So I have to go back to the restaurant tomorrow and cook for him. 'The fabulous Chef Moore demands an audition. 'Hey, how did your interview go? Are you a real chef now?' 'But I was shopping in Chinatown, and then it started raining.I guess I didn't realize how long I was gone.' She moved from the table and peeled off her wet raincoat. I would have been here myself, but you know I can't leave the museum until six o'clock.' She grimaced, trying to push a hanging wire out of sight. 'You were supposed to be here when the electrician came, Piper. 'What else is new?' Prue asked without even looking at her.

Prue was only two years older than Piper, but sometimes she treated Piper more like a child than a sister. Piper leaned on the round wooden table underneath the chandelier. Then she scowled at Piper, narrowing her ice blue eyes. She smoothed the dark bangs of her shoulder-length bob with her fingers and sighed. Twenty-seven-year-old Prue was balanced on top of a ladder, fiddling with an ornate crystal chandelier. She squeezed some water from her long, dark hair as she followed Prue's voice into the middle parlor. Piper set the groceries on the foyer floor. 'In here,' Prue replied, 'working on the chandelier.' Soaking wet, Piper burst through the front door. She didn't know how Prue managed to keep her life so well under control. Piper tried her best to be punctual, but something always seemed to come up. Prue and Piper usually got along well, but Piper knew that one of her older sister's pet peeves - and she had many - was lateness. He'd never really kept in touch with them after the divorce.

Their father hadn't been around to take care of them. The three sisters loved the house and knew it well - they'd grown up in it, raised by Grams after their mother died when they were little. Grams had willed the house to them and their younger sister, Phoebe, who was living in New York City. Piper and Prue had been living in the old San Francisco house for about six months - ever since their grandmother died. She didn't know what time it was, but she knew she was late - really late. Her arms loaded with groceries, she rushed up the rain-slicked steps of the red-and-cream-colored Victorian house she shared with her older sister. 'Prue's going to kill me,' Piper Halliwell muttered to herself.

The Power of Three by Eliza Willard