Chapter 1SofiaThenThis time, they catch her watching them.
Sofia doesn’t look away fast enough. Brooke drops her eyes back to her color-coded sixteenth-century lit notes, and Caroline’s glance flicks away from Sofia’s in the corner of one of their mirrors. They’d hung the gallery wall together, Caroline and Sofia, before Brooke Winters ruined everything. Afternoon light glares at the three of them thorough a brass-edged looking glass. It’s so much easier to appreciate its eclectic whimsy when a hangover isn’t burrowing into your optic nerves.
Brooke and Caroline are out of the room before Sofia’s even really there—probably off to jog around campus and love every minute of it. Jenna is volunteering for a blood drive or something else that will look great on her medical school applications. The roommates are busy enjoying a bright Sunday fall morning in Connecticut, crisp and admissions-brochure-ready. What could be better?
More wholesome?
More vomit-triggering?
Sinking onto the just-vacated couch, Sofia is alone in the common space of their suite. A sharp ache encircles her waist. She’s still in the clothes from last night in Manhattan with Leo: mercilessly skinny skinny jeans (Caroline’s), a silky tank top, boots splayed at lopsided angles next to the door. Sofia gingerly peels off the jeans.
The inseams have dug shallow, ribbed trenches in the skin that run from her hips to her bony ankles. She rubs at the marks as she swings her legs onto the floor, dislodging her flip phone. Sofia got it in exchange for writing a few papers for a senior whose trust fund hung in the balance of graduating on time. She flicks open the cracked screen. Leo Archer: three missed calls. Caroline Archer: one text message:
We need to talk.
A fist clenches, then tightens in her stomach. Sofia can’t handle either of the Archer siblings right now. Those conversations will have to wait until she rejoins the land of the functional living. She rakes through her thick strands of hair that gleamed in perfect loose waves last night but have now collapsed into a tangled mess. She considers taking one of Leo’s little blue pills. There are probably a few left at the bottom of her purse. She could blow the lint off one and make the pain float away on a pharma-cumulus cloud. Tempting, but no.
Sofia can see into Brooke’s room from here: she always leaves her door open like a trusting idiot. Everything changed when Brooke arrived on campus, assigned to Caroline’s, Sofia’s and Jenna’s lives through the kind of registration “coincidence” rich Yale donors like Brooke Winters’s family seem to arrange all the time. Brooke’s arrival coincided with the end of Sofia and Caroline’s relationship, another “coincidence” Sofia won’t ignore. And the worst part is, Sofia didn’t even realize how fragile everything was between the two of them. How wide the chasm between Caroline’s world and hers will always be.
Sofia slouches over to the refrigerator in the cramped kitchenette, opens a carton of day-old lo mein, and takes a few gloriously greasy bites, wishing the Imperial Palace sold the stuff by the yard. Some people responsibly burn off empty calories, while others revel in shamelessly piling onto the damage. Without question, Brooke falls into the former category. As much as anything else, that just makes Sofia hate her more.
Brooke doesn’t strike an outsider as the sort of person who could ruin people’s lives. To the untrained eye, she is all sweetness and pedigree, paper-thin cashmere cardigans and effortlessly understated good taste that says old money in a very carrying whisper. The kind that’s loud enough to make people like Sofia want to scurry back into their proper places: basement kitchens, damp groundskeepers’ sheds, or steaming laundries, a discreet distance away from oaken offices and time-weathered statues of important men.
Like Caroline, Brooke is fluent in the language of boarding schools and the best places to ski, the thousands of unwritten rules that govern a world Sofia can only ever press her nose against and try not to smudge the glass. “Winters,” like “Archer,” is the gloss that smooths Brooke’s path to a life spent flitting from waterfront properties to charity galas and handsome investment banker husbands. Brooke is someone without a chip on her shoulder, without baggage, without a constant ache for something Sofia can never have.
Sofia spools more glistening brown noodles around the plastic fork and into her mouth, and a slimy chunk of chicken falls with a moist splat onto her bare thigh. There’s nothing like eating leftover takeout in your underwear to make it clear that yes, you really do need to get your shit together. And as a matter of fact, that’s precisely what Sofia intends to do. As long as she doesn’t get caught in the more unsavory aspects of her plan.
She leaves the empty container next to the vase of flowers Bryce had delivered to Caroline yesterday. The spray of funeral-scented lilies and roses are intended to make up for his checking out the coxswain on the women’s crew team. It’s the kind of fight only rich people can have. Guys like Bryce Hostetler don’t have to say they’re sorry. They buy “sorry,” beautifully packaged. Resisting the urge to topple the vase to the floor, Sofia stretches and leaves the kitchen.
Her room is spare and nowhere as stylish as the rest of the suite. She’ll probably never know what it’s like to have $40 to spend on “designer candles’’—which are apparently a thing. But the bittersweet smell of cigarettes, forever steeped into Sofia’s sheets and clothes, and Yaya’s lavender sachets reminds Sofia of the tiny room she’d shared with Drea in their apartment above Mom’s restaurant. Of seagull calls and storm-chilled wind rushing through the salt grass. Of the island. Home. Sofia struggles to remember what happened last night, but the hangover prevents her from uncovering more than fragments. Instead, the familiar, well-worn reel of the summer she met Caroline flickers to life in her mind.
The Archers came to Nantucket for the season every year, along with the tide of dozens of families exactly like them. Caroline’s stepfather, the steely, formidable Bill Archer, and her mother, the fragile, glamorous Diana Archer, were carbon copies of most of their little Greek bistro’s Chardonnay-mainlining clientele. Leo and Caroline looked so alike that no one would have guessed that Bill wasn’t Caroline’s biological father. Not unless they noticed the impatience mixed with disapproval on Bill’s face whenever his inconvenient, willful stepdaughter was in view.
It didn’t matter how much Leo, Bill’s son with Diana, loved his half sister. Caroline might be legally allowed to call herself “Archer,” but she would always be stray trash stuck to Bill’s shoes. Caroline was the most beautiful thing Sofia had ever seen all those summers ago: wild white-blond hair and eyes like the sky in a gathering storm. A warrior queen trapped in a Park Avenue darling’s body. Sofia had no use for Leo then, the little brother utterly eclipsed by his sister.
Bill and Diana more or less allowed Caroline and Leo free rein through the hot, salt-sticky days between June and July in Nantucket, more out of lack of interest than kindness. Their children’s absence made it easier to spend their days playing tennis or hunting poor people or whatever it is the rich do with the stretch between Memorial Day and Labor Day. Whenever Sofia wasn’t working shifts at Santorini’s, she got to bask in Caroline’s world, a world that for one blissful summer after the next, became hers, too.
Nights in the sand dunes under the stars. The crowded downtown and scorching restaurant kitchen melted away to the multimillion-dollar peace behind gated estates. Days spent in the ocean, on the sand, reading and sharing secrets in the attic of the Archers’ summer “cottage.” It doesn’t matter that, on the surface, their relationship makes no sense. The particular loneliness of all outsiders brought them together, and it kept them entwined in a new reality of their own making. One just for the two of them.
Stripping off the remainder of her clothes, Sofia piles them neatly into a plastic hamper. If you’ve never had a space of your own, taking good care of your first is an automatic. Instinctive. Jenna has it, too. Sofia noticed it in her roommate’s compulsive cleaning, probably ingrained from the summers Jenna spent sweating in a Merry Maids van and lugging around mops with her mom instead of at a cushy internship or doing “ecological restoration work” between tequila shots in Costa Rica. She wraps herself in a towel, extracts a makeup remover sheet from its crumpled pack on the dresser, and wages a short war against the makeup, oil, and dirt smudged on her face. Gradually, her unvarnished features emerge in the mirror.
Skin like milk. It’s stark against eyebrows almost as dark as the eyeliner blackening the makeup remover sheet that swipes across Yaya’s high cheekbones and around the Eliades hazel eyes. She combs her hair into a curtain that hangs past two of her favorite features: sharp, prominent shoulder blades. After the first time Leo and Sofia had sex, Leo said she looked like someone had sawed off angel wings and left the stubs behind. The thought makes her shiver.
Copyright © 2025 by Virginia Trench. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
