It’s Always the Husband. Michele Campbell

until Kate killed the mood by warning them about what to expect.

      “Beware the stepmonster,” she said.

      Kate’s mother had died of cancer when she was ten, and she was on her second stepmother.

      “Victoria hates me. She’ll be all sorts of nasty when she sees you because she’ll hate you by association. Ignore her. Dad will run interference, since you’re from Carlisle, and anything Carlisle is cool with him.”

      “Wait a minute. They know we’re coming, right?” Jenny said.

      Kate waved her hand airily, and Jenny’s stomach fell.

      “Relax. It’s fine,” Kate said.

      The cab came to a stop in front of a stately brick building. A uniformed doorman rushed over and opened the door. He was jolly, with a silver mustache and a big smile, and wore a jaunty cap with earflaps.

      “Welcome home, Katie,” the doorman said, in a nasal New York accent, then knocked on the driver’s window. “Open the trunk, my friend.”

      “Hey,” Kate said, waving at the doorman perfunctorily as she jumped out and hurried into the lobby.

      The sidewalk was wide here, and spanking clean. Well-dressed people glided by in both directions, some in furs, others walking fussy little dogs. Jenny stepped hesitantly from the cab. Kate was inside already, and the doorman was pulling bags from the trunk of the taxi and loading them onto a shiny brass luggage cart. Apparently their bags would be taken care of, but what about the cab fare? Jenny reached for her wallet, trying not to feel resentful. She was getting free lodging in New York, after all, and she knew Aubrey couldn’t afford to cover the meter. Hopefully they wouldn’t be taking too many cabs, or she’d end up with no money to buy Christmas presents this year.

      The lobby sparkled in the light of a tall Christmas tree and an enormous crystal chandelier. Kate stood inside the open elevator, practically bristling with anxiety and impatience. It had never occurred to Jenny before that Kate might be nervous to come home.

      “Let’s go,” Kate said.

      “Our bags,” Jenny said.

      “Gus’ll bring ’em up in the service elevator.”

      A second doorman lurked in the corner of the elevator, operating the old-fashioned controls. He slid the door closed noisily with a brass handle, and they started to climb. The elevator was dark and smelled of lemon furniture polish. A moment later, it deposited them directly into the Eastman apartment. The girls stepped into a grand entry gallery with a black-and-white checkerboard marble floor. There was no obvious place to put their boots and coats, only a carved table with a claw-foot base that held a tall vase of lilies, and impressive oil paintings on the walls. Three towheaded boys, who all looked to be under the age of eight, came running into the foyer, shouting Kate’s name.

      “My favorite monsters!” she cried, patting them like puppies as they hugged her legs. Over their heads, she rolled her eyes at Jenny and Aubrey. “Every time Victoria pops out a little Eastman, my inheritance shrinks. Plus there’s my stepsister Louise. She’s not here, she lives in Switzerland with her mother. They spend money like it’s water.”

      Money must be the source of the conflict, then. Certainly when Victoria came out to greet them a moment later, she didn’t seem remotely like a monster. To the contrary, she was young and pretty, with expensively highlighted hair, and did her best to be gracious in receiving her stepdaughter’s unexpected guests.

      “A crowd at Thanksgiving, how jolly,” she said, smiling tightly. “Plenty of food, and we’ll make room at the table. I’ll have Gus bring up some caterer’s chairs from the storage room.”

      Kate hugged her stepmother hello and they exchanged pleasantries. Every word out of Kate’s mouth dripped with contempt, no matter how innocuous the literal meaning. Comments as seemingly agreeable as “Don’t you look fab” and “What gorgeous earrings. Are they new?” carried a poisonous undertone that was as apparent to Jenny as it surely was to Victoria.

      Victoria showed them to a hall closet where they could stow their things, and said she would get to work finding sleeping bags for the floor of the library.

      “You can duke it out for the couch,” Victoria added.

      “Can’t we sleep in the maid’s room so we can have some privacy? Rosalba’s off for the holiday, isn’t she?” Kate whined.

      “She’d kill me if she found out. I don’t need her moping over it,” Victoria said, and strode off.

      “See? She cares more about her housekeeper than she does about me,” Kate said, loudly enough that Victoria surely heard.

      Kate led them to the library, which was basically a large, lavishly appointed, misnamed den. The walnut shelves held no books, but were filled instead with expensive-looking knickknacks and silver-framed photographs of the little stepmonsters. Kate dumped her bag on the floor, and only then did Jenny realize that it wouldn’t be just her and Aubrey camping on the gorgeous leather sofa. Kate didn’t have her own bedroom in her father’s apartment. This was Kate’s only home away from Carlisle, and it didn’t belong to her.

      “Come on, this is better than the digs I usually rate,” Kate said, seeing Jenny’s dismayed expression.

      “It’s fine. I didn’t say a word,” Jenny said. “What do you usually rate?”

      “Normally I sleep on a cot in the monsters’ room so I’m not in Victoria’s way. I got upgraded to the library because of you two, I guess. The room doesn’t matter. We’ll only be here to sleep,” Kate said.

      Kate set about making good on that promise. They changed out of their travel clothes and did their makeup in the hall bathroom, then hailed another cab. When they reached their destination, Jenny was careful to hop out first, and Kate opened her wallet without batting an eye. They cut a long line, and a bouncer looked them up and down and nodded, removing the velvet rope to let them into the nightclub of the moment, not bothering to check their IDs.

      “Your new hair got us in!” Kate shouted to Aubrey over the din as they entered the dark club. Jenny thought that was generous. Kate got them in – something in her looks, her outfit, her attitude. Anybody who believed otherwise wasn’t paying attention.

      “Blondes have more fun,” Aubrey said, smiling broadly.

      They threaded through the packed crowd, looking for the friends Kate had arranged to meet up with. Music pulsated. Young, fabulous-looking people, dressed in the hottest fashions, danced and swayed and made out under flashing colored lights. Everywhere she looked, Jenny saw waiters carrying trays weighed down with lavish cocktails and oversize bottles of champagne.

      “How much do the drinks cost?” Jenny worried aloud, but neither of them heard her.

      Kate’s friends were already ensconced in a large elevated booth overlooking the dance floor. Kate’s on-again-off-again boyfriend Griff Rothenberg sat next to a glamorous brunette, who leaned toward him and giggled suggestively while he ignored her, his eyes searching the dance floor restlessly. He spotted Kate, and his face lit up with wild desperation.

      As the girls mounted the steps to the booth, a security guard stepped in front of them.

      Griff sprang to his feet. “She’s with us,” he said.

      The guard turned. “Which one?” he asked.

      “Oh. All of them,” Griff replied, and Jenny realized he hadn’t even noticed her, or Aubrey either, so preoccupied was he with Kate.

      Griff sat down and slid over to make room, and the three girls crammed into the booth, thigh-to-thigh. Kate’s friends were the most uniformly beautiful people Jenny had ever seen, from Griff with his fine profile and head of sun-streaked hair, to the glamorous brunette, to a waif with mile-long eyelashes who looked like Edie Sedgwick and turned out to be the daughter of a famous billionaire. (The bodyguard who’d stopped them belonged to her.) Jenny recognized