Firefly Beach Read Online Free

Hill, and Caroline watched Skye’s gaze go there now.
    “What are those boats?” Clea asked, pointing at the cluster of lights out by Wickland Shoals. “That’s what I’m wondering.”
    “They anchored there today,” Augusta said. “Two big white boats and a lot of little launches running in and out.”
    Leave it to Clea to be thinking something simple, uncomplicated, Caroline thought. She was the happiest Renwick sister, the least encumbered, the only one who had put the past behind her. Caroline gave her a smile. She turned to Skye.
    “How about you?” she asked. “Why are you so quiet, Skye?”
    “Just thinking,” Skye said. But of course she would not say what about.
    “We’re all together, Caroline,” Augusta said. “Let that be enough.”
    “I thought someone said something about cocktails,” Skye said, rising unsteadily. “Can I get anyone anything?”
    “I don’t think so,” Augusta said with a sidelong glance at Caroline.
    But when Skye turned to walk precariously across the moonlit lawn, Augusta followed, linking arms with her youngest daughter. Homer rose, as if to follow. He seemed torn. Caroline scratched his ears, and he turned his eloquent eyes to hers. He had always sensed that Skye was the one who needed protection. But his great love was for Caroline, and both of them knew it.
    Duty won. When Skye and Augusta headed up the gentle incline, Homer followed behind with his old head bent and his tail wagging. They disappeared inside the house. Caroline and Clea sat still, waiting. The music started: the tinkle of ice against silver, the complicit laughter, the clink of heavy crystal.
     

     
    Unable to sleep that night Caroline turned her head and looked at the framed photo on her bedside table. It showed her, Clea, and Skye, all in summer dresses, at yet another party for their father, when Caroline was about sixteen.
    Sisterhood is amazing. Caroline had known it almost forever, from when she was two, the moment she first realized her mother was growing large. It never ceased to amaze her: She and her sisters came out of the same womb.
    Caroline knew it was the same for sisters everywhere. Whenever she met women who had sisters, she knew they knew. They understood the incredible connection. Staring at the picture, she tried to remember those girls from long ago. Her eyes focused on the image of herself: smiling but guarded, standing slightly behind Clea and Skye, as if to protect them.
    “What were you thinking?” she whispered to her old self, to her younger sisters.
    They grew up in the same house, with the same smells, the same sights, the same sounds. They had the same parents. They shared a room, fell asleep every night to the sound of one another’s soft breathing. They shared the same images in dreams. They knew each other’s nightmares. Some of their sweetest dreams were of one another.
    “We walked each other to school,” she said to herself, to her sisters.
    When she looked at her sisters’ bare legs, she knew every single scar. She knew the crescent-moon scar just under Clea’s left knee, where she tripped in the night and fell on a piece of broken glass. She knew the inch-long scar on Skye’s right ankle, from the time she snagged her foot on barbed wire, cutting through a pasture where none of them were supposed to be.
    She knew the boys they liked. She had teased them about every single one. She helped them write love notes, she dialed boys’ phone numbers for them so Clea or Skye could hear that boy answer and then hang up. Sometimes, and she would feel ashamed about this until she died, she flirted with them when her sisters weren’t there. She wanted to see whether they liked her better.
    Gazing at the picture, she knew they all had secrets. What about the different experiences, the things they’d never know about each other? They don’t tell you everything, Caroline thought. The fights they heard their parents have when she was asleep. The only time in her