In my purse, I hear my phone chime with an email and resist the urge to check it.
“Look at you,” Libby teases, “stopping to smell the literal roses.”
“I’m not City Nora anymore,” I say, “I’m laid-back, go-with-the-flow N—”
My phone chimes again, and I glance toward my purse, still keeping pace. It chimes twice more in quick succession, and then a third time.
I can’t take it. I stop, drop our bags, and start digging through my purse.
Libby gives me a look of wordless disapproval.
“Tomorrow,” I tell her, “I’ll start on being that other Nora.”
* * *
As different as we are, the second we start unpacking, it could not be more obvious that we’re cut from the same cloth: books, skin care products, and very fancy underwear. The Stephens Women Trifecta of Luxury, as passed down from Mom.
“Some things never change,” Libby sighs, a wistfully happy sound that folds over me like sunshine.
Mom’s theory was that youthful skin would make a woman more money （true in both acting and waitressing）， good underwear would make her more confident （so far, so true）， and good books would make her happy （universal truth）， and we’ve clearly both packed with this theory in mind.
Within twenty minutes, I’ve settled in, washed my face, changed into fresh clothes, and booted up my laptop. Meanwhile, Libby put half her stuff away, then passed out on the king bed we’re sharing, her dog-eared copy of Once in a Lifetime facedown beside her on the quilt.
By then I’m desperately hungry, and it takes six more minutes of googling （the Wi-Fi is so slow, I have to use my phone as a hot spot） to confirm that the only place that delivers here is a pizza parlor.
Cooking isn’t an option. Back home, I eat fifty percent of my meals out, and another forty percent come from a mix of takeout and delivery.
Mom used to say New York was a great place to have no money. There’s so much free art and beauty, so much incredible, cheap food. But having money in New York, I remember her saying one winter as we window-shopped on the Upper East Side, Libby and I hanging on to her gloved hands, now that would be magical.
She never said it with bitterness, but instead with wonder, like, If things are already this good, then how must they be when you don’t have to worry about electric bills?
Not that she was in the acting business for the money （she was optimistic, not deluded）。 Most of her income came from waitressing tips at the diner, where she’d set me and Libby up with books or crayons for the length of her shift, or the occasional nannying job lax enough to let her tote us along until I was about eleven and she trusted me to stay home or at Freeman Books with Libby, under Mrs. Freeman’s watch.
Even without money, the three of us had been so happy in those days, wandering the city with street cart falafel or dollar pizza slices as big as our heads, dreaming up grand futures.
Thanks to the success of Once in a Lifetime, my life has started to resemble that imagined future.
But here, we can’t even get an order of pad thai brought to the door. We’ll have to walk the two miles into town.
When I try to shake Libby awake, she literally cusses me out in her sleep.
“I’m hungry, Lib.” I jog her shoulder and she falls onto her side, burying her face in a pillow.
“Bring me something back,” she grumbles.
“Don’t you want to see your favorite little hamlet?” I say, trying to sound enticing. “Don’t you want to see the apothecary where Old Man Whittaker almost overdoses?”
Without looking up, she flips me off.
“Fine,” I say. “I’ll bring you something back.”
Hair scrubbed into a blunt little ponytail, sneakers on, I take off back down the sunny hillside toward the dirt road hemmed in by scraggly trees.
When the narrow lane finally T-bones into a proper street, I turn left, following the curving road downward.
As with the cottage, the town comes into view all at once.
One instant, I’m on a crumbling road on the side of a mountain, and the next, Sunshine Falls is spread out beneath me like the set from an old Western, tree-covered ridges jutting up at its back and an endless blue sky domed over it.
It’s a little grayer and shabbier than it looked in pictures, but at least I spot the stone church from Once, along with the green-and-white-striped awning over the general store and the lemon-yellow umbrellas outside the soda fountain.
There are a few people out, walking their dogs. An old man sits on a green metal bench reading a newspaper. A woman waters the flower boxes outside a hardware store, through whose window I see exactly zero customers.