Bad Heiress Day. Allie Pleiter

      “Darcy, it’s Aunt Jenny.”

      Oh, no. Not Aunt Jenny. This woman had single-handedly started dozens of family arguments.

      “Good morning, Aunt Jenny,” was all Darcy could manage, still holding a box of Pop-Tarts in her other hand. She could already hear the usual hurt edge in the woman’s voice.

      “I just had to call and ask, what were you thinking, child? How could you be so hurtful to the rest of your family? You know we couldn’t get there for the memorial service. They’ve only just now opened up the airports again. Honestly.”

      “Look, Aunt Jenny, I know…” Darcy picked up a Handi Wipes and began mopping up crumbs in an effort to keep from jumping down Aunt Jenny’s throat.

      “You know I would have wanted to be there. We’re all that Paul had left. Would it have killed you to put off the service until the family could come pay their respects?”

      All that Paul had left, huh? “Aunt Jenny…” For a second, she considered that hanging up might be the wisest course of action—she was sure to say something she’d regret if Aunt Jenny kept it up.

      “I just wanted to ask how you could be so inconsiderate. Why, Charles is just livid.” Darcy could imagine just how livid Uncle Chuck could be. The man rarely got off his La-Z-Boy for anything. One of Aunt Jenny’s favorite tactics was to project her self-righteous anger onto Chuck—whom everyone knew to be permanently disinterested—as if he were some sort of emotional ventriloquist’s dummy. Darcy doubted that Chuck had done much more than hoist a beer in her dad’s honor and tell Jenny to go buy a nice card and send flowers.

      And she hadn’t even done that much.

      Darcy wrung out the cloth, trying not to visualize it as Jenny’s neck. “There didn’t seem to be much point in waiting. We didn’t know how long travel would be disrupted. We can always have a nice little family service in the summer.”

      “How very convenient for you. I don’t see the hurry in all this.”

      Darcy whirled around at the harshness of the woman’s words, the phone cord knocking over a glass of juice Paula had left too near the edge of the counter. Her patience shattered with the glass. “I’m sorry you’re upset, Aunt Jenny, but Dad had said his goodbyes. Perhaps you should have paid your respects to him while he was still alive.” She hadn’t intended to be so cruel, but her anger at all the people who stayed away because it was hard to be with Dad came tumbling out. Jenny had never come. Not once in two years. “You never once came to visit him while he was sick, why start now?”

      Jack looked up from the breakfast nook and began to ease himself off the chair. Aunt Jenny’s wounded silence filled the phone. Darcy shut her eyes, fighting for control. Acting like this wouldn’t solve anything. She didn’t fight Jack when he took the phone from her hands.

      “Jenny, perhaps we should leave this conversation for another day. You can understand it has been a hard time.”

      “Jack, I’d have thought you would have been—” came the woman’s shrill voice through the receiver.

      “I’m sorry, Jenny, but Darcy and I have an appointment and we really need to go.”

      Darcy shut her eyes. She heard Jack mutter something less than kind as he thrust the handset back into the cradle.

      “You knew she’d react that way,” he said as he bent over the broken glass, picking shards out of the puddle of orange juice with his fingers.

      Darcy sniffed. “I can hope.”

      “It’s gonna get worse when she finds out about the money.”

      “She’s not going to find out about the money,” Darcy replied. It was hard enough to deal with her own reaction, she wasn’t going to add vicious Aunt Jenny into the mix. “Dar—”

      “I’m not dealing with her. Not now. She’s been invisible for two years, she doesn’t get to show up and play loving sister now.”

      “Yes, I know she’s horrible, but she was horrible before. She’s always been—”

      Darcy cut him off. “Who’s side are you on, anyway?”

      He tossed the shards into the garbage. “Yours. Ours. But we’re all just going to have to try to be reasonable….”

      “Don’t do that!” Darcy snapped. She wasn’t ready to be reasonable. She’d been reasonable and responsible and reliable for months, and she’d been repaid with deception and death. There was nothing reasonable about that. She’d earned the right to act out. To be unreasonable.

      But not to Jack. For God’s sake, he didn’t deserve this. She wasn’t handling this well. Tears tightened her throat.

      “Jack, I’m…”

      “Not handling this well,” he said softly, as he stepped over the juice puddle to take her in his arms. “But it’s only your first week on tour as Little Orphan Heiress.” He’d coined the term late last night after they lay in bed talking. It was so crass, so full of disrespect for the situation at hand, that it made her laugh. Awful but truthful. She should have slapped him on the cheek for the hideous remark, but somehow she loved him for daring to say it. For the absurd honesty of it. “We’ve got a lot to work out here, and that last remnant of your bonkers family isn’t helping.” He kissed her forehead. “But I’m on your side, here, remember?”

      “No, I’m on the side. You’re standing in the middle of the orange juice.”

      Chapter 4

      Comfortably Drastic

      Despite death and national security, Monday came.

      After seeing everyone off to work and school, Darcy sat alone in the quiet of her deserted kitchen, watching the steam make graceful curls out of her teacup. The frenzied desperation of the last week had filtered down to a kind of dead calm. A low tide, still and dry. Darcy remembered the feeling from her childhood home on the Gulf Coast. A flat void of mud and tidal leftovers, baking to a slightly foul smell in the hot summer afternoon.

      Low tide.

      If life had a low tide, she had hit it.

      Her dad was right about one thing: the money meant almost nothing in the face of her life’s tangled messes. It offered no real comfort, just complication. Darcy wondered if the odd sensation of useless abundance had struck her father when the lawsuit had been won. Money, she guessed, was a poor substitute for a living wife. She sure knew it was a poor substitute for a living father.

      The house gaped open and empty around her. She wondered, aimlessly, when the last time was she washed this bathrobe? Or when was the last time she’d bought anything new for the house? Had a haircut? Put on lipstick?

      The idea rose in her chest and surfaced with a small, quiet, pop. Today was Monday. Mike had science club, Paula had dance lessons. And, for once, it was everybody else’s turn to carpool. She cast a hopeful eye at the kitchen calendar, grateful to see a blank square. She had the whole day.

      Granted, there were about two dozen responsible things Darcy ought to be doing today, not counting the massive stack of paperwork for her father’s estate.

      But responsibility wasn’t coming along today. Darcy Nightengale was going to be her own best friend today, and the rest of the world could just wait until tomorrow.

      She grabbed her address book and the yellow pages and made three phone calls, not taking no for an answer on any of them.

      She was out the door in seventeen minutes flat.

      “Mercy! What have you done with Darcy Nightengale? I know she went in there half an hour ago. Where’d you put her?” Kate let the magazine she was holding fall into her lap. Darcy reveled in the way Kate’s eyes lit up. Kate’s look was exactly the way she felt.

      Ernestine