CHAPTER FOUR

      ELLE AND ERIN had both grown a head taller since Tara had last seen them, more than a year before, on the most recent of her rare and brief visits to New York, and they’d both had haircuts. Gone were the long blond locks she’d brushed and braided so many times—now they sported short, breezy styles that framed their faces. And they were almost the same height as she was.

      Although the girls were actually fraternal twins, and there were some marked differences between them if one knew what to look for, the resemblance was striking enough to convince most people they were identical.

      Elle, the elder by four minutes, was the confident one, the ringleader. Erin, who wore glasses despite her father’s repeated attempts to sell her on contact lenses, was shy and formidably bright. Tara suspected the glasses served as a kind of shield for the girl, something to hide behind when she was scared or simply wanted time to observe and assimilate whatever might be going on around her.

      When the pair spotted Tara, waiting with a big smile and her arms already opened wide, they rushed her, backpacks bouncing between their skinny shoulder blades, cheeks flushed, eyes glowing with delight.

      “Mom!” Elle cried jubilantly, as the three of them tangled in a group hug, at once laughing and teary-eyed.

      Since the divorce, James had expressly forbidden the twins to address Tara as “Mom,” and she thought of correcting Elle, but she didn’t have the heart to do it and, besides, her ex wasn’t there to object. He was thousands of miles away, just the way she liked him best.

      “It’s wonderful to see you two,” Tara said, when the hubbub had died down a little and they were headed for baggage claim, a zigzag trio with their arms linked at the elbows.

      “It’s wonderful to be here,” Erin answered, adjusting her wire-rims.

      Tara felt a little stab of love as she shifted, putting an arm around each of their tiny waists. They wore the narrowest of jeans, sandals and long-sleeved T-shirts, Elle’s blue, Erin’s pink. “We’re going to have a great time,” she told them. “You’ll like Parable, and the farm, too.”

      Erin’s eyes grew big and very blue. “We were so scared Dad would change his mind and make us go to summer camp instead of coming out here to stay with you.”

      Elle nodded her agreement as they all strolled purposefully through the small airport, moving aside now and then so they didn’t block foot traffic. “And summer camp started weeks ago,” she added. “The day after school let out. So everybody’s already chosen their friends. We would have been, like, geeks.”

      Tara laughed. “Geeks?” she countered. “Never.”

      “Elle likes to be in on all the action,” Erin said, wisely tolerant of her sister.

      They reached the baggage claim area and waited with the other arriving travelers, until a buzzer squawked and the first bags lurched into view.

      Erin and Elle had two large suitcases each, color coordinated like their T-shirts, with busy geometric patterns.

      Tara, after getting one luggage cart, went back for a second after her stepdaughters pointed out their bags. By the time she got back, a man in a cowboy hat had lifted one pair of suitcases onto the cart. He repeated the process, tugged at the brim of his hat and, without a word, picked up his own bag, and walked away.

      “That was a cowboy,” Erin breathed, impressed. “A real one, I think.”

      Tara grinned and nodded. “The genuine article,” she agreed.

      “How do you know?” Elle asked them both, ever practical. “Maybe he was just a guy in boots and a hat.”

      “I know he’s a cowboy,” Tara replied, “because he stepped up and helped with the suitcases without being asked.”

      Elle pondered that, looking only partially convinced, and Erin gave her sister a light prod in the ribs. “Cowboys do polite stuff,” she informed Elle. “Like lifting suitcases and opening doors.”

      “Not just cowboys,” Elle retorted. “Tony—” she glanced at Tara, no doubt figuring her stepmother was out of the loop, having been gone for a couple years “—he’s the doorman in our building. He does the same things.”

      “But he doesn’t wear boots and a hat,” Erin said in the tone of one bringing home a salient point. “Not one like the cowboy had on, anyway.”

      “He’d look silly if he did,” Elle said. “Right in the middle of Manhattan.”

      “I’ve seen cowboy hats in Manhattan, though,” Erin reasoned. She was the diplomat of the pair, Elle the pragmatist.

      Tara, enjoying the exchange, reveling in the presence of her beloved stepdaughters, didn’t comment. She simply led the way outside, pushing one cart while Erin managed the other, and silently counted her blessings, two of them in particular.

      Sunshine shimmered in the twins’ hair, and there was a cool breeze out.

      Life is good, Tara thought, rolling her cart through the crosswalk.

      Elle swung around her backpack in front of her as they walked, rummaged through it, extracted an expensive cell phone and switched it on before pressing a sequence of icons. By the time they’d found the SUV, she was finished with whatever she was doing and popping the device into a jeans pocket.

      “There,” she said. “The paternal unit has been duly informed of our whereabouts.”

      Tara smiled again—not that she actually stopped smiling since the moment she had spotted Elle and Erin in the flow of incoming passengers—and opened the hatch on the SUV with a button on her key fob.

      This time, there was no cowboy to step up and load the baggage into the back of the rig, but working together, they jostled the luggage inside. Then the twins flipped a coin to see who would sit in front with Tara and who would sit in back.

      Erin won the toss, crowed a little and climbed in across the console from Tara.

      “I thought you had a dog,” Elle remarked from the back as she buckled herself in for the ride home.

      “Lucy’s waiting impatiently back at the farm,” Tara told the girls, starting the engine, preparing to back out of her parking space. “She likes to ride in cars, but she’s still a puppy, really, and I think this trip would have been a little too long for her.”

      “What happened to the red car?” Erin wanted to know. “The one you sent us pictures of?”

      Tara might have sighed in memory of her zippy little convertible, if she’d been alone, or in a less ebullient mood. “I traded it in,” she replied.

      “We wouldn’t all fit in a sports car, goon-face,” Elle pointed out, affably disdainful.

      “I know that, ding-dong,” Erin answered, without a trace of hostility.

      “No name-calling,” Tara said lightly. The way the girls said “goon-face” and “ding-dong” sounded almost affectionate, but it was the principle of the thing.

      Erin bent to lift her backpack off the floorboard and ferret through it for her own phone, an exact duplicate of Elle’s, except for the case. “You texted Dad that we got here okay, right?” she asked Elle without looking back.

      “He’d be the paternal unit I mentioned, goon—” Elle paused, and her tone took on a note