“I still can’t believe he drowned,” Danielle said as Natasha approached the group.
Natasha placed a hand on the casket. “It is a convenient explanation,” she murmured, “given everything that happened that night.”
Poppy whipped her head around. Aster pressed her lips together, looking caught. Corinne visibly paled. Even Rowan seemed nervous. They hadn’t exactly talked about what they’d been doing the evening Steven drowned—or much else that had happened that summer. Maybe there had been too many other things to discuss, or maybe they’d avoided it on purpose.
Julia touched Danielle’s arm. “Come on,” she said sharply. “Let’s leave them be.”
The organist broke into the opening bars of “So My Sheep May Safely Graze,” and they all took their seats. Supporting their grandmother, Edith, the priest walked slowly down the aisle. He grasped her dripping-with-diamonds, liver-spotted hand, although she kept trying to swat him away. Despite the humidity inside the church, Edith pulled her sable even tighter around her, as though it were a brace to hold her neck in place. She pushed her large, dark, round-framed glasses higher up her face and smiled coolly at the mourners.
When she reached their pew, Edith gave each of her granddaughters a papery kiss. “All of you look lovely.”
Then she sat, crossing her slim legs at the ankles, and folded her hands in her lap, as though she assumed all eyes were on her. And likely, they were. She always gave her granddaughters one piece of advice: You, my dears, are the heiresses. Remember that, always. Because no one else will ever forget.
The girls were the future of Saybrook’s Diamonds, and they had to act accordingly. They were to live their lives with the utmost decorum, smile for the cameras, speak several languages, hold many degrees, cultivate the art of conversation, and, most important, refrain from doing anything that might bring scandal upon the family.
And yet they had. All of them. It had been a summer of secrets. Secrets that set them apart and made them tighten inside—secrets that they hadn’t even told one another. As they glanced around the sweeping cathedral, they each suddenly feared a bolt of lightning from above. They were the heiresses, all right, the sparkling princesses of a family that might or might not be doomed. But by Edith’s standards, they hadn’t been behaving like heiresses at all.
And it was only a matter of time before the world found out.
FIVE YEARS LATER
1
On a late April morning, as rain smeared the windowpanes, washed the dirt off the sidewalks, and slowed traffic on every block in New York City, twenty-seven-year-old Corinne Saybrook stood barefoot in a dressing room, talking on her cell phone in clipped, precise Turkish.
“So we have permission to establish the liaison office?” Corinne asked Onur Alper, her contact at the Turkish branch of the General Directorate of Foreign Investments, whom she’d met the last time she’d visited.
“Yes, all of the documents are in place,” Mr. Alper answered, the phone connection crackling. “We’ll still need you to register with the tax office, but Saybrook’s International is cleared to set up a branch of your business in the Republic of Turkey. Congratulations to you and your company, Miss Saybrook.”
“Thank you so much,” Corinne said smoothly, adding a salaam before clapping the phone closed. She smiled at her feet, feeling the satisfying swell of victory. Her family’s jewelry empire was one of the most prominent retailers in the country, both for the masses and the fabulously wealthy, but it was Corinne’s job to make it number one in the world.
Then she gazed down at herself, almost startled to see where she was—and what she was wearing. She was clad in an ivory Monique Lhuillier gown. The Chantilly lace fabric clung to her body, accentuating her porcelain skin. The hem ended neatly at the floor at the front and spilled into a long, romantic train at the back. A diamond necklace, on loan from her family’s private collection, sparkled at her throat, the jewels cold and heavy against her skin. Today was the final fitting for her wedding dress. Corinne had already canceled several times because of work obligations, but with the wedding in a month, time was running out.
There was a knock on the dressing room door. Corinne’s cousin and matron of honor, Poppy, poked her head inside, dressed in a classic white shirt, khaki trench, skinny black pants, and a pair of bright red Hunter boots that only Poppy could pull off. Poppy had grown up on a farm in the Berkshires, spending as much time picking wild berries and milking cows as she did learning French and playing tennis.
“Everything all right, honey?”