"Your house sitters?" Evan said. "At Christmas?"
"When we're all here?" Gwen said.
"Well," said Frederick, "I wanted you to meet them."
Evan and Gwen looked at each other.
"Are you trying to fix me up or something, Dad?" Evan said. "Because, really, I can find my own girls, and I mean, your loser house sitters?"
"No, Evan, I am not trying to fix you up, believe me."
"It's so nice to meet you," Amber said when Frederick introduced the sisters to his children. "Freddie talks about you all the time."
"Freddie?" said Evan.
"She means your father," Crystal explained confidentially.
Frederick said, "Never mind, never mind. Here's my sister, Felicity. And this is her friend Joe."
"Freddie?" Evan was saying in astonishment to his sister.
The sisters moved into the attic bedroom and, they pointed out, would make themselves at home, no one needed to bother about them, since the house was practically their home; after all, they had spent so much time home-sitting in it.
Amber knew she had a high hill to climb, and she knew, too, that the going would be tough. She squared her pretty shoulders. Might as well get started at once. She had exaggerated only slightly to Annie: there had definitely been talk of marriage, or at least living together. But it was clear to her that she would have to neutralize Gwen and Evan first.
"What a great home," she said to Gwen. "So much history. I found a picture of it from, like, over a hundred years ago. On the Internet. It took me weeks, but . . . Here."
She had actually called the town museum and talked to an archivist who e-mailed it to her a few days before. She handed Gwen the copy she had printed out on thick matte photographic paper.
Gwen looked pleased in spite of herself. "Thanks." She examined the photo. "I've never seen this one. It looks so bare, doesn't it?"
"Your family obviously did a lot with the grounds."
Gwen nodded. "The rosebushes."
"Heirlooms." Then feeling a little more comfortable, Amber said, "Speaking of heirlooms, did your dad ever get that bathtub drain fixed? I reminded him about it a thousand times. That dad of yours, head in the clouds, right? Artists, right?"
Gwen looked at her blankly.
Amber, sensing she had gone too far too fast, tried to shift into reverse. "Such a beautiful old tub. With those claws? I brought some new bath salts. Perfect for that luxurious antique tub. I got them on a professional massage-therapy website. They're organic. They even have hemp in them." She bent down and unzipped her bag, pulling out a jar. "Would you like to try them?"
"No," Gwen said, her voice cold again. "I have no interest in hemp, thank you very much."
"I do," Evan said. "Just not in my bath."
"Oh yeah?" Crystal said. "Well, I have some really good weed . . ."
And so it was Crystal, not Amber, who chiseled the first real social chink in the Barrow family wall. Amber felt the victory had practically been handed to Crystal on a silver platter, and that it wasn't such a very big victory anyway, and she watched with a mixture of pique and gratification as Crystal and Evan retired to the back porch.
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