"Please snow, please snow," she murmured. She pressed her palms together and said a quick prayer, then crossed herself.

Keely turned from the window and then hopped up on her bed, standing on the mattress so she could see herself in her dresser mirror. Carefully, she rolled up the waistband of her plaid skirt until the hem rose to midthigh, just to see what it looked like. Three rolls and a tug and the hem was perfectly even, as if her mother had made it that short. The nuns at Saint Alphonse required that school uniforms reach the floor when kneeling, a notion that every other girl in the all-girl school found positively prehistoric, especially in 1988.

"Have you finished your homework?"

Her mother's voice echoed through the tiny apartment. For as long as Keely could remember, it had been just them. She'd never known her father. He'd died when she was just a baby. But Keely carried a picture of him in her mind, an image of a strong, handsome man with a charming smile and a tender heart. His name was Seamus and he'd come to the United States from Ireland with her mother, Fiona. He'd worked on a fishing boat and that's how he'd died, in a terrible storm at sea.

Keely sighed. Maybe if she'd had a father around, she and her mother might have gotten along a little better. Fiona McClain had strong ideas about how her daughter should be raised and first and foremost was that Keely McClain would grow up a good Catholic girl. To Keely that meant no makeup, no parties, no boys-no fun. Instead of meeting her friends on Saturday morning to hang out at the mall, she was forced to help her mother at Anya's Cakes and Pastries, the shop right below their apartment.