Having a daughter whose company he actually enjoyed was one of Jim's favorite accomplishments. The odds were against you, in all matters of family planning. You couldn't choose to have a boy or a girl; you couldn't choose to have a child who favored you over the other parent. You could only accept what came along naturally, and Sylvia had done just that, ten years after her brother. Bobby liked to use the word accident, but Jim and Franny preferred the word surprise, like a birthday party filled with balloons.

The back of the house was even better—the swimming pool, which had looked merely serviceable in the single backyard photograph, was in fact divine, a wide blue rectangle tucked into the hillside. A cluster of wooden chaise lounges sat at one end, as if the Posts had walked in on a conversation already in progress.

From the lip of the pool, they could see other houses tucked into the side of the mountain, as small and perfectly shaped as Monopoly pieces, their gleaming faces poking out from a blanket of shifting green trees and craggy rocks.

Jim's vague understanding was that she had so much money that a strict job description was superfluous.

the timing was such that Fran could be counted on to have at least one red-faced scream per day.