ball on the bed and cupped her phone to her ear, trying to feel like Reese was closer than he was. “And the hotel is just as beautiful as ever.”
“I’m so glad to hear that.”
“What are you up to?”
