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By Root 1341 0

bars and clubs where a bottle of water alone ran nearly ten dollars. One of her roommates, a bitter-faced young woman named Stella, worked for a publication house that owned a number of women’s magazines, and would scour the beauty closet for the complex range of grooming products that turned Bean into Bianca. And she learned how to get invited to sample sales, and to make friends or sleep with people in PR, who had all the best collections (she attributed her pièce de résistance, a fabulous crocodile handbag even A-list celebrities hadn’t been able to get ahold of for months, to a particularly adventurous romp in a limousine on the way home from a completely forgettable book launch party). But it still wasn’t cheap.

You might forgive Bean for what she did if some kind of desperate need—rent, food, protection payments to the Mafia—had inspired the first embezzlement. But it wasn’t like that. Let’s be honest. It was too many nights out at too many nightclubs, too many drinks bought for herself on a slow night when no man offered to buy for her, too many (and one was too many, really) pairs of shoes that cost more than a semester’s worth of textbooks at Barney. But she was sitting at her desk doing the payroll. The firm was small enough that she wrote the checks out by hand and took them to one of the partners for signature, and she realized, though the thought had never crossed her mind before, that it would be so easy to add a little extra to her own. The partner never looked at them, he just signed them, and she would just do it once. Just to recoup some of the exorbitant overdraft charges she had accumulated. And she would pay it back.

And since it didn’t go missing once, and there was a sample sale at a handbag warehouse where she knew some people and could get in and get first shot at some of the current season’s bags, she did it again. And then a delicious Hollywood star had taken over the lead in some revival on Broadway, and Stella was absolutely dying to go, so Bean took her for her birthday. And there was a completely swish winter coat on sale, and she really couldn’t wear her old winter coat; not in this city. And on. And on.

This is not to say Bean didn’t feel guilty. She did. Every time she deposited her check at the bank, thanking her stars the firm hadn’t gotten around to direct deposit, she expected the teller to look at her, to see her burning cheeks and the lies in her eyes and call her out for what she was. A thief. But it was so easy to forget in the simple pleasure of spending, of treating her girlfriends to a night out. Until the next time payday came around and her bank account was empty and she had to do it again.

It wasn’t pure selfishness either; she gave as generously to others as she did to herself. The one thing she never did was travel, and this is part of the ugly truth as to why Bean came home so rarely. She knew the one day she was out was the day she’d be discovered, and so she was there, day in and day out, and she felt a little sick about the way people in the firm complimented her on her excellent work ethic, on the way she showed up even when she was burning with fever, brushing it off as enthusiastically applied makeup, and she grew to hate herself for it, but she couldn’t stop.

Now, if you are a psychologist, you might say something about how Bean hated her job, and might even have hated New York, and this was all her way of getting the hell out of it all without having to do any of the heavy lifting herself.

And you might well be right.

She had not told us everything, of course, not nearly. She hadn’t told us how she’d been hiding the sick, dark feeling inside by burying it in dangerous fantasy. She hadn’t told us about Edward and the way she’d betrayed Lila. She had told us none of this.

Sisters keep secrets.

Because sisters’ secrets are swords.

But at that moment, we were thinking not of what Bean had done wrong, but how she could make it better. “It’ll be okay, Bean,” Rose said softly, her words as gentle as her fingers on our sister’s head. “We’ll make it okay.”