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bride in an arranged marriage?”
    The two women ignored him. “Whatever you say,” Lissa told her. “But don’t be surprised if she asks you about it.”
    Claire made the connection quickly, and Lissa nonchalantly flipped through a magazine while she waited for the small talk to pass. Claire missed Mrs. Craig’s cornbread, yack yack yack. She was so excited to be able to see the new house, yack yack yack. Lissa stifled a yawn.
    She put the magazine down when Claire finally broached the subject of Alec, literally squirming as she lied to the woman. Lissa was just glad Mrs. Craig couldn’t see Claire’s guilty expression.
    “How’s it going?” Lissa mouthed. She didn’t have to wait very long for an answer. Claire listened intently for a moment, then gulped a little, her cheeks reddening again and that same grim expression taking over.
    “No, Barbara, I know that she’s not the sort of person who acts out of malice. Whatever she’s done she’s done out of her incredible spontaneity.”
    Oh, really. Surely the old lady wasn’t going to fall for that. She must have, though, because Claire was once again on the listening end of the conversation.
    “Barbara, I know what you’re trying to say.”
    Uh-huh, Lissa thought. I bet I do, too.
    Claire let out a kind of strangled laugh. “I don’t have any worries in that department. I mean, he seems like the most wonderful man in the world to me, but what would Miranda want with him?”
    Alec’s expression darkened, and he stomped back to his desk. He left before he could see the expression Lissa caught as Claire looked toward the ground and said into the phone, “No, you’re right. Scott was no prize, either, was he? No, Barbara, I wasn’t worried about him—I knew all along he wouldn’t be there.”
    There was eavesdropping, and then there was making a spectacle out of someone’s psychic pain. Having none of her own, and wanting to keep it that way, Lissa stopped paying attention to Claire’s increasingly despondent tone and turned her computer on for the first time that morning.
    She looked up again when she heard Alec say, “Hey, Claire. Thanks for making me sound like Clark Kent.”
    Claire said nothing, only went to her computer, turned it on and began typing in that same mindlessly dedicated way she always did.
    “So what’s the deal?” Alec asked. “Can I go or not?”
    “You can go.” At Claire’s distressed tone, Lissa looked up to see someone who was about to go on an all-out crying jag. Her eyes were blinking rapidly behind her glasses, her nose looked like she’d been out on an all-night drinking binge and her voice was cracking. Lissa was about to offer a sympathetic word or two when Claire bolted out of her chair and ran for the stairwell. To the ladies’ room, no doubt.
    Alec stared after her. “Can you explain that to me?” he asked Lissa.
    “Not so you’d understand,” she said sarcastically, and continued her one-word-per-minute typing routine. The slow pace of her work left her with plenty of time to think about other things. Plenty of time to think of a way to help out poor Claire.

3
    “Y OU DON’T KNOW what I would do to have this hair,” Claire’s friend Allie told her as she whipped a wide-toothed comb through Claire’s brown locks. “It’s thick, it’s heavy. There’s a lot of it. You could work hair like this.” Allie and Claire had been having this argument since high school. Then, as now, Claire simply ignored her.
    She didn’t know what she was doing at Allie’s Designs of Your Life Hair Studio anyway, not when tomorrow was The Day. Whatever she could do for her looks tonight was not going to rival the kind of beauty support team Miranda was sure to have working for her. Changing her looks would only make Alec think she was insecure about this trip. Unless he didn’t notice at all. Now there was a comforting thought.
    Growing up, people had always defined Miranda and Claire by their differences. Claire