Extraits

"Sometime I hate what I love,' she said.

A beat on the other end.

"Even me?" Avery asked.

"Never you," said Bonnie, though she knew perfectly well Avery would take the remark that way. That was, she supposed, why she said it. Avery made a noise between a hum and a growl.

"Well, I just love you," she said. "That's why I'm pushing you."

"I know," said Bonnie. "I love you too. Without the too." It was what Nicky used to say to them. No too. Just love.

"What are you doing there? We're so not L.A. people."

"Maybe I am," said Bonnie.

But Bonnie didn't think of herself as any kind of person, L.A. or otherwise. She had been a boxer for so long she'd forgotten to become a person. She'd chosen the city because it was far away from where she'd been training in New York and seemed like an easy enough place to get a job. She didn't care if she liked it. She was only there to escape.

"It doesn't feel normal. I could hurt her, you know ? If she was here, I'd punch her in the neck."

Bonnie smiled.

"That's a pretty weird place to punch someone."

"Well, I wouldn't want to hit her face. Just get close to it, so she'd know I was really, really mad at her."

"I get that. I'd punch her in the neck too."

"Yeah, but you'd probably kill her if you did that."

"Too late."

Tha words hung between them, vibrating.

He was the only man in the house, but he also was the house. They lived inside his moods.

Lucky had this theory that having a bad dad was like growing up in a place with a long, rough winter. It hardens you. It also prepares you for reality, which is that slee is a season, not a lifestyle, and most men will hurt you if they get the chance. Or maybe it was only the people who grew up with bad dad's who believed that.

Kids who grew up with loving fathers had the same starry-eyed softness as kids raised in places like Malibu, those homes of eternal sunshine. They never had to toughen up.

It wasn't the first time she'd phoned Nicky since she died; the urge to speak to her sister and tell what life was like without her was constant. Calling her felt like being an amputee who, believing she still has legs, keeps trying to stand.

She missed the New York subway with its flith, reliable unreliability, and lack of cell service; the Paris metro was almost aggressively efficient and fully accessible by cell phone, even underground. Here, there was nowhere to hide.

Lucky is twenty-six years old, and she is lost. In fact, all the remaining sisters are.

But what they don't know is: As long as you are alive, it is never too late to be found.

Look at an umbilical cord—tough, sinuous, unlovely, yet essential—and compare it to a friendship bracelet of brightly woven thread. That is the difference between a sister and a friend.