Chapter 9

"Sis?" I repeat, gawking at her. Because it hits me like a piece of fallen scaffolding that this is why she looked familiar—her eyes and mouth…they're similar to what I see in the mirror each morning. "You're his daughter, too? Why didn't you say anything?"

She reaches for my carry-on bag, and I let her take it, because I'm numb. Too much has happened, one revelation snowballing with another, forming a snowmageddon that's avalanched my brain. It's impossible to form a logical thought beyond the press of—I have a sister, now?—but there's room enough for illogical ones. I figured she took the bag as a friendly gesture, the way someone will offer a chair to a person they've just slapped with big news, but she tosses it carelessly into the interior of the cabin, which looks like wood on top of wood.

"Hey," I say, flinching, a protest making it through my sloppy brain. "My laptop's in that."

She ignores the comment and pulls me into the house, and even though I'm more intrigued than ever—could she really be my sister?—I feel like a fly being tugged into a spider's den.

"Come on," she says. "I've got some bourbon in the kitchen with your name on it."

What is it with people feeding me alcohol today?

I'm not about to complain, though. If ever there's a day for drinking it's today, even more so now than at eight this morning. So I follow her down a wood-lined hallway to a cozy kitchen, the walls half wood and half a chalky, grey color that probably used to be white. The stove's small but no more so than the one in my apartment in Brooklyn, and the thought of baking in here is pleasant.

Nicole waves me toward a round table with four chairs pushed up to it—each of them different, as if scavenged from freebies left out on people's stoops—and I sit on one that's painted blue. Sure enough, there's a bottle of bourbon sitting out with two juice glasses.

It's almost impossible to wrap my head around what's happening. Just this morning, I was sitting with my father in his kitchen. Now I'm in a kitchen that belonged to my other father—a man I'll never know—about to have a drink with a half-sister who may be crazy.

"Well, shit," Nicole says, filling up both glasses to the brim. "It's good to finally meet you. Damien—that's my husband—told me not to do the thing with the plane ticket. He said you might not make it on the flight and it would be a waste of money, but I knew you'd pull through. You couldn't help it. You've got those Ricci hustler genes." She puts out her fist, presumably for a bump, and for some godforsaken reason, I give it to her.

You just can't say no, I hear Lainey telling me. It's pathological.

So I put on a stern face. "I almost missed it. Do you know how long it takes to get to JFK Airport from my apartment?"

"No, not really," she says as if she couldn't care less. "I'll bet it was kind of fun, though, huh?"

"No," I object, although she's not entirely wrong. It gave me an adrenaline rush, making the mad dash and getting there in time, and it was definitely a thrill to board the plane at the last minute and find myself next to him. "How do you know you're my sister?"

"The will was the first I'd heard of you," she says with a sigh. "My husband and I are private investigators, so you can imagine how embarrassing that was for me. If you're wondering how we can know for certain that you're really a Ricci—Dick said in his will that there was a DNA test when you were little."

"Oh," I comment, the word falling out of my mouth. Because part of me had hoped this was all some strange mistake, despite my resemblance to him, to her. Despite what my father had told me. "You're really a private investigator?"

I'd never met one before in real life. It had always struck me as the kind of job people have in TV and in books, not real life.

"But I didn't go looking for Dick after he left," she continues, ignoring the question, which is probably just as well, "because I didn't want to find him. I would have wanted to find you. He may be dead, but I'm pissed at him for keeping you secret."

For half a second, I'm thrilled by this—by the fact that I have a sister, and she wanted to find me. Lainey's like a sister, but I'd always wondered what it would be like to have a sibling with the same parents. Someone I could bitch to about the Tribe of Light or Dad's relentless positivity. Of course, the only thing I can bitch to Nicole about is being abandoned, which doesn't sound like much fun at all. Then I absorb the rest of what she said.

"You knew Dick?"

She nods and takes a swig of the bourbon, giving a sigh of enjoyment as she sets the glass down. "You know, I used to think drinking shit bourbon was a mark of character, but when Damien's right, he's right. The good stuff just hits different. Don't tell him I said so, though. I don't want him to get a big head. His anniversary present to me was much better than mine to him, and we both know it."

"You knew Dick?" I ask again, getting annoyed. She's no more straightforward than Declan, but at least he had the good grace to seem to feel bad about it.

"Yeah," she said. "I had that misfortune. I'm sorry to report that his name was accurate."

"So I've heard," I mutter.

"He cheated on my mother constantly—with your mom, too, it turns out." She lifts her glass, and I find myself mechanically lifting my drink to clink it with hers.

There you go again, says Lainey in my head.

Nicole shrugs. "I'm a few years older than you. He left when I was seven, sent divorce papers, and never came back. Like I said, my mom and I didn't bother to look for him."

"He raised you?"

She laughs as if this is the funniest thing she's heard all month, or maybe in her whole life. "Now, let's not get to free-wheeling with words, Claire Rainey. That man didn't raise shit. But he did leave us this crappy house, so I suppose he wasn't totally useless."

"Us?" I repeat, feeling sweat bead on my temples. "So it's not mine?"

"It's ours." She grins at me. "We got it halfsies, just like sisters should. And there's an insurance payout, too. With a caveat…"

"A caveat?"

She sighs. "You keep repeating everything I'm saying. Did you hit your head? Or maybe you just inherited Dick's brain along with his sense of style."

I glance down at Declan's shirt, my soaked shorts, and ruined shoes. I'm guessing she didn't mean it as a compliment to me or our bio dad. "I didn't know either of you existed yesterday morning," I say as soon as I'm confident I can say them in an even tone. "I'm just trying to keep up."

She snorts. "Anyway, back to the caveat. Yeah, the insurance company thinks he committed suicide."

"Did he?" I ask, feeling a squeezing sensation in my chest. Honestly, if this day keeps going on the way it has, I'm going to have a heart attack at twenty-eight.

"Oh, I think not. You know how it is." She waves her hand in a gesture that's supposed to convey something, although I have no idea what. "They don't like to pay up. They'll think of any excuse not to. He fell down the stairs—accident, right?—but he had a ton of alcohol in his system, plus some pills, so they think he did it on purpose. You know, drugged himself up and then took a fall so he could make it look like an accident. Fucked up, no?"

"Why would he do something like that?"

"To get his beloved daughters a payout, of course," she says with a sarcastic smile.

I pause, trying to think of a tactful way to ask what I need to ask. But she's not tactful, so maybe I don't need to be either. "How much money are we talking?"

"Not too much," she says, and my spirits fall. "Something like two-hundred-and-fifty grand each."

My mouth drops open. "Not too much?"

I'm used to living on a personal assistant salary in New York City. Sure, it wouldn't be enough for me to open my bakery without any external backers, not in New York City, but if I did it somewhere else…

I could finally do something with my life instead of daydreaming about it. I could stop waiting—watching sand fall to the bottom of the hourglass.

Then I remember the rest of what she said. "But they're not going to give it to us…"

"Unless we can prove it was an accident or someone offed him."

My eyebrows rise. "Didn't the police do some kind of investigation?"

A pfft of air escapes her. "They're incompetent as hell, but they didn't find his death suspicious."

I sigh, my dreams of the bakery floating away. "I suppose that's that. I guess we can still sell the house. That'll be worth something."

Her expression hardens. "I don't give up so easily, and starting now, neither do you. Maybe it was an accident." She shrugged her shoulders. "Damien's looking into that angle. He's meeting with a structural engineer who took a look at the stairs, and we already have our lawyer working on the insurance company, but there is a chance someone did this to him, Claire, and you and I will be working on that. Because if anyone had a right to kill that salty bastard, it was you and me. I didn't do it, and I know for a fact that you didn't do it, so it's only right if we're the ones who look into it."

"You really think someone murdered him?" I ask in awe. The rest of the message penetrates a beat later. "And you want me to look into it? You're the P.I. I'm just—"

"Oh, I know all about your sad little job," she says dismissively, lighting a flame of anger in my gut. Because who the fuck is this woman, anyway? But years of Agnes have dampened my spirit of resistance, and I don't step in to tell her off. "This is your chance to prove you're worth more than that."

"To whom?" I find myself sputtering. "To you? Why do you think I care about proving anything to you?"

"Good," she says with a grin. "Your spirit isn't entirely broken yet. I'd prefer to be the person to do that. We can rebuild from there."

"You're crazy," I say before I can think better of it.

"A lot of people think so, sure," she says with a sly grin. "But no one would ever call me a pushover. Can the same be said of you?"

I don't say anything, because I can't. I am a pushover, and we both know it. Maybe I've always been that way, or maybe seven years of Agnes Lewis did it to me. Either way, there's no denying the truth—a truth that's even now seeping into my bones and making me feel weak. Small. I don't like her for that. I don't like her for taking my world and shaking it like it's a snow globe she might choose to throw in the trash.

"No, I didn't think so," she says. "Drink your bourbon."

My hand lifts the glass of its own accord, and for a second, I think I'm going to sip it—that I'll do what she told me to, for no other reason than that she told me, but then she says. "What'd you think of your companions on the plane?" Her gaze lowers to my shirt, and a lazy grin crosses her face. "I see you met Declan."

I don't plan it, I just throw the contents of the glass onto her face.

I flinch after I do it, my hand clutching against the empty tumbler as if I can retroactively take it back, because I've never done anything like that before. Ever. My dad always taught me to avoid conflict at school. Two kids in his middle school wailed on each other, and one of them ended up hitting the other in the head with a rock and giving him a concussion so bad he missed two months of school.

It's not worth the risk, he'd say. It's always better to walk away with your body and dignity intact.

But Nicole doesn't hit me in retaliation. She doesn't even yell or jump to her feet. Instead her smile stretches wider—it's genuine and terrifying, and I feel like I made a big mistake by coming here. A bigger one by throwing that drink on her.

"Good," she says, grabbing a dish towel that's sitting on the middle of the table and sopping up most of the liquid. "I wish you'd wasted a shittier bourbon, but I'm glad to see you're not all rose petals and butterflies on the inside. I'd hoped for more."

"You don't get to control my life," I say, rising to my feet. "How'd you know my seat would be next to Declan's?"

"You should be thanking me," she says, smirking now. Her shirt has to be as soaked as mine was earlier, but she doesn't seem uncomfortable in her skin. I'll bet this woman is never uncomfortable in her skin. "He's a sexy beast, and it's obvious you noticed." She waggles her eyebrows up and down. "The second I saw him, I knew I couldn't let him go to waste."

"We were both stranded, and we got caught in the rain. So he gave me a shirt to change into. Big whoop," I say. "I can see you're very concerned with how I got here from the Charlotte airport, and why I arrived in a tow truck."

She waves a hand in unconcern. "What matters is that you're here. Besides, I've met that guy. Roy is a harmless non-entity. The perfect person to drive you around."

"His name is Rex."

"I don't care." Her gaze narrows on me, calculating. "What happened with Declan? Why wasn't he the one who dropped you off? Did you piss him off? Because that wouldn't be good for our plans. I was banking on you charming him with your blonde hair and Pollyanna personality."

"What plans?" I ask through my teeth.

She sighs, and rocks back in her chair, balancing it on its back legs. I hope it falls. "I put you between him and Mrs. Rosings for a reason, Claire. Declan's the one who found our father's body, and our dad was screwing Mrs. Rosings. If someone offed him, it was probably one of them. And you're going to help me find out which."