LITMIR.BIZ

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      She swivels her chair to face her desk again as her assistant obediently retreats with the contract.

      Today’s stack of mail is a few inches high, as usual. Fiona begins sorting it efficiently into piles: trade information, client queries, bills…personal?

      Yes, personal.

      She examines the large rectangular white envelope that looks like a greeting card or invitation. The printed label is addressed not to Fiona Fitzgerald Public Relations, but to Ms. Fiona Fitzgerald. It’s postmarked right here in Cedar Crest.

      That’s unusual. Her personal correspondence invariably goes to her home several blocks away from this converted Victorian office building on Main Street.

      Then again, her home address has been unlisted, as a safety measure, ever since she got divorced and started dating again. A single woman just can’t be too careful these days.

      Fiona is curious about the contents of the envelope—but not curious enough to interrupt sorting the remaining mail and open it. One doesn’t get as far as she has by being easily sidetracked from the task at hand.

      Self-discipline. That’s what it’s all about.

      Anyway, she’s seen enough junk mail disguised as personal correspondence that she should probably just toss the card into the garbage can unopened.

      But she’ll probably open it. Later, when she has a chance. Just in case it really is a greeting card, or an invitation. Fiona doesn’t receive many of those these days, unless they’re business-related.

      She was a shrewd negotiator in the divorce—she got their two-story, 2,000-square-foot Tudor home and all the furniture, plus the BMW, full custody of Ashley, and shared use of the vacation cabin up in the mountains.

      Patrick got the Jeep, parental visitation rights…

      And the friends.

      She probably shouldn’t have been surprised that everyone in their old social circle—both husbands and wives—chose to align themselves with Pat. Her ex is easily the most affable guy in town—when it comes to everything and everyone but Fiona, that is.

      Theirs was a bitter divorce. She had hoped they could at least be civil—as much for Ashley’s sake as for her own. This is a small town, she doesn’t care to have their marital disaster aired for public opinion. Yet even now, two years after the papers were signed, Pat has very little to say to her—and too much to say through the local grapevine.

      The lines are clearly drawn, and it’s lonely on Fiona’s side.

      Even her own parents are once again all but estranged from her. Staunch Catholics, they were devastated by her divorce and abandoned her in a time when she really could have used their support.

      Oh, well. She still has Brynn, even if they don’t have a lot in common these days—or much time for each other.

      That doesn’t matter. They’ll always be sisters—just bonded by friendship rather than by blood.

      Or maybe a bit of both, Fiona thinks with a shudder, remembering that awful night.

      “We’ll always remember…That fateful September…”

      How often in the past decade has she been haunted by the opening lines to the Zeta Delta Kappa song?

      Haunted, and taunted.

      Maybe Brynn is, too. But they don’t talk about it.

      Better to forget it ever happened and keep their friendship—their sisterhood—grounded in the present.

      Yes, Fiona has Brynn. She has a flesh-and-blood sister, too: Deirdre—or Dee, as she was called before she shed the childhood nickname, along with her ties to Cedar Crest and just about everyone in it.

      Deirdre might not possess Fiona’s type A energy, but she is literally Fiona’s other half—not just her identical twin but her mirror image. In genetic terms, that means the egg didn’t split until late in the embryonic stage. Any later, Fiona learned in a college biology class, and twins would be conjoined.

      For practical purposes, “mirror image” means that Fiona is left-handed while Deirdre is right-handed; Fiona’s auburn hair naturally parts on the right, Deirdre’s on the left. They have the same petite, waiflike figure, the same whiter-than-white, unblemished complexion, the same slanty green eyes.

      So close were they throughout their childhood that Fiona and Deirdre—Fee and Dee—might just as well have been literally joined at the hip.

      Not anymore.

      Fiona hasn’t seen her sister since she visited Deirdre at her home on St. John in the Virgin Islands to celebrate their twenty-ninth birthday almost a year ago.

      “What are we going to do for our thirtieth?” Deirdre asked as they said good-bye at the airport. “How about an Alaskan cruise?”

      Fiona countered with, “Why don’t you come to Cedar Crest and we’ll just drink a bottle of champagne, or two or three, together? I’ll buy you a plane ticket.”

      “You know I can’t plan that far ahead.”

      “You can, Dee…You just don’t like to.”

      “Exactly. Anyway, Antoinette will want to be with me on my birthday.”

      “So bring her,” Fiona suggested, as though her sister bringing her lesbian lover for a hometown visit is an everyday event.

      “Yeah, Mom and Dad would love that.”

      “Are you kidding? You think I’m planning on celebrating my birthday—our birthday—with them? They won’t even have to know you’re in town. You’d stay with me.”

      “Well, considering they told me never to darken their doorstep again, you know I wouldn’t stay with them.”

      “Does that mean I should go ahead and buy you a ticket? You and Antoinette?”

      “I can’t plan that now, Fee. I probably won’t even know until the day before what I feel like doing for my thirtieth birthday.”

      Thirty!

      Another looming milestone for Fiona.

      One Brynn is facing as well. And within the next month, too. Even Matilda.

      And Rachel…

      Rachel would have been thirty this year, too. In fact…

      Fiona’s eyes automatically go to her desk calendar.

      Today, she realizes, startled by the coincidence. Today would have been Rachel’s thirtieth birthday.

      Yes, she’s positive about the date. It’s indelibly imprinted on her brain.

      Rachel Lorent was born on September 7th…the same day she died.

      “What’s that, baby?”

      “Hmm?” Cassandra Ashford looks up to see her fiancé watching her with interest.

      She quickly tucks the greeting card and its envelope into the new issue of Essence, which arrived in the same batch of mail she picked up on their way into the condo just now.

      Alec Bennett tilts his head. “You have a secret admirer or something?”

      “A secret admirer?” Cassie forces a laugh as she shoves the magazine into her brown leather tote bag, still slung over her shoulder. “Why would you say that?”

      “Because you just hid that card in your magazine, that’s why. And now you’re trying to hide the magazine in your bag.” He reaches across the breakfast bar to playfully tug at the bag. “Is there something in there that you don’t want me to see?”

      “No!” she says quickly—too quickly—and pulls away.

      Alec raises an eyebrow and thoughtfully rubs his neatly trimmed black

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