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CHAPTER ONE

The train gathered speed as the sea finally blazed into view, and Greta Gatsby fiddled with the crumpled letter in her lap.

"Next stop, Great Neck. Great Neck!"

The conductor strode through the corridor, knocking on compartment doors. Great Neck was the first stop on Long Island; though the train would continue through a smattering of resort towns all the way to Port Washington, Greta would not be on it. She was bound for West Egg, the secluded little haven some four miles north of here where her brother, Jay, had made his home. Their home: seven years younger than her brother, Greta had lived under Jay's guardianship since their parents had died fifteen years ago.

You couldn't deny it was a remarkable turnaround of fate. They'd been born poor and orphaned early. All she'd had was Jay, and then he'd gone off to the front, and Greta, to live with their dour Aunt Ida. Lonely years, indeed. But Jay had always said everything would change once he was rich, and though others might have thought him a dreamer, he'd been right. He had a head for strategy, it turned out. Though he didn't much use the marble chess set in the library, he knew its rules. Greta had noticed how people never expected her brother to be shrewd in business—he had the soul of a dreamer, and therefore they underestimated him—but since childhood Greta had known her brother was special. Even so, she'd never expected him to be 'quite' so successful.

"The art of the gambit," he'd told her once, years ago. She'd been confused; chess was hardly gambling.

"Gambit," he'd corrected her. "It's a tactic. In chess it means sacrifice: you lose something to gain something."

At the time, she hadn't thought much about the sacrifice part. But sometimes now she wondered exactly what Jay had lost—what they had both lost, perhaps—in order to get where they were.

"Going somewhere nice?"

A young man had entered the compartment shortly after Grand Central. He was the sole other occupant of the enclosed space and the hint of impropriety in this was faintly thrilling, even if the same could not be said for the young man himself, who had been sniffing energetically the whole way from Manhattan, and on whose lapel a souvenir of lunch was prominently displayed. He looked at Greta expectantly, awaiting her answer.

"Home," she obliged. Somewhere she'd longed to be many times these past few years.

As soon as he'd had the money for it, Jay had sent her off to a fancy boarding school stocked with Mayflower types, and then to an even fancier "finishing school" for a couple of years. Jay wasn't a snob, but he detested being looked down on, and was determined that Greta would escape the stain of New Money. For her part, Greta had begged him, if further learning was to be involved, to send her to a real university, one where she might learn something about the world besides the art of watercolor and how to recite poetry, but to no avail. She'd done her best to learn about the world all the same, burying her head in a science book or a newspaper as often as in her beloved mystery novels. Her father had been something of an amateur scientist, and her mother a pragmatic woman who made balancing the household accounts look like child's play. They had always agreed on one thing above all, which was that a mind was a terrible thing to waste.

Greta wholeheartedly agreed, but she also felt that life was a terrible thing to waste. Happily, this summer, at the grand old age of twenty-one, Greta Gatsby had finished her education for good and was coming home to stay. It was absolutely thrilling and a little intimidating. She hoped for freedom, and feared for a new set of restrictions—the world Jay had bought them entry into had already shown itself to be heavy with codes and rules—but escaping from the Academy was an incontrovertible joy. Whatever the real world held for her, she decided, it had to be more invigorating than how she'd spent these last years of her life.

The young man opposite gave another protracted sniff—he really was exerting himself with this one—and for both their sakes, Greta felt moved to offer him her handkerchief.

"I'm all right." He waved. "You dropped your letter."

She demurely retrieved the crumpled paper from the floor and tucked it away. She knew all its news by now anyway. Chiefly, Jay had wanted to alert her that his friends Tom and Daisy Buchanan would be at the house upon Greta's return—apparently, they had been staying there for some weeks while their own stately pile, in the tonier locale of East Egg, underwent some repairs.