“Why?”

“You’re eligible to buy one hundred shares at eighteen dollars a share. So you need to mail in a check for eighteen hundred dollars.”

Jess grinned in disbelief. “Eighteen hundred dollars?”

“No, no, no, you have to do this,” Emily said. “After the IPO, the price will go through the roof. Daddy’s buying. Aunt Joan is buying….”

“Maybe they can buy some for me too.”

“No, this is important. Stop thinking like a student.”

“I am a student.”

“Just leave that aside for the moment, okay? Follow the directions. You’ll do really, really well.”

“How do you know?”

“Have you heard of Priceline?”

“No.”

“Sycamore Networks?”

Jess shook her head as Emily rattled off the names of companies that had gone public in 1999. The start-ups had opened at sixteen dollars, thirty-eight dollars, and were now selling for hundreds of dollars a share. “Just read the material, and mail the check….”

“But I don’t have eighteen hundred dollars,” Jess reminded her sister.

“So borrow.”

“All right, will you lend me eighteen hundred dollars?”

Emily lost patience. “If you’d just temporarily give up your aversion to money …”

“I don’t have an aversion to money,” Jess said. “I don’t have any. There’s a big difference.”

“I don’t think you understand what I’m giving you,” said Emily. “I get only ten on my Friends and Family list.”

“So it’s sort of an honor,” said Jess.

“It’s sort of an opportunity. Please don’t lose this stuff. You have ten days to take care of this. Just follow through, okay?”

“If you insist.” Emily’s bossiness brought out the diva in Jess.

“Promise.”

“Promise,” Jess said. After which she couldn’t help asking, “Do I still have to try on the clothes?”

“Here’s the blouse, and the jacket. Here’s the skirt.” Emily straightened the blanket on Jess’s unmade bed and sat on top.

The skirt was short, the jacket snug, and they were woven in a rust and orange tweed. The blouse was caramel silk with a strange lacquered finish, not just caramel but caramelized. Jess gazed for a moment at the three pieces. Then she stripped off the rest of her clothes and plunged in.

“Oh, they’re perfect,” said Emily. “They fit perfectly. Do you have a mirror?”

“Just in the bathroom.”

“Here, brush your hair and tie it back. Or put it up. Go take a look.”

Jess padded off to the bathroom and peeked at herself in the mirror, where she saw her own bemused face, more freckled than she remembered. The tweed jacket and the silk blouse reminded her of a game she and Emily had played when they were little. They called themselves Dress-Up Ladies and teetered through the house on high heels. Sometimes Emily would wear a satin evening gown, and pretend she was a bride. Then Jess would be the flower girl, with scarves tied around her waist. That was before their father gave away their mother’s clothes.

“Can you see?” Emily called from the bedroom.

“It’s really nice,” Jess called back.

“It’s a Vivienne Tam suit,” said Emily when Jess returned.

“Thank you. I could tell by the … label.” Jess sat down cautiously on her desk chair. Comically, experimentally, she tried crossing her legs.

“You hate it,” Emily said.

“No! It’s really very pretty.” Jess was already undressing.

“Just say you’ll wear it once.”

“I’ll wear it to your IPO.” Jess pulled on a giant T-shirt and sweatpants.

“You aren’t going to the IPO. It’s not a wedding.”

“Okay, I’ll wear it to your wedding.” Jess flopped onto the bed. “Don’t you miss him?”

“We’re used to it.”

“I never would be,” Jess declared, and added silently, Never in a million years. She would never deny herself the one she loved, or make excuses for him either. She’d never say, It’s complicated, or We have to be patient. Love was not patient. Love was not kind. It didn’t keep; it couldn’t wait. Not in her experience. Certainly not in her imagination.

“What did Dad and Heidi get you?” Emily asked.

“Just the tickets home for Thanksgiving. And they sent me pictures from the kids. See—Lily wrote her name, and a rainbow.” Jess spread their half sisters’ drawings over the bed. “I think these scribbles are from Maya. And I have Mom’s letter here somewhere….”

Their mother, Gillian, had passed away when Emily was ten and Jess was only five. Fighting breast cancer, suffering from long treatments, alternately hoping and despairing as the disease recurred, Gillian had cast about for ways to look after her daughters when she was gone. She’d then learned that some patients wrote letters to their children for their birthdays. Jess and Emily each had a set of sealed envelopes.

Jess pulled her letter from a stack of notebooks on the floor. “It’s short.” The letters got shorter and shorter. Reading them was hard, like watching their mother run out of air.

“Dear Jessie,” Emily read aloud as she smoothed the creased paper, “I am trying to imagine you as a young lady, when all I see is a five-year-old girl waving her little legs in the air—that’s the sign that you’re tired. I imagine you with your hair untangled. Your sister tried to brush your hair this morning and you wouldn’t let her. I wish you would.” Emily paused a moment, sat up straighter on the bed and continued. “Surely by now you are embarking on a profession. If you have not yet embarked, please do!

“Ahem,” said Emily.

“I have embarked!” Jess protested. “A doctoral program is embarking.”

“She means working.”

“Philosophy is work. And I also have a job.” By this, Jess meant her part-time job at Yorick’s, the rare-book store on Channing where she did her reading in the afternoons.

“I don’t mean a job—” Emily read, and then stopped short. “She knew what you were going to say.”

Jess giggled, because Emily treated the letters like such oracles.

“I don’t mean a job. I am talking about a career, and a vocation. George Eliot wrote ‘that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life’—but that was more than one hundred years ago. I’m hoping that you and your sister will set your sights a little higher.” A little higher, Emily thought, as she placed the letter on the bed, and yet Gillian had been a mother, no more, no less. Would she have done more if she had lived? Much more? Or just a little? Jess was sorting through her mail on the floor. “You aren’t even listening,” Emily accused her.

“Yes, I am. Things are not so ill with you and me.”

“You never take these letters seriously.”

“I do! Of course I do. I’ve read them all—lots of times.”

Emily was shocked. “All of them? Up to the end?”

“Yeah, I read them all at once when I was twelve.”

“You did not!” Emily had always looked forward to her birthday letters and missed them now. Gillian had only written them up to age twenty-five. “That’s just wrong.”

“Why? She never said you have to wait for your birthday every year.”

“But that was the intent!”

Jess considered this. “Maybe. I just opened all of mine at once. Then I got into Dad’s computer and opened the WordPerfect files.”

“Why would you do something like that?” The idea was foreign to Emily. Not only dishonorable, but self-defeating, like peeking to see how a book ends. “Didn’t you feel bad?”

“No. Yours were better than mine, anyway.”

“You read mine?”

“They were more interesting,” Jess confessed cheerfully.

“Jess.”

“Well, you were older, so she knew you better.”

“I’m sorry,” said Emily.

“Sorry that you’re older?” Jess hit her sister with a pillow. “Why are you so sad tonight?”

“I’m not sad,” Emily retorted, but she was; she was. Birthdays saddened her. She missed their mother, and she did miss Jonathan, although she wouldn’t talk about it. He had his own start-up on the East Coast and they didn’t see each other enough. Of course Jess knew that. She knew what Emily kept hidden, and so their time together was difficult, and also sweet.

Jess found what she was looking for on the floor, a photo of Lily and Maya in red and green plaid nightgowns. “Look at this.”

Emily examined the picture. “Have you noticed how Heidi likes Christmas colors?” she asked Jess. “It’s like she celebrates Christmas all year round.”

“Mmm.” Jess loved her sister most when she was catty. Emily was so disciplined, as a rule. Jess waited for those occasions when Emily said an unkind word. There was nothing cozier than talking about their father and his house in Canaan, Mass.—the house where they had not grown up. Nothing sweeter than wondering how Heidi got their father to go running—about which they felt the same way—pleased and also secretly a little angry, because he had never felt the need to exercise before. They discussed the cuteness of their half sisters, aged three and one; they never forgot to speak of this, but they reverted quickly to Heidi and how she didn’t cook. On the one hand, they were supposed to fly east for Thanksgiving, and on the other hand, they would be eating at a restaurant.

“It’s the worst of both worlds,” said Emily. “Guilt without home cooking.”

“I think I’d be afraid of Heidi in the kitchen,” said Jess, and Emily could not stop laughing. It was as if all their talk before, about the IPO and the birthday letters and the suit had been a prelude to this—the real conversation about their father and the family, all new people: Heidi and the little girls. Jacinta, the live-out nanny, who kept house and took care of dinner, but unfortunately took off weekends. Elmo, the new goldfish, who had arrived without the children’s knowledge after the first Elmo went belly-up. Richard was new too, someone who changed diapers.