Carolina Isle Read Free Page A

brainwashedthat the only real theater was in New York. And she always felt that she was right on the edge of making it big.
    Through all those years, Sara exchanged letters with Ariel. No e-mail, no faxes, nothing new or modern, just old-fashioned letters. Ariel wrote three or more letters to each of Sara’s because Ariel had more time. With each of the letters Sara came to enjoy them more. I can’t wait to tell Ariel! became a constant thought. When Sara went to New York, where she knew no one, and where she failed at one audition after another, it was Ariel’s ever-cheerful letters that kept her going. Ariel was Sara’s anchor, the one who was always there, the one person in the world who knew where Sara was and what she was doing.
    Then, when Sara turned twenty-three and was beginning to realize that she just might never make it on the New York stage, she had another one of those life-changing events. The CEO of the company Sara worked for, R. J. Brompton, pointed at her and said, “That one. I want
her.
” That’s all he had to say. He was so revered, and his word was such law, that Sara could believethat she’d been chosen to test out a new guillotine.
    It was worse. He’d chosen her to be his personal assistant. Not his secretary—he had two of those. His PA. Sara soon learned what the duties of a personal assistant were. She did anything her boss asked of her. She was a wife without the sex—not that Sara wanted the sex or that R. J. Brompton had a wife. No, she thought, humans have wives and families. And after eighteen months of working for R.J., Sara was sure he wasn’t human. No human could work as much as he did. He was a robot who gave her more money every time she told him she wanted a life and that she was leaving his employment.
    By the time Ariel’s letter saying she wanted to exchange lives reached her, Sara knew exactly how she felt. She hated herself for having no spine and not being able to tell R.J. what he could do with his job. She hated herself for not having enough talent to make it on Broadway. She had come to hate everything about her life, and more than anything, Sara wanted to do something besides work for R. J. Brompton.
    It was because Sara was so tired and so fed upwith R.J.’s 3:00 A.M. phone calls that she was going to agree to try Ariel’s impossible scheme.
    The idea of having Ariel’s life of leisure, with nothing to deal with but a mother who sounded rather lonely, was the best idea she’d heard in years. Of course the idea of exchanging lives would never work, but it sounded nice. Three sirens went by and Sara thought of the quiet of a small Southern town. She had to haul a big basket of laundry down to the basement tonight and she dreamed of dropping her dirties in a hamper and having them reappear, clean and pressed.
    She grabbed a Post-it note, wrote “Love to!,” then put it in an envelope and addressed it. She’d mail it on the way to the laundry.
    â€œLeave everything to me,” Ariel wrote back, and Sara did. But then, she was too tired to do anything else.

Chapter Three
    A RIEL FELT BAD THAT SHE’D LIED TO her cousin, but she knew it was necessary. If she’d told Sara the truth, she would never have considered exchanging places. And wasn’t it true that all was fair in love and war? Ariel just hoped that her cousin would forgive her when she found out that she had done everything for love.
    It had started over a year ago when Ariel was in New York with her mother on one of their twice-yearly clothes-buying trips. Ariel had to attend some boring fund-raiser with her motherand a lot of other old people who wanted to show off how much money they had.
    For the first hour Ariel made small talk and listened to people tell her how quaint they found Arundel. Their tone said that they couldn’t imagine living in a place that had no food delivery, but still, it was an adorable little town.