“Yay!” Aster cried, pushing a long peacock-blue column dress at Danielle. “Wear this! It would look amazing on you!”
Danielle looked touched. “You want me to join in?” She ran her fingers along the silken fabric.
Aster waved her hands. “Stop asking that. You’re one of us now. Now, come on.”
You’re one of us now. Aster was handling that so well—but then, that was Aster for you, always game for whatever life threw at her. Rowan glanced at Danielle again as she quietly unzipped the back of the dress. She wanted to like her new cousin. She wanted to embrace her as much as Aster did. But she wasn’t sure she quite trusted her yet. Perhaps that had nothing to do with Danielle and everything to do with Julia—after all, Danielle was just as much of a victim as they all were.
Rowan selected a fringed black dress and put it on too, feeling a little bit like Poppy as she zipped it up. Moments later, when Rowan looked around, all of them had transformed into Poppy, their skin glowing, their eyes bright, their smiles confident. Even little Skylar in the floppy hat and a pink tunic of Poppy’s that came to her ankles had a sudden je ne sais quois about her. In the dull bedroom light, her face turned a particular angle, she looked so much like Poppy, it took Rowan’s breath away.
They looked ridiculous in such ornate gowns and bare feet, standing in the middle of a closet, that they looked at each other and burst into peals of laughter. It felt suddenly as if they were little girls at Meriweather again, playing dress-up in their mothers’ closets.
Aster ran to the stereo and put on dance music, bopping to the beat. Then she started across the floor, swinging her hips and pasting a confident look on her face. “Go, girl!” Rowan called out to her, swaying to the music too.
“Aster, you still have a great walk,” Natasha admitted.
“You really do,” Corinne added, which made Aster’s face light up. “Have you ever thought about modeling again?”
Aster burst out laughing. “I’m sticking with Saybrook’s. Haven’t you heard? Boring is the new black.” Then she looped her arm around Natasha’s. “Maybe Danielle could recruit you too.”
Danielle, who had finished pulling on the blue sheath—it did look amazing on her—looked up. “That could be arranged.”
“It would be so much fun!” Aster cried, clapping her hands. “We could all be there. Have lunch every day, cocktails after work, take retreats on the company expense account . . .”
Natasha shook her head. “I don’t think so. Actually, I’ve been thinking about getting out of New York for a while. Traveling somewhere remote, getting my head together.”
Corinne looked crushed. “You’re leaving?”
“It won’t be for very long,” Natasha promised. Then a sly smile across her face, and she shot down the hall, swinging her hips like Aster. At the end of the hall, she thrust her arms into the air dramatically, just as she used to do at the end of her dance routines or one-act plays. Everyone hooted with laughter.
“Rowan’s turn!” Corinne called when Natasha finished.
Rowan looked at Poppy’s dress. It was so long that it dragged on the ground. “I need shoes,” she announced. She hunted Poppy’s racks for good ones.
“Ooh, I know she has some silver sling-backs that would look great with that dress,” Aster announced, dropping to her hands and knees too. She pulled a small stepstool from the back and climbed up it to check the upper racks, producing the pair in question.
“My turn!” Skylar tugged on Rowan’s skirt when Rowan finished her run. “Watch me!”
All of them turned away from the box to cheer on Skylar as she pranced down the long hallway. The floppy hat fell halfway off her head, but she caught it with a flourish. After Skylar walked, Corinne took a turn, her cheeks shining. Then Danielle went. They sorted through more dresses, tried on more items, and even made fun of some of Poppy’s impulse buys, including a pair of neon-green snakeskin platforms and a coat that looked as if it was made out of hair. Rowan sat back for a moment, watching all of them, feeling a moment of utter peace. Everything felt so good. So safe. And she realized, with a start, that she adored her life. Her cousins, her family, her integrity. It finally felt like enough. More than enough.
Across the room, her phone chimed loudly. Frowning, she glanced at it, then turned back to Aster, who’d pulled out a beautiful but totally impractical white dress that was see-through on the top and had a voluminous skirt that looked as if it was made out of hundreds of silken braids. “Even I couldn’t pull this off,” she said.
“It looks like a princess dress!” Skylar cried, reaching for it.
The phone bleated again. Rowan shot her cousins a quick smile, then rose and crossed the room. She pulled her phone from her bag and glanced at the screen. Her stomach dropped to her feet. NEW POST ON THE BLESSED AND THE CURSED.
The site had been eerily silent since Julia’s disappearance. There hadn’t even been a link to the story about the standoff on the bridge or a hint that Corinne had called off the wedding, or everything about Danielle, even though Page Six and Gawker had practically dedicated days’ worth of bandwidth to both of those stories. Nor were there any candid pictures of them. No unauthorized videos. No overheard conversations. Was that proof that Julia had been running the site? Or had she just provided the host with the juiciest tidbits?
She pressed the link that took her to the page. Sure enough, there was a new post. Rowan blinked hard. Chunky words filled the page. Pictures, too.
“One heiress, two heiress, three heiress, four,” it said, showing pictures of Rowan, Corinne, Aster, and Natasha. Rowan scrolled down a little.
“Five heiress, new heiress.” A picture of Danielle. And then: “Do they know there’s one more?”
Rowan’s eyes blurred. She understood those last words individually, but not as a group. What was the site talking about? There had been another heiress: Poppy, but now she was dead. Or maybe it meant heirs? But there were four heirs: her brothers, then Winston and Sullivan. Somehow she didn’t think it meant anything like that, though. Her fingers started to tremble. A metallic taste filled her mouth.
Danielle stuck her head out of the closet. “Are you okay, Rowan?”
Rowan shot up fast, covering the phone screen with her hands. Danielle’s stare was intense. Knowing, maybe? Or perhaps Rowan was losing her mind.
“I’ll be there in a second,” she said absently, hoping she didn’t seem anxious. “I just need to take care of this.”
It means nothing, she told herself, taking deep, even breaths. Whoever had posted this was just fucking with them. There were no more Saybrooks. There were no more secrets. They knew everything they needed to know.
And yet she couldn’t help but peek again. But when she gazed down at the screen once more, the page was blank. She hit refresh again and again, her heart pounding hard.
Just like that, though, the post was gone.
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PART II
ONE YEAR LATER
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It was late afternoon at the Saybrook family’s annual end-of-summer party in Meriweather. Edith Saybrook stifled a cough as she strolled to the porch. Though the thermometer tipped almost eighty-five degrees in the shade, she felt an impenetrable chill. She pulled her fur closer around her neck.
Her granddaughter, Corinne, looked up from her Adirondack chair in alarm. “Are you okay?”
“Of course,” Edith snapped, clutching her lime-flavored Perrier. “I’m as healthy as an ox.”
Corinne took a sip of her lemonade. Her brand-new fiancé, Will, exchanged a worried look with her. They made a nice enough couple, and she cer
tainly seemed happier than she’d been with that Shackelford boy. What a mess that had been, but it was over now. Not that the tabloids thought so. Reporters were still calling Edith to get her comment on whether Dixon and Corinne would reconcile. Let it go, she always thought.
Edith looked over the balcony at the party on the patio. Though they’d wanted the Labor Day party to be a small affair, mostly to celebrate Loren DuPont, a brand-new client Corinne’s sister, Aster, had wooed, but it had turned into a two-hundred-person bash. There was Aster now, wearing a silver cocktail dress, chatting with Loren herself, with that man she hung around with—Michael? Mitchell?—standing awkwardly by her side.
With that Elizabeth gone—Edith had never liked her—Aster had been promoted to associate client liaison, and she’d brought in a lot of new business. Of course, Edith had always seen that girl’s promise. Or at least, that was what she told everyone now.
Edith’s other granddaughter, Rowan, glowing in a short white gown that showed off her athletic figure and holding hands with a tall man who’s name she never could remember—they met on the Columbia Law Review, perhaps?—was letting Poppy’s older daughter pet one of those filthy dogs she owned.
And then there was that new one, that redhead who used to live in the caretaker’s cottage but now stayed here. It was sickening the way they all fawned over Danielle now. She was a grown woman, for God’s sake. How could they be so sure Danielle hadn’t been part of her mother’s scheme? Edith had half a mind to go down there and give that Danielle a talking-to, once and for all.
But she felt so tired. And all at once, she couldn’t remember the name of the granddaughter who’d gone to India shortly after she’d recovered from her injuries. She was still there—hadn’t she just sent a postcard a few days ago of a child on the side of the road? It was that black sheep, the one who for so long pretended like she was too good for the family.
“Grandma?” Corinne peered at her curiously again.
It popped back in: Natasha. Of course. “I told you, I’m fine.” Edith was keenly aware that Corinne might have been sent up here to baby-sit. “Good Lord, I’m just getting over the flu! You people are acting as though I have the plague.”
Corinne and what’s-his-name exchanged another secret glance. Edith pulled her fur tighter around her, suddenly struck with paranoia. Could they know? Might they suspect this wasn’t the flu? They couldn’t. She was keeping up such good appearances.
Still, in her mind’s eye, she pictured that doctor, an impertinent upstart named Myers, displaying her MRI scans on a glowing screen. “It’s such an unusual path for this type of cancer,” he’d told Edith. She’d visited him alone that day, just as she’d gone alone for the blood draws, the cervical scrapes, and the MRI too. “Usually these sorts of lesions are slow-growing, easy to catch. But this . . . well . . .”
He’d outlined all the medications and the treatments they could try, though he didn’t sound very optimistic about her prognosis. Whatever this was, it had permeated her uterus and had moved on to the organs next to it. Edith had stood up, livid. “I’m getting a second opinion. Don’t you know who I am?”
The doctor looked startled. “Ms. Saybrook, cancer doesn’t play favorites.”
It sounded like something one might put on a bumper sticker. Edith stormed out of the office, nearly slipping on the hard linoleum. But in the elevator, she’d pressed every floor just to get a few moments of peace. A quiet, dooming voice whispered seductively in her mind. You knew it would come to this. Deep down, you knew everything.
Did she? Could she have? Oh, she’d wondered plenty after her granddaughters revealed what Alfred had done. Mason knew. Poppy too . . . and Natasha, and Candace and Patrick, and he was only family by marriage. And then everyone had looked at her, expecting her to be in on the secret too. And she’d sat there, poker-faced, but inside she just felt . . . shriveled. Punched. Good Lord, she’d thought. Here it was, after all these years. Laid out like a corpse.
She remembered when Alfred came back from the war as if it were yesterday. How proud he’d been to show her the diamonds he’d found! “I got this at a bazaar in Paris,” he said excitedly, holding up the large yellow one to the light. God, it was as big as a baseball. “Oh, Edie, isn’t it beautiful? We’re going to make a killing.”
But something had bothered her about the story. A bazaar in Paris? What were they doing having flea markets at a time like this?
And where had he gotten money to buy stones? Toward the end of the war, whenever Alfred went on leave, he complained in his letters about barely having any money for a movie and a beer, pretty much forgetting that Edith was struggling at home trying to keep his jewelry store afloat. And she’d heard the whispers too. Less-than-moral things happening over there by the Allied soldiers. Thefts from people who’d already had their dignity stripped from them. They rationalized it, Edith supposed, because they felt they were owed something for their sacrifice. And so they took . . . and they didn’t tell. But her Alfred wasn’t like that, was he? Wasn’t he a good man, an honest man?
Still. She’d asked, in a roundabout way, just to make sure. Alfred told her again and again that everything was legitimate. “Just be happy,” he told her on his way to auction that morning. “And get ready, because our whole life is going to change.”
And then it did. That stone sold for a mint. Alfred gained national recognition for it, and he invested the money he earned from its sale into the store.
Saybrook’s grew. Alfred cut and sold the other diamonds he’d “acquired” while overseas, expanding the store again and again. He made connections with better mines and dealers. With some of the profits he was able to buy better, clearer diamonds, turning them into higher-quality jewelry. Soon, people from New York were coming to Boston to see him. And shortly after that, the decision was made to move to Manhattan.
Every time a Saybrook died tragically, Edith wasn’t one hundred percent surprised. But to admit it was karma, a curse? Buying into that, agreeing with the press that the family was cursed—well, that meant admitting that they’d done something to deserve it. And so she’d dismissed it as nonsense.
Now, Edith shut her eyes. That was a long time ago. And what Edith was suffering from probably just was the flu, not some garish, amorphous tumor assailing her from the inside out. She certainly didn’t deserve this illness for keeping her mouth shut all those years. She didn’t believe in curses. That was that.
A strange noise startled her awake. She opened her eyes, not having been aware she’d even dozed off, and looked around. The two chairs next to her were vacant now. The music had stopped. Guests froze, cocktails in hand.
A scream rose from the beach. Edith stood. Who was that? Then Patrick emerged from between the pines. “Help!”
Everyone started to move. Though still disoriented, Edith made it downstairs and across the lawn. She searched frantically for her granddaughters, but she didn’t see a single one. A few men pushed through the group, offering their services. But where was Aster? Where was Rowan? Edith called out to them weakly, but her voice didn’t carry.
There was a small circle around a body on the sand. Edith’s heart lurched. “Call nine-one-one!” a voice bellowed. Patrick dropped to his knees over the body. “Is she breathing?” someone yelled. “Is there a pulse?”
“Who is it?” Edith screeched, clawing furiously to get through the crowd.
A stranger she’d never seen before whirled around and widened her eyes. “It’s one of yours.”
It hit Edith like a blow to the chest. The stranger stepped aside so Edith could get through. She knelt down on the sand, touching a girl’s bare foot. Patrick loomed over her, trying to do CPR. “Move,” Edith growled at her son, crawling on top of the body. She stared into the girl’s face, recognizing those signature ice-blue eyes, that sloped nose, the oval-diamond pendant Edith h
ad given each of her granddaughters on her eighteenth birthday.
“No,” she bellowed, collapsing against the girl. It couldn’t be. Not another one. Wasn’t her tumor enough? Couldn’t she be the sacrifice?
The tide rushed in, hitting Edith with a shock of cold. People rushed to and fro, shouting panicked instructions. Edith stared into the trees, suspecting that someone was watching. Julia Gilchrist had never been found. Could it be her? Could it be someone else?
Or maybe it was something else. Maybe it had been something else all along.
An ambulance screamed up the walkway. People ran up to the EMTs, directing them to the body. But Edith’s gaze remained fixed on the woods, waiting for whoever—or whatever—it was to show themselves. All at once, she knew it for sure: the curse was here again.
Or maybe it had never left.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
TO COME.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
SARA SHEPARD graduated from New York University and has an MFA in creative writing from Brooklyn College. The author of the bestselling young adult books Pretty Little Liars and The Lying Game, as well as the adult novels The Visibles and Everything We Ever Wanted, she lives in Pittsburgh.
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