Inside, she took a deep breath and tried to let go of the ball of stress in her gut. The flashback had been the first she’d had in a long time, and she’d nearly forgotten the taste of bone-deep terror, a sensation most people would never experience.
She looked around. Her place was clean, her plants were alive—well, semi-alive, anyway. Everything was great.
She was working on believing that when a knock came at her door. And actually, it was more of a pounding, loud and startling in the calm silence of her living room. Not Tommy—he would’ve knocked while yelling her name. Cole would’ve texted her before getting out of his car.
No stranger to danger, Brooke grabbed her trusty baseball bat on the way to the door. She hadn’t traveled the planet over and back more times than she could count without learning how to protect herself. Just as she leaned in to look out the peephole, there came another round of pounding.
“Brooke!” called out a female voice. “Oh God, what if you’re not home? Please be home!”
Brooke went still as stone. She knew that voice, though it’d been a while. A long while. It belonged to her older sister, Mindy. Mindy had her shit together. She wore a body armor of calm like other women wore earrings, didn’t have to count in her head, and had never lost her way or screwed up her entire life.
The frantic knocking continued, now accompanied by something that sounded suspiciously like sobs.
Brooke yanked open the front door, and Mindy fell into her arms. They hadn’t seen each other in over a year, hadn’t spoken in months, and the last time they had, they’d hung up on each other.
“What the hell?” Brooke asked.
They weren’t a demonstrative family. Hugs were saved for weddings and funerals, or the very occasional family gathering where there was alcohol, copious amounts of it. Emotions were kept tight to the vest. But Mindy was demonstrating boatloads of emotion at high volume, clinging like Saran Wrap while crying and talking at the same time in a pitch not meant for humans.
“Min, you gotta slow down,” Brooke said. “Only dogs can hear you right now.”
Mindy sucked in a breath and lifted her head. Her mascara was smudged so badly that it was possibly yesterday’s mascara that just hadn’t been removed. She wore no other makeup. She was at least fifteen pounds heavier than Brooke had ever seen her. Her clothes were wrinkled and there was a suspicious-looking dark stain on her T-shirt, which was odd because Mindy didn’t wear tees. Her shoulder-length hair was the same honey color as Brooke’s, but Mindy’s hair always behaved. Not today. It was outdoing Brooke’s in the squirrel-tail impersonation and looked like it was a week past needing a shampoo. Mindy hiccuped, but thankfully stopped sobbing.
Brooke nodded gratefully, but braced herself. She had a very bad feeling. “Okay. Now who’s dead?”
Mindy choked on a low laugh and swiped beneath her eyes, succeeding only in making things worse. “No one’s dead. Unless you count my personal life.”
This made no sense. Mindy had been born with a plan in hand. At any given moment of any day, she could flip open her fancy binder and tell you exactly where she was in that plan. “You’ve got a little something in your hair,” Brooke said, and gingerly picked it out. It was a Cheerio.
“It’s Maddox’s. He was chucking them in the car.” Mindy’s eyes were misting again. “You don’t know how lucky you are that you don’t have kids!”
It used to be that a sentence like that would send a hot poker of fire through Brooke’s chest, but now it was more like a dull ache. Mostly. “Why are you falling apart? You never fall apart.”
Mindy shook her head. “Meet the new me. Remember when we were little and poor because Dad had put all his money into the first POP Smoothie Shop, and everyone called us the Lemon sisters?”
“We are the Lemon sisters,” Brooke said.
“Yes, but they made it a play on words, like we were lemons. As in, bad lemons. As in, worthless. Well, I’m a bad Lemon!”
“First of all, you were the one who told me to ignore it back then because we weren’t worthless,” Brooke said, “so I’ll tell you now—we’re still not. And second, you’ve got a great life, a life you’ve planned out in great detail, I might add. You married a doctor. You now run and manage the Wildstone POP Smoothie Shop. You bake like no other. People flock to the shop on the days you bring in your fresh stuff to sell alongside the smoothies. You’ve got three kids. You live in a house with a real white picket fence, for God’s sake.”
Mindy sniffed. “I know! And I get that on paper it looks like I’m the together sister, but I’m not!”
That shouldn’t have hurt, but it did. Mindy didn’t have the first clue about Brooke’s life these days. Which was another problem entirely. “Min, what’s really going on here? We don’t do this. We’re not . . . close.”
“Well, whose fault is that?” Mindy’s eyes filled. “I burned the school cupcakes and the firefighters had to come, and now the whole block knows I’m losing my shit. Dad wants to sell off some of the POP Smoothie Shops, including the Wildstone one, so he can ‘retire’”—she put “retire” in air quotes, probably because their dad was already pretty much hands-off with the business—“which puts me out of work. Linc says I should buy it, and I love that store, you know how much I love working that store, but I can’t so much as potty train Maddox, even though he’s thirty-two-point-five months old.” She drew in a shuddery breath. “And I think Linc’s having an affair with Brittney, our nanny.”
Whoa. Brooke stopped trying to do the math to figure out how old 32.5 months was in years and stared at her sister. “What?”
“Look, I know you hate me, but when it all started to fall apart in the car on the way home from Mom and Dad’s in Palm Springs, I looked you up. Google Maps said you were right on the way home to Wildstone.”
Wildstone. Their hometown on the central coast of California, tucked among wineries and ranches and gorgeous rolling hills dotted with oaks. Just the thought of it conjured up a sense of longing so painful it almost buckled her knees. “I don’t hate you,” she murmured. She shook her head. “And do you really think your husband, the guy you’ve been in love with since the second grade and who worships the ground you walk on, is having an affair with the nanny? And since when do you have a nanny?”
“Since I went back to work at the shop right after Maddox was born.” Mindy sighed. “She’s only part-time, but yes, I really think he’s cheating on me. Which means I’m going to be single soon.” She clutched Brooke’s arm, the whites of her eyes showing. “I can’t go back to being single, Brooke. I mean, how do you know which way to swipe, left or right?”
“Okay, first off . . . breathe.” Brooke waited until Mindy had gulped in some air. “Good. Second, why do you think Linc’s having an affair?”
“Because Cosmo says that married couples our age are supposed to have sex two to three times a week, and we don’t. I’m not sure we managed to have sex once this whole month!” She tossed up her hands. “It used to be every day. Every day, Brooke, and we used to role-play, too, like sexy bad cop and sassy perp, or naughty nurse and—”