I nodded. Yumiko continued, “Why don’t you do a quick song with us? Just so we know how it’ll feel? We’ll do ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb.’”

I took a moment to warm up—after the plane ride, my throat felt a little tight. I could feel Rose’s withering stare. Merry flipped the cassette over and hit RECORD on the tape player.

As I launched my voice, the other girls chimed in. It felt electric, like everything just slid right into place. Merry’s alto tones were deep and fluid, and I could hear the soft, lifting vibrations of Yumiko’s soprano.

We let the song taper off, but there was no doubt that we all felt the mood shift of the room.

“Let’s try another one,” Merry said. It was even better than the lullaby. The silence afterward was so thoughtful that Merry forgot to stop recording, and Yumiko had to lean over and hit the button for her.

They were both smiling. Even Rose tilted her head, regarding me with a new look.

“Did you do much performing before the show?” asked Yumiko. “Just wondering how you lucked into all this.”

“I’ve taken singing lessons since I was a kid and done some school musicals . . . but Sing It was the biggest thing I’ve done so far,” I admitted.

“But you sent in demos and stuff, right? The typical hungry-artist thing?” Merry asked.

“Not really . . .”

“Hold on,” Rose said, and leaned forward on both elbows. “Are you telling me that you only just realized last year while on that singing show that you wanted to be serious about it?”

I was suddenly ashamed that I hadn’t tried even harder, that summer or any of the summers before.

“Damn.” Rose slapped her palms down on the conference table with a resounding thud. “We worked for every inch that we could gain and now here you are, fresh off the televised mayhem, waltzing in for a spot. Ridiculous.”

I didn’t know how to respond to that. A beat; the room darkened as a cloud shifted under the sun. Rose caught herself and intertwined her fingers together, bent her head forward as if she were praying. She breathed in and out. The other two girls seemed to understand that Rose was making a decision. They kept their mouths shut and just watched. “You’re good,” she said finally. “You have to be serious, okay? You have to be serious, because we are serious.”

We’d been in this room for less than twenty minutes and I didn’t know these girls at all, but I could sense the lingering sweetness of our harmony, like a perfume hovering in the air. I knew we could do great things. I looked into her mismatched eyes and nodded. “I am.”

She nodded her head toward the door, dismissing me. “We’ll let you know.”

4.

Thursday

Yumi

What’s this one called?” Rose said, feet drawn up onto the couch and gesturing with one hand. Her orange-colored drink wobbled perilously close to the lip of the glass. I’d considered mimosas for the early hour, but thought it was too festive a drink to serve the day after learning our friend had died. I’d tucked the booze away before guests arrived, but as soon as Rose came in she asked where the vodka was. She was drinking a screwdriver, light on the orange juice, heavy on the vodka.

I wrenched my eyes away from her drink and looked at the painting. It was oversize, fit into an overwrought gilded frame, and hung opposite the couch. I took a gulp of my own drink to soften the memory. “Something about a storm on the sea. He was obsessed with buying fancy paintings for me and he came home saying it was by Rembrandt.”

“You think it’s a fake, though?” She quirked an eyebrow, looking at it some more.

“It has to be. But I liked the energy of it and he gave it to me.”

“Just like that—gave it to you? Even after all that mess?”

She’d probably followed the divorce in the tabloids; I hadn’t discussed it with her and Kevin wouldn’t have, either. “I think it was because of all that mess. Probably an act of kindness or pity, I think. He didn’t even tell the lawyers about it.”

Growing up, my parents had one couch, wrapped in a plastic liner. I considered their wisdom, protecting their polyurethane couch with even more plastic, as I watched a sweating orange droplet fall from Rose’s over-full glass onto my eight-thousand-dollar dove-gray sofa.

She made a grunting noise as we heard the front door open and slam in echo. “Sorry, sorry,” Meredith sputtered, kicking off a pair of pink sneakers and folding her feet underneath her next to me on the opposite couch. “I was up with Sunny last night and then took a nap. My internal clock is still on London time. And there’s a thick camp of paparazzi right outside your gate.”

Rose’s eyebrow remained raised as she sat sipping her drink. Merry used to adjust to time zones instantly; motherhood had blunted her edge and evidently Rose judged that. “How is Miss Soleil?” she asked.

Merry blew out a breath. “Sweet. Tiring. Teenagers,” she said with a knowing smirk, before realizing that neither Rose nor I had children. “Well, you remember what it was like, being that age.”

I was sure that my upbringing—kids picking on me because I had a funny last name, being the only nonwhite face in a sea of students, before we moved to the Bay Area when I was twelve—was vastly different from Merry’s teenage years. She’d told us before that she had been on the JV cheerleading squad and asked to the senior prom when she was only a sophomore. But I said, “I can imagine.”

“Only”—she fussed with a throw pillow—“She’s been asking about doing more in the entertainment world.”

“Like stripping?” Rose said, obviously joking, but Merry’s head snapped up.

“No, but almost as bad as.” She gave a grimace. “She thinks that because she’s the daughter of Cherry Gloss and the stepchild of Raul X. Martinez”—this she said in a hoity-toity accent, although from what I knew, Soleil did not speak like this at all—“and she has sixty thousand followers on social media, she is entitled to leverage that into something.”

“Like stripping?” Rose repeated, smiling harder. Merry threw the pillow at her. Luckily, she missed.

“No. Like modeling. When I asked her who would hire her to walk their catwalk, you know what she said? Any one of your designer friends. Can you believe that?”

“Nepotism wins again,” I said lightly, trying to keep the sour note out of my voice.

Merry poured herself a glass of white wine and gulped down half of it. “I already hate that she’s on Instagram so much, with her life so public like that, but at least I’ve given her basic safety pointers so she’s not posting where she is when she’s actually there. But you remember what it was like before. All that attention.”

Attention can be loaded. Attention can be good or bad.

We murmured, commiseration or agreement, I wasn’t sure. Rose sucked in her cheeks and jiggled her glass of ice cubes in the ensuing awkward silence. Merry looked around. “I like what you’ve done to the place,” she said, changing the subject. We hadn’t spent so many consecutive days with one another in a long while. I’d had the painting for months but Rose hadn’t been over to my house for probably years.