The summer Caroline was twelve, they had two straight weeks of rain in Manila, and her father taught her to play poker.

Strange how that's the vacation she remembers most fondly. Not Copenhagen or São Paulo or Agra, but that tiny, soggy cottage in the Philippines. She'd only then realized how prolific the Lee clan actually was. Everyone crowded around an ancient table, playing hand after hand for toothpicks instead of poker chips. Bing might have had a knack for chemical equations and cellular pathways, but he turned out to be hopeless against Caroline at cards.

She can still recall the taste of that thrill, her tidy pile of toothpicks growing steadily larger.

But that had been before, before everything having to do with the word "family" became a blurred mess of disillusionment and obligation. Now vacations are warmer and more glamorous, and Caroline would kill for the mucky weather and chaotic closeness of that summer.

She never mentions it, though, taking to her expected roles with belying ease. Caroline Lee, socialite, sorority president, executive, sophisticate. There is a tally in her head of wins against losses. Caroline does well. Her blood cools. She grasps at her newfound success, revels in the potency of beauty mixed with subterfuge.

It's sweetly habit-forming.

Darcy manages to elude her skill, and he is frustratingly, endlessly fascinating for it. She can observe his habits easily enough. He stirs his coffee three times, counterclockwise. He wears softer colors at home. He speaks with a touch more formality right after returning from the opera. Impassive facial expressions and reserve are his strengths, however, and even after years of friendship Caroline finds herself wondering exactly where she stands with him.

Somehow he is her brother's best friend. Darcy is disciplined where Bing is too open, too easy. But they are both that rarest of rare breeds: fundamentally decent men, and she supposes that is enough to bind them. Caroline does not share their virtue; she is merely the hanger-on, a jealous realist in the shadow of Bing's naiveté and Darcy's old-fashioned principles. She watches and wants, with the defiant yearning of a person young and unversed in denial.

So when Bing moves to this godforsaken town for the summer, and Darcy decides to follow, Caroline tears herself away from L.A. It's a selfish, almost proprietary thing.

She needs them.