Chapter One
“I WILL NEVER MARRY DAVID TREDWELL!”
Ariel Weatherly looked in the mirror and rehearsed her speech to her mother. “I am twenty-four years old and I will choose my own husband.” No, she thought. That’s not right. “I have chosen the man I want to marry and I will do so.” Yes, better. Much better.
There was a soft knock on the door.
On impulse, Ariel messed up her hair. She liked what she saw.
“Come in,” Ariel said, and a maid opened the door.
“Your mother would like to see you downstairs.”
“Yes, of course,” Ariel replied with a sigh.
The maid looked behind her to make sure Mrs. Weatherly wasn’t nearby. “I like your hair,” she said, then closed the door.
Ariel grabbed her brush and smoothed her hair, then she smiled. She wasn’t sure yet, but she may have come up with a way to get out of marrying David, to marry the man she truly loved, and to keep from being disinherited. Still smiling, she left her room and started down the stairs. If only Sara would agree. She must! Ariel thought. If she doesn’t …
But Ariel couldn’t think of that now. She only knew that she’d use whatever means she had at her disposal to get her cousin to agree to her plan.
Chapter Two
SARA READ ARIEL’S LETTER, THEN READ it again. She couldn’t believe her eyes. As always, the letter was written with a fountain pen on thick paper that Sara was sure cost half her year’s salary. But it wasn’t the extravagance that shocked her; she was used to that.
Ariel wanted to trade places with Sara. She wanted to be Sara, and Sara to be her.
“She wants to be me?” Sara whispered i
n wonder as she put the letter on her lap. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to have the leisure to sit around all day and plan adventurous schemes? she thought. Or time to plan anything, for that matter. Time to do anything other than whatever your egomaniac boss could think up for you to do? Sara had come to care about her cousin a great deal over the years, but that didn’t keep her from being jealous.
Sitting in her tiny New York apartment, her feet up, exhausted from yet another day running around doing her boss’s bidding, Sara gazed out the window to the brick wall across the alley. She could afford a better apartment, but after a lifetime of struggling to make ends meet, she’d rather have money in the bank than spend it. And then there was the fact that she was constantly telling her boss that she was quitting. If she quit, how long would it be before she got another job? But choosing to live as though it might all be gone tomorrow didn’t make her feel any less jealous about her cousin’s big house with the servants, and about the two trips a year that Ariel and her mother took to New York to buy clothes. What would it be like to have a dress made just for you? Sara wondered.
She looked down at the letter. “Just for a while,” Ariel had written. “Temporarily.” Sara smiled at that. Poor Ariel, so spoiled, everything given to her. She wouldn’t have a clue how to work for somebody like R. J. Brompton.
The whole idea was absurd, of course, but it was nice to daydream. In fact, Ariel’s letter opened Sara’s eyes to a secret she’d kept even from herself: She wanted to see Arundel, North Carolina. Not just see it as a tourist would, but see it from the inside. She wanted to make her own judgment about the place. Her father had told her Arundel was “the center of hell,” yet Ariel wrote of the glories of her hometown.
Sara knew she had relatives in Arundel, but she’d never met them. Because of old wounds, she was sure that if she showed up there as Sara Jane Johnson she wouldn’t be welcome. But what if she got to know them as Ariel and showed them she wasn’t like her father’s side of the family? What would happen when she finally told them who she was? Would they welcome her—or hate her?
Getting to know the people of Arundel sounded good in theory, but the truth was, she was afraid of the place.
For seventeen years, what had been “done to them” was Sara’s father’s favorite topic of conversation—if you can call monologues that never ended conversation. She’d heard in detail how her mother grew up as part of “the family” in Arundel, a place that, according to her father, was the center of all snobbery on earth. “It begins there and radiates outward,” he said. “Like the rays of the sun?” she asked when she was a child and still thought her father was actually talking to her. “No, more like a spreading disease,” he said. He told Sara that her mother had been one of the bluebloods, one of the elite, the four hundred, whatever he could think of to call them, but she had fallen in love with him—and that had been the end of her. Sara’s father’s family was dirt poor, like the sharecroppers of the olden days, he told her, making his family sound noble. “But your mother’s family couldn’t stand people who worked for a living,” he said. “Honest workers, that’s all we were, but they hated us.”
Sara’s grandfather had disowned his daughter after she eloped. She died in a car wreck when Sara was three, and her father finally drank enough to kill his body when she was seventeen.
Sara looked back down at the letter.
She was just finishing her freshman year of college when she met Ariel for the first time. Sara had been in the study room of her coed dorm, up all night cramming for finals. She hadn’t showered in three days and her hair was hanging in greasy strings around her face. She was in her usual uniform of sweatpants and a stained sweatshirt, and her feet were encased in worn-out running shoes. Not that Sara ever ran. Or did any exercise. Like most college students, she lived on pizza and Coke.
At first Sara felt, rather than saw, Ariel. It was like when people say they feel a ghost. When Sara looked up from her book, the room was silent, and everyone was staring at a young woman standing in the doorway. She was pretty in her simple dress, a dress Sara was willing to bet cost more than she’d spent on all the clothes in her closet. To Sara’s astonishment, the young woman walked straight toward her. “Could we talk?” she asked.
Feeling clumsy and dirty, Sara mumbled, “Yeah, sure,” and followed the elegant young woman outside. Sara wondered if she wanted her to cut her lawn. Growing up, Sara had been the kid who cut the lawns and pruned the boxwoods. She was the kid who baby-sat.
The perfect young woman sat down carefully on a stone bench under a flowering dogwood. She stared at Sara for a few moments, then told her they were cousins. “I was told we looked alike,” Ariel said.
Sara smiled at that. Never had she looked like this woman did.
“I didn’t call first because I didn’t know your number. I hope it was all right to just show up. I really wanted to meet you.”
“Yes, it’s okay,” Sara said, her eyes wide from looking at her cousin so hard. Could she really be related to this beautiful creature with her perfect hair, perfect clothes, perfect everything?
“Do you think we could correspond?” Ariel asked.
“Write letters?” Sara asked. “Sure, why not?” She was thinking that she’d have nothing to say to a woman whose life was so obviously different from her own. Ariel reeked of money, education, and manners. Sara had a flash of memory of her own father sprawled on the couch, snoring in a drunken stupor.
For a moment the two young women sat in silence, then Ariel looked at her watch—a tiny thing of gold and diamonds. “I wish I could have gone to college,” she said, sighing.