Hope entered first, carrying her flute case. Then Allegra, carrying only the twelve-hundred-dollar Stella McCartney hobo bag she had bullied Eddie into buying her when Eddie took her to Manhattan for the modeling interview. Not a book or paper in sight, which was why Allegra had straight C’s. Eddie let her slide because he had graduated from New Bedford High School with C’s, and look at how successful he was now! Grace shook off the residue of whatever inappropriate emotions she’d been having for Benton Coe and focused on her girls, her sun and moon. Allegra was the sun—bright and hot and shining. Hope was the moon—placid, serene, inscrutable. Grace was a little more in awe of Allegra because… well, because she was Allegra. And Grace was more protective of Hope because they had almost lost her at birth.

“Hello, lovelies,” Grace said. She tried to scoop both girls up in an embrace, but they executed a perfectly synchronized bob-and-weave to avoid her—Allegra to the left, Hope to the right—and headed toward their bedrooms, where they would remain with the doors shut until dinner.

Which, tonight, would be quiche Lorraine and spinach salad. Eddie liked meat and potatoes, but since he’d taken on the spec houses, he appreciated the frugality of eating their own home-farmed eggs.

Grace tried not to take offense at the evasion—not a word of greeting, no thought to ask how her day had been. If Grace were to be very honest, she might admit that lately her daughters made her feel more lonely instead of less so.

“How was school?” Grace called after them. But there was no response.

“We’re having quiche for dinner!” Grace said. “Around six!” No response.

There had most certainly been days this past winter when being so thoroughly ignored had sent Grace into a fog of depression. She yearned to make the girls cups of hot tea and bake them chocolate chip cookies and sit around looking at fashion magazines while Allegra talked about her weekend plans with Brick and Hope pulled out her flute and played a few bars of a Mozart concerto. But even Grace realized this was unrealistic. They were, after all, teenage girls and could be counted on to think only of themselves.

Today, Grace didn’t care. Today, Grace headed back to her master bathroom to paint her toenails.

Benton Coe had returned. This year was their year. They had all summer in front of them.

HOPE

Sometimes she wished her parents had never told her the story of her birth, and yet it had been part of her personal narrative since she was old enough to understand it. Hope—or baby number two, the smaller, weaker twin—had had her umbilical cord wrapped around her neck, a fact that escaped the obstetrician’s notice because Allegra had popped out healthy, whole, and hogging the entire room’s attention for the first time of a million in her life. Once the doctor noticed that baby number two was in distress, Grace was raced to the operating room, where Hope was delivered by emergency C-section four minutes later. But she was nearly dead by the time they got her out. She was, her father liked to dramatically say, the color of a damson plum, and he had thought, There’s no chance. But the doctor had resuscitated Hope, kept her alive on a ventilator, and she and Eddie had been taken in the MedFlight helicopter to Boston while Grace and Allegra stayed at Nantucket Cottage Hospital.

Hope had been in the NICU for a week before she was named. The name her parents had picked out was Allison—Allegra and Allison, for nauseating twin symmetry—but after all that transpired, they changed their minds and decided to call her Hope, no explanation needed.

She was a survivor, an underdog who had prevailed; she was the smaller, weaker twin, all but ignored while her sister took center stage; she was lucky just to be alive. The doctors had told her parents that Hope might be brain damaged or hindered in some other way.

“But,” her mother said, “you are just as right as rain.”

Hope had no idea what that meant, but she did wish her parents had kept the story of her birth to themselves. She wished it were secret history that nobody ever talked about, rather than being the event that defined her.

Smaller, weaker, lucky to be alive. Whereas Allegra was bigger and stronger, her easy life an apparent birthright. In the fourth-grade class play, Allegra had been cast as Alice in Alice in Wonderland, and Hope as the Dormouse. Then, as now, this had pretty much summed up their differences.

Allegra was okay. At times. Not as smart as Hope, or at least not as book smart; in school, she put forth minimum effort. Hope had one class with Allegra: health, taught by the phys ed teacher, Ms. Norman. It was a layup, the easiest A in the world, because it was nutrition and exercise and personal hygiene, basic stuff everyone on earth already knew from being a human and being raised by other humans. And yet Allegra never handed in her homework, and when Ms. Norman called on her in class, asking her to name the most prevalent nutrient found in milk, Allegra gave a derisory laugh and said, “Um? Don’t know?” She sounded like a moron, and Hope was embarrassed to have shared a womb with her. Anyone who had ever watched a cereal commercial knew the answer was calcium.

Out of the classroom, however, Allegra and her best friend, Hollis Brancato, ruled the school. They were the real twins, matched in their prettiness, their long, shiny hair (although Hollis’s was blond to Allegra’s brunette), the makeup right out of magazines, their carefully curated clothes. Who knew how many thousands of dollars Allegra had wheedled out of their father so that she could have “pieces” by Parker and Alice + Olivia and Dolce Vita. Allegra’s one coup over Hollis was that she had been invited to New York City for a modeling interview. Allegra had told Hollis and everyone else at school that she was “still waiting to hear,” meaning she might start her climb up to the ranks of Gisele and Kate any day. Only Hope knew that the woman at the modeling agency had declared Allegra three inches too short and too “standard issue” in the beauty department to ever get any work.