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in style, with a sloping roof and broad galleries surrounding it on both the upper and lower levels.
    At first glance the house looked the same as it always had to Serena—graceful, welcoming, impressive without being ostentatious. Then she blinked away the golden glow of her memory and saw it exactly as it was, as if seeing it for the first time ever.
    The roof was in a state of disrepair, due to heavy spring rains. Shingles were missing and a bright blue tarp had been thrown over a portion near the west dormer. The columns of the upper gallery needed paint and some of the balusters were missing from the handrail, giving the house the appearance of having a wide gap-toothed grin. The brick of the ground floor and the wooden siding of the upper story were still painted yellow, but the color had faded with age to the shade of old parchment instead of the butter-yellow of her memory.
    Memory was flattering, Serena reflected; reality was like seeing a beloved relative who had passed from middle age to old age between visits.
    She made her way across the broad lawn at a hurried, half-lame walk, her shoes and purse cradled against her. A screen door on the upper level of the house swung wide open and her niece and nephew burst out like racehorses from the starting gate. Six-year-old Lacey ran shrieking down the wide steps, a blur of blond ringlets and pink frills, with eight-year-old John Mason right behind her, a bullfrog clutched between his hands and a maniacal grin on his face.
    “John Mason, leave your sister alone!” Shelby Sheridan-Talbot shouted, bustling out onto the gallery.
    She was a fraction of an inch shorter than Serena with a softer, slightly rounder figure. Her brown eyes were a bit more exotic in shape, and her mouth seemed perpetually set in a petulant frown. Beyond those slight differences they appeared very much the same physically. Shelby looked ready to address the chamber of commerce in a bright yellow suit with a fitted jacket that flared out at the hips in the current style intended to denote femininity. The emerald silk blouse beneath the jacket sported a flamboyant candy-box bow at the throat. Serena felt like a bag lady in comparison.
    “Oh, my Lord, Serena!” Shelby exclaimed dramatically. She pressed perfectly manicured hands to her cheeks, displaying a diamond ring big enough to choke a cat and a large square-cut topaz. “What on earth has happened to you? You look like you've been mugged or run over by a truck or both.”
    “Gee, thanks.” Serena trudged up the steps, uncharitably wishing that she had been born an only child. Shelby's temperament was as capricious as the weather—sunny one second and stormy the next. She tended to be silly and frivolous. Her constant theatrics were tiring in the extreme, and she had a way of saying things that was at once innocent and cuttingly shrewd and that made it exhausting to endure a conversation with her.
    Serena frowned at her as she limped onto the gallery and Shelby inched back, making a moue of distaste, careful not to brush up against her.
    “I'm not having a great day here, Shelby, and I don't have time to go over the gory details with you,” Serena said. “I've got to change and get going. Can you please arrange to have someone pick up my car in town? I left it down by Gauthier's.”
    Shelby's expression quickly clouded over from feigned concern to childish annoyance. “Of course, Serena. I have nothing better to do than run errands for you. My stars, you come home looking like something the cat dragged in, worrying me to a frazzle, and the first thing out of your mouth is an order. Isn't that just like you.”
    Serena limped past her sister. She seriously doubted Shelby had given a single thought to her absence from the house. Shelby's most pressing concerns in life were her children, her wardrobe, and her prominence in community affairs—which she entered not with an eye to civic duty but social status. She was as pretty and shallow as