Two new chapters this week, folks! Make sure you read 8 and 9!!

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Aunt Amalia, for one, was thrilled about the wedding, and insisted it be held in her backyard—a flat rectangle of snow-covered grass and bare trees that she insisted would be made up like a "winter wonderland" in time for the ceremony.

"We were just going to do it in our living room," insisted Robbie as he sat beside me on her expensive mauve-colored sofa, a full cup of tea growing cold before him. "We're only inviting a few friends."

But Piper chimed in from his other side: "Dad and Laura."

"And your cousins, right, Piper?" I could help but add.

"Mm, just two of them, though," she answered, leaning towards me over Robbie's lap like he was an unfortunately placed pillar blocking her view of a concert. "Talia's like ten months preggo and they won't let her fly."

"And Kieren," I couldn't help but mutter under my breath, which was apparently news to Piper. I assumed she hadn't seen him much since the night we all came back through the portal from Yesterday nearly three years before. The thought made me stop for a second and check my math.

Yes, three years. That's how long it had been since the world had started spinning again. Both too short and too long for me to really comprehend.

"So you'll need the bigger venue," Amalia chirped, and I could see she was putting on a bit of a character: happy and accommodating aunt. I remembered suddenly that she had been an actress briefly in New York. If the performance was a bit strained, it wasn't really her fault. None of us had been playing these roles for very long. And with Robbie's school schedule being often at odd hours, he hadn't attended very many of these Boston tea parties my aunt had been throwing.

"We really appreciate it," Piper said with one of her signature million-watt smiles, and that seemed to seal the deal: winter wonderland it was.

Piper grabbed my hand as we all headed to the backyard to check out the space, leaving our teacups for the maid to clean. I knew that my soon-to-be sister-in-law had already ordered what looked like an entire reem of light pink material from a local fabric store and had been up for the past three nights designing a dress. She had taken some design classes at a local college when she'd first arrived in Boston, but hadn't gone back in the fall.

She was the only one of the three of us who really hadn't figured out what to do with the rest of her life, an understandable development since she'd been orphaned at seventeen. Like me, she often fell into the trap of making Robbie into the sun, something she could simply orbit in order to find her place in the universe. Again, I wondered if it was too much for him, a thought that seemed doubly urgent as Aunt Amalia demonstrated where all the dangling lights could be placed in her sprawling red maple trees.

"It's perfect," Piper beamed now. "Isn't it perfect, baby?"

"It's perfect," Robbie echoed, smiling as Piper practically skipped across the light dusting of snow covering the yard, mentally measuring its square footage, apparently.

"Do you think we could fit a little dance floor over here?"

"Piper," Robbie cut in, "Aunt Amalia doesn't want her grass crushed."

But Amalia shooed the idea away. "Oh, the grass is dead for the winter anyway. If Boston snow doesn't kill it, I'm sure a dance floor won't."

Piper beamed with pleasure, and Amalia made her hands into two L shapes, forming a rectangle by which to view her own yard, like a cinematographer sizing up a big scene before filming it. "It could go in that corner," she concluded.

I found myself standing by Robbie, teeth clattering a bit as the evening February air seeped through our jackets. Piper and Amalia had only met a couple of times before this, but with this new common goal to bind them they now fell into a rhythm, circling the yard like fireflies.

"I think this is gonna take a while," Robbie joked softly for my benefit.

"The good news is, you won't have to do anything but show up."

He nodded, happy to watch Piper plan. She had told me once that she didn't want a man who thought he had to take care of her, didn't want to be seen as a living doll. I could see why now more clearly than ever: she needed her relationships to be the other way around. How soon, I wondered, before she made him have children that she could dote on?

"Marina," Amalia called from the 'dance floor.' "Could you run into the kitchen and grab the measuring tape? It's in the top drawer by the refrigerator."

"Sure thing," I said, glad to be temporarily dismissed into the warmth of the house.

On my way to the kitchen, I grabbed the tea cups off the table so I could rinse them in the sink. I couldn't get used to the idea that Amalia had someone do little things like that for her. She had been raised in the same apartment as my mother, three of them in a one-bedroom. How do you go from that to this without always feeling like a bit of an imposter?

The tape measure was easy to find, but I didn't really want to head back outside. My eyes drifted to the large walk-in pantry, and I couldn't help but smile, remembering how it had been off-limits when we had visited as kids.

I poked my head in there now and I could feel my jaw drop at the view. It was the size of a Cadillac and stuffed from floor to ceiling with food. Jars of preserved olives, peppers, sausages, many with German labels; boxes and boxes of pasta and cereal, arranged by size; cookies, crackers, an entire shelf of caviar. Labels in a dozen languages. A temperature-controlled wine refrigerator taking up an entire wall.

I couldn't help but think of the refrigerator in the pyramid house the night Adam and I had stayed there. Stuffed to the gills, overwhelmingly opulent. Why did rich people buy all this food? Who was it for? Or did they just buy it because they could?

Looking over my shoulder to be sure I was alone, I felt seven years old again. No one was coming, though, and my curiosity was getting the better of me. I reached to the top shelf and pulled off a small jar of caviar, examining the thick black eggs under the light. Probably tasted like salt, I imagined. Very expensive salt.

Putting it back on its shelf, I noticed an ancient-looking box of corn flakes jutting out of its shelf—the only thing in this pantry that I could actually imagine having in my own kitchen. But the box design was so dated, I was pretty sure whatever was inside wouldn't be edible anymore. I pushed it back into place anyway, nestled among the other, fancier looking cereals.

And that's when I heard the click.

I almost didn't notice it as it was quite subtle. But upon further inspection, it was clear that the entire wall of shelves had moved about a quarter inch. It wasn't until I stepped back that I could see why. The wall wasn't a wall. It was a door. A trick door, designed with great care to fit into the same dimensions as the opposing shelves. That way no one would suspect a thing just by looking at it.

Whoever designed it knew what they were doing. Amalia's late husband, maybe? Or more likely a carpenter he had hired.

Knowing my time was limited before someone came looking for me, I pushed the large door back just far enough to poke my head in, wary suddenly of what I might find there. My experience with hidden doors was that they usually led to things you weren't supposed to see.

But a light yellow glow from above, triggered apparently by the opening of the door, revealed nothing but a little storage area. That makes sense, I decided—they're rich, after all. They need somewhere to hide the jewels and blocks of gold, or whatever it is rich people don't want the rest of the world to find.

So it almost took my breath away to see what was actually in the room. No gold. No jewels.

It was Amalia's previous life. A stack of those little Mexican dolls abuela used to knit was carefully arranged inside an open, very plain suitcase. A rack of old clothes, some of them quite clearly costumes from her acting days: a flapper dress, an old ballgown, a cheap white blouse starting to fray around the collar.

There was a shelf of theater books, too—a couple dozen plays with their paper covers all in a different color, biographies of actresses who had been popular thirty years ago. A clear, plastic box on the floor full of cassette tapes, CDs. One of Amalia's old headshots was lying on the floor: black and white, her smile a bit forced, her brown eyes the size of grapefruit, looking so much like my mother that I almost felt I should look away.

Her whole life—her real life—was all in this tiny little hidden room. Everything else was just the act.

I was about to turn and close the door when I noticed one last shelf of books, tucked behind the suitcase. Some old paperback novels took up most of it—The Catcher in the Rye, 1984—but something else was there too.

Yearbooks. Three of them, from East Township High. One for each of the three years she'd been there before running off at sixteen.

Amalia had said that Elaheh Farghasian was new at the school then. Could it be that the books might hold a little more information about her?

Acting on an impulse, I grabbed the closest one, from her junior year, and tucked it under my coat. And after closing the hidden door, and then the pantry door itself, making sure everything was back in its place, I zipped my coat up tight so the book wouldn't fall out.

I grabbed the measuring tape on the way to the yard, preparing an excuse that I'd had to use the bathroom. But I didn't end up needing it. By the time I got back outside, Amalia and Piper had moved on to using sticks and rocks to delineate a mock seating area, Robbie was scrolling through his phone by the back door, and nobody seemed to even notice that I had been gone.

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Wait, there's more! Keep reading for chapter nine!!