ACT I: THE PARTY

The champagne was the color of weak tea and cost more than Maggie Corrigan made in a month, which was something Diana Winthrop told herself as she stood near the edge of the ballroom and watched people dance. Not that she was jealous. Not of the champagne, anyway. She was more interested in the people drinking it—the way they tilted their heads back and let the alcohol do its slow, warm work, the way they laughed a little louder than necessary, the way they looked at Rosalie as though she were a public sculpture they had come to admire.

Rosalie was at the center of the room, as always, wearing a dress the color of sea foam and a smile that was both genuine and performative. She was engaged to Julian Crosswell III, heir to a shipping fortune, and tonight's gathering was the public announcement of that engagement—though everyone already knew. The Long Island social pages had been running photographs of Rosalie for months. She was the kind of beautiful that made strangers stop on the street and the kind of talented that made strangers stop on the street and ask what she was talented at. The answer was everything. Piano. Fencing. French conversation. The kind of everything that is accumulated the way one accumulates jewelry—piece by piece, until you have enough to fill a case.

Diana was wearing a dress that was beautiful but wrong. Not wrong in the way that attracted attention—wrong in the way that said I tried but did not quite succeed. It was the right color but not the right shade. The right cut but not the right fit. She looked like a sketch of what Rosalie looked like when rendered by someone who had seen her once from a distance.

"You're standing in the draft," Rosalie said, appearing at her elbow with a glass of champagne and the kind of concern that was real but not deep enough to change anything.

"I'm fine," Diana said.

"You're always fine," Rosalie said, and meant it as a compliment.

Diana's pocket contained a letter. She could feel it against her thigh, the way one feels a coin in a pocket when one is considering spending it. The letter was from her magazine editor in Manhattan—a man named Harold who had a habit of using words like luminous and searing and achingly true when she submitted a story. The letter said: We would like to offer you a regular column. Five hundred words, once a month. The pay is not generous, but the exposure will be. Also, your writing is the only thing in this magazine that makes me feel alive.

She had not told Rosalie. She had not told anyone. The column was something small and hers, a thread of light running through the dark fabric of a life that was mostly made up of standing near the edge of ballrooms and holding drinks she did not want.

ACT II: THE LETTER

The band played something fast and desperate—a jazz number that made people tap their feet and Rosalie pull Julian onto the dance floor. He danced badly, but she danced for both of them, and she danced in a way that made you want to watch, which was the whole point of dancing for someone who was being watched anyway.

Diana excused herself and walked through the ballroom, past the buffet table where nobody was eating, past the portrait of Rosalie's grandfather on the wall—a man who had made his fortune in shipping and whose eyes seemed to follow you with quiet judgment—and into the music room.

The music room was empty. The piano sat against the wall, closed and silent, its surface reflecting the candlelight in wavy distortions. Diana sat down on the bench and opened her purse. She took out the letter and a pen and a small notebook that she kept for writing—black cover, lined pages, filled with short stories that she wrote in the evenings when the house was quiet and the only sound was the wind coming off the Long Island Sound.

She read the letter again. A regular column. Five hundred words. Once a month. She had written four stories for the magazine in the past year. Each one was about a girl who was overlooked, forgotten, loved less than someone else. Each one had been praised. Each one had made her feel, for exactly ten minutes, like the person she was supposed to be.

She began to write the acceptance.

Dear Harold,

Thank you for the opportunity. I will submit my first column by the first of the month. The subject is still forming in my mind—something about light, I think. The kind of light that falls on one person in a room and leaves the other in shadow. Not the kind that is cruel, just the kind that is.

She stopped. The pen hovered over the paper. She looked at her hands—small, pale, unremarkable hands—and thought about how Rosalie's hands were the same shape but did different things. Rosalie's hands played piano and waved to crowds and held Julian's arm at cocktail parties. Diana's hands held pens and typed stories and held a drink near the edge of a ballroom.

Julian found her there. He came into the music room without knocking, which was either the kind of thing a man who is engaged to someone else does when he is curious, or the kind of thing a man does when he does not understand boundaries.

"Rosalie sent me to find you," he said. "She says you always hide in music rooms when you're uncomfortable."

"She's right," Diana said. "I do."

He sat down on the other end of the piano bench. He smelled like expensive cologne and the nervous sweat of a man who is trying very hard to be charming and knows he is not very good at it.

"I like your stories," he said.

Diana looked at him. "You read them?"

"I read everything Harold publishes. I'm in shipping. I need to know what people are thinking."

She felt something shift inside her. Not much—a small shift, like a key turning in a lock. Julian Crosswell III, heir to a shipping fortune, was reading her stories. Not dismissing them, not glancing at them with polite disinterest. Reading them.

"What did you think of the last one?" she asked.

He was quiet for a moment. "I thought it was about a girl who looks like her sister but is loved by no one."

"Yes."

"Do you have a sister?"

"I do."

"Is she here?"

"Everywhere," Diana said.

ACT III: THE CONVERSATION

Rosalie found them both. She appeared in the doorway the way she appeared everywhere—in light, with energy, with the kind of presence that makes a room smaller and larger at the same time.

"Julian, there you are. Diana, come back. The band is playing something slow."

"I'm writing," Diana said.

"About what?" Rosalie asked, coming over and looking at the notebook without asking permission, which was the kind of thing she did—assuming access to everything Diana had.

Diana closed the notebook. "Nothing important."

Rosalie's eyes flicked to the letter on the piano. "Is that from Harold?"

"Yes."

"Did he say yes to the column?"

Diana looked at her sister and saw, for the first time, something in Rosalie's face that was not the polished version she showed the world. It was a crack. Small, but real. She looked envious. Not cruelly envious—the way one person looks at another person who has something they want, without knowing how to ask for it.

"Yes," Diana said.

Rosalie sat down on the piano bench next to Julian. She looked at Diana with an expression she had never worn before—a mixture of pride, relief, and something that might have been shame.

"That's wonderful," she said. "I knew it would be. I told your mother I knew it would be. She didn't believe me."

Diana felt something move in her chest. Not a lot—just enough. Her mother had not believed Rosalie's sister would get the column. Rosalie had believed. Rosalie had told her mother, and her mother had not believed, and that was the kind of thing that happened in families like theirs—small dismissals, quiet corrections, the slow accumulation of being told, in a thousand ways, that you are not the one who matters.

But Rosalie believed.

She opened the notebook again and tore out the page with the acceptance letter. She handed it to Rosalie.

"Read it," she said.

Rosalie read it. She read it twice. Then she looked at Diana and said, very quietly, "You write about us. Don't you?"

Diana considered the question. She could lie. She could say no. She could say she wrote about imaginary girls and nothing real. But Rosalie had asked, and she had read the words, and she was sitting on a piano bench in a music room on Long Island with the sound of jazz drifting through the walls, and for once in her life, Diana did not want to be invisible.

"Yes," she said. "I write about us."

Rosalie was quiet for a long time. Then she said, "I'm sorry."

"For what?"

"For not knowing. For not knowing that you wrote things like that about us."

"You wouldn't have understood," Diana said. And then, because she wanted to: "But I'd like you to try."

ACT IV: THE DEPARTURE

She left the next morning. She packed a small bag—three changes of clothes, the notebook, the portfolio of stories she had submitted to magazines, and a book of poems by Hart Crane that Rosalie had given her for her birthday two years ago and that she had never opened until the night before.

The train to New York was quiet. The light came through the windows in a pale, greyish gold, the color of weak tea, the color of champagne. Diana sat by the window and watched the Long Island coast disappear—the houses, the trees, the water—and thought about what she was leaving behind and what she was walking toward.

The column was five hundred words a month. The pay was not generous. The exposure would be, maybe. None of it mattered. What mattered was that she had written a letter, and a man in Manhattan had said yes, and her sister had read the letter and believed and been proud and said sorry, and that was more than she had ever had before.

She heard someone on the train singing a song she recognized—a jazz standard, slow and sad, the kind of song that makes you want to cry without knowing why. She closed her eyes and listened and wondered, for the first time, whether the world was as small as she had thought, or whether the world was exactly as big as she needed it to be.

The train went on. The coast disappeared. The singing went on.

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