Homeport

But it made her start thinking. I could tell.”
    “You have the bronze, but you’ll never be able to sell it.”
    “Sell it? Why should I want to sell it? Do you think this is about money?” She pressed a hand to her stomach as she laughed. “It’s never been about money. It’s you. It’s you and me, Miranda, like it’s always been.”
    Lightning shimmered against the glass of the window behind Elise, ragged forks of it digging into the sky. “I’ve never done anything to you.”
    “You were born! You were born with everything right at your fingertips. The prized daughter of the house. The eminent Dr. Jones of the Maine Joneses, with your highly respected parents, your fucking bloodline, your servants, your snooty grandmother in her big house on the hill.”
    She gestured wildly, turning Miranda’s stomach to a greasy wave as the gun swung in every direction. “You know where I was born? In a charity ward, and I lived in a lousy two-room apartment because my father wouldn’t acknowledge me, wouldn’t accept the responsibility. I deserved everything you had, and I got it. But I had to work for it, to beg for scholarships. I made sure I went to the same colleges as you did. I watched you, Miranda. You never even knew I was there.”
    “No.” Miranda removed the cloth from Andrew’s head. She thought the flow of blood was slowing. She prayed it wasn’t wishful thinking.
    “Then again, you didn’t do much socializing, did you? Amazing how all this money made you so boring. And I had to scrimp and save while all the time you were living in a nice house, being waited on, reaping in glory.”
    “Let me call an ambulance for Andrew.”
    “Shut up! Shut the hell up. I’m not finished.” She stepped forward, jabbing with the gun. “You shut the hell up and listen to me or I’ll shoot the sorry son of a bitch here and now.”
    “Don’t!” Instinctively, Miranda shifted her body between the gun and Andrew. “Don’t hurt him, Elise. I’ll listen.”
    “And keep your mouth shut. Jesus, I hate that mouth of yours. You talk and everybody listens. Like you spit gold coins.” She kicked a discarded shoe across the floor until it rapped solidly into the wall. “It should have been me, it should always have been me, and it would have been if the son of a bitch who got my mother pregnant, who promised her everything hadn’t been married to your grandmother.”
    “My grandmother?” Miranda shook her head even as her fingers slid slowly down to check Andrew’s pulse. “You’re trying to tell me my grandfather was your father?”
    “The old bastard just couldn’t keep his zipper up, even into his sixties. My mother was young and stupid and she thought he’d ditch his ice bitch of a wife and marry her. Stupid, stupid, stupid.”
    To punctuate her feelings, she snatched up an agate paperweight from the occasional table and winged it over Miranda’s head. It boomed against the wall like a cannonball.
    “She let herself be used. Let him get away without paying, never did one goddamn thing to make him pay, so we lived hand to mouth.” Her eyes glittered with fury as she shoved the table over.
    Another Jones, Miranda thought frantically, another careless liaison and inconvenient pregnancy. She shifted to the balls of her feet, braced. But the gun swung back, its barrel aimed toward the center of her body. And Elise smiled beautifully.
    “I watched you. I watched you for years. I planned for years. You were my goal as long as I can remember. I went into the same field. I was every bit as good as you. Better. I went to work for you. I married your useless brother, I made myself invaluable to your mother. I’m more of a daughter to her than you’ve ever been.”
    “Oh yes,” Miranda said with perfect sincerity. “You are. Believe me, I mean nothing to her.”
    “You’re the centerpiece. I’d have had your position sooner or later. You’d have been the one scrambling for scraps. Remember the David ? That was quite a coup for you, wasn’t it?”
    “So you stole it, had Harry copy it.”
    “Harry was very enthusiastic. It’s so pitifully easy to manipulate men. They look at me and they think, She’s so delicate, so lovely. And all they want to do is fuck and protect.”
    She laughed again, sliding her gaze down to Andrew. “I’ll say this for your brother. He had some good moves in bed. It was a nice side benefit, but breaking his heart was better. Watching him slide into the bottle