Harper parks at the carriage house and, finding it unlocked, lets herself in.

The house smells like Evening in Paris, the scent Eleanor wore all through their childhood. Harper supposes that Tabitha must now wear it, because she is slowly but surely turning into Eleanor. The carriage house is upside down—three bedrooms and two baths on the entry floor, then stairs that lead up to the living space. Fish goes nuts with the cornucopia of new smells; he is in and out of every bedroom, his tail slamming against the door frames.

Harper identifies Tabitha’s room—all-white bed, fifty million pillows in different sizes, and a bolster the size of a fallen tree. She probably still sleeps on top of the covers, because getting underneath them messes up the sheets, and somewhere within the logic of Tabitha’s brain, it is better to have crisp, clean sheets than to enjoy sleeping in them.

Whatever.

Ainsley’s room is the one that smells like pot and has a highball glass filled with—Harper takes a tiny sip—vodka on the dresser. Okay! Harper dumps the glass in the bathroom sink and throws her duffel bag in the third bedroom, which appears to be a catchall. There’s a bed with a full-size mattress and a coverlet that Harper remembers from… from… wow… the cottage on Prospect Street. It’s white matelassé, yellowed now.

There is a desk covered with shelter magazines—Domino, House Beautiful, Traditional Home, Architectural Digest. (Someone is an interior designer wannabe. Ainsley? Tabitha?) There’s a Windsor chair at the desk, but aside from that, nothing else. Plenty of room for the dog bed.

Upstairs is more formal—a gorgeous cherry dining table with six low-armed chairs around it and a tall bouquet of fresh delphiniums in the center; there’s a turquoise tweed sofa with swanky 1960s curves, above which hangs a rectangular mirror. There is a TV on a glass-and-acrylic console and dressmaker’s dummy in the corner wearing the Roxie in lime green, which initially gives Harper a fright. She thinks, for an instant, that it’s Tabitha.

The kitchen is beautifully outfitted and well equipped, but it’s too clean—never-used clean.

Shame, she thinks. What she could have done these last fourteen years with a kitchen like this.

Fish comes to bury his snout in her crotch, a sign that he approves.

“Well, good,” Harper says, scratching his ears. “Just don’t get used to it. Six days. Seven at the most.”

Harper finds the grocery store. It’s a Stop & Shop, and Harper feels a pang of longing for Cronig’s and the Reliable Market, which is really reliable only for being expensive.

As Harper is climbing out of her Bronco, she feels a hand on her arm.

“Tabitha?”

Harper looks up to see a very handsome, clean-cut man in a shirt and tie and horn-rimmed glasses. He looks like Superman before he’s Superman. He looks like Clark Kent.

“I’m not—”

“Did you get a new car?” Clark Kent asks. He gasps when he sees Fish asleep across the back. “Did you get a dog?”

The look of utter shock on Clark Kent’s face is enough to make Harper laugh. She nearly plays along. How many times in their early life did one twin pretend to be the other? A twister, they called it, short for “twin sister.” No one could tell them apart.

No one.

Harper nearly says, Yeah, I traded in for this old clunker. Can you believe it? What does Tabitha drive? Harper wonders. A red Mercedes convertible, as sleek as a woman’s shoe? And I got a dog. I figured I needed one more pressing responsibility.

But Harper can’t do it to this guy. She grins. “I’m not Tabitha.”

“Tabitha,” Clark Kent says, “I know the other night was awkward, and I’m sorry—”

Harper is, naturally, dying to hear about Tabitha’s awkward night, but she interrupts because to let him continue only to satisfy her wanton curiosity seems cruel. She’s on Nantucket, it’s a fresh start, and she’s going to be nice. “I’m Harper Frost, Tabitha’s twin sister.”

“Her…” Clark Kent fish-mouths as he searches for words.

“Her twin sister. I live on Martha’s Vineyard.”

Clark Kent nods once. “She told me about you.”

“Well, that’s something,” Harper says. “We haven’t communicated much in the past decade and a half, but last week our father died…”

Clark Kent’s eyes widen.

“…and on Monday evening, our mother fell down and broke her hip.”

Here Clark Kent gasps. “Eleanor?”

Harper tilts her head. “How do you know my sister?”

Clark Kent straightens up and offers Harper his hand. “I’m being terribly rude. I’m sorry. My name is Ramsay Striker. I’m… or I was… well, I lived with your sister… Tabitha… I dated Tabitha for four years, lived with her for three. We broke up in February.”

“Ah,” Harper says. She studies the guy: tall, successful looking, well dressed. Tabitha’s type, or what Harper has always pictured as Tabitha’s type, although the only real boyfriend of Tabitha’s that Harper has ever met is Wyatt, who was not Tabitha’s type. Which is one reason—of many, she supposes—that it didn’t work out between them.

Harper would like to pin Ramsay Striker to a board like a butterfly specimen and ask him ten thousand questions.

As if reading Harper’s mind, Ramsay Striker checks his watch. “Do you want to go grab a drink?” he asks.

It’s the lunch hour, and places will be crowded, Ramsay says, so he suggests “the brewery” because Harper can bring her dog.

Brilliant, Harper thinks. Ramsay is thoughtful. And, as it turns out, the brewery—CISCO BREWERS, the sign says—is the perfect laid-back place to go on a mild, sunny afternoon.

Harper loves Nantucket already!

The brewery features a large brick patio surrounded by rustic farm buildings. One building sells beer, another sells wine, and yet another sells spirits. Perched on a stool with a golden retriever at his feet is a long-haired guy playing the guitar. There are a few dozen people sitting at picnic tables, drinking and eating guacamole and chips or oysters from the food trucks.

Ramsay and Harper choose an empty picnic table, and Ramsay says, “How does a beer and a lobster roll sound?”

Harper loves a man who instinctively knows what a particular moment calls for. “Like heaven,” she says.

Harper limits herself to two beers and just a sip of the third because she still has to go to the store and make it back to the carriage house before Ainsley gets home from school. She has told Ramsay about herself and Tabitha growing up—all the way to the divorce and the family divided between two islands.

Ramsay says, “So why the rift between you and Tabitha?”

Why the rift? So many reasons, starting with that fateful game of rock, paper, scissors. Harper tries, for the ten thousandth time, to imagine what would have happened if Tabitha had chosen scissors instead of rock. It would have been hellish to watch Tabitha roll away with Billy while Harper was trapped with Eleanor in the mausoleum on Pinckney Street. The furniture in that house was all two hundred years old—heavy, dark, and ornate with brocade upholstery and velvet drapes; the library was filled with dusty books, and oil portraits of their creepy Roxie ancestors hung on the walls. Would she have hated Tabitha? Yes, she supposes she would have. But she wouldn’t have become Eleanor’s disciple. That had been Tabitha’s willful choice.

Other things had happened to Tabitha that had been beyond her control.

Julian.

Harper is not going there.

She realizes that information has only been flowing one way during this lunch. Ramsay hasn’t divulged anything about his relationship with Tabitha, and they’re running out of time. It’s already two o’clock.

“How are you able to do this?” Harper asks.

“This?”

“Take a two-hour brewery lunch.”

“Oh.” Ramsay laughs and nudges his glasses up his nose. “My name is on the door. Family business on Main Street. Insurance.”

“Why did my sister let you go?” she asks.

“Wow,” Ramsay says. “Nice reversal.”