Miranda was the one to alert me to the NorCal power outages in a Hangouts message (much more seamless to receive these now that I am the owner of a Android phone, having unwittingly launched my iPhone last Friday into the universe when some rando picked it out of my pocket on the bus). In an uncertain world, it’s somehow comforting to me that she refuses to consider the time difference between London and the West Coast, despite years of promises.

“Saw the news about California. Promise me that you’re coming somehow. I can’t handle this without you. Ring or ping if you can.”

After 10 years on an iPhone, I’m perhaps unreasonably sensitive to the new sounds this Galaxy whatever makes. Everything could potentially be a ring or an alarm, and while the Hangouts ping is unmistakably the same — and a noise I normally sleep through — this one woke me. Stumbling on a balled up and discarded pair of Alex’s jeans (they’d almost made it to the hamper two feet away) as I shuffled to the bathroom, I glanced at the time on the microwave. 5:45 a.m. — close enough to a respectable hour to rise that I had no business going back to bed. Thanks, Miranda.

I put the kettle on and scrolled through the news — PG&E was to cut power over a huge swath of Northern California, starting the day I was due to fly to Heathrow for the wedding. Fan-fucking-tastic. While I wasn’t particularly worried about losing power in the studio — after all, I won’t be here, and I’d already cleared out almost all the perishables from the fridge in advance of my trip — I was more concerned about the airport facing closure. Google assured me that not only was my little corner of West Berkeley unaffected by the shut-off, but SFO was open for business. (Yes!)

Throwing on Al’s terrible “silky” polyester dressing gown, I pottered outside into the near-dawn with my cup of PG Tips to get my circulation moving sufficiently to handle a call with Miranda. It really doesn’t matter how many times I wash it, in Tide or OxyClean or Mrs. Meyer’s Honeysuckle laundry detergent, his dressing gown will forever smell of a combination of adolescent Alexander funk, Silk Cuts and the rancid Lynx Pulse body spray he favored in 2006. And its rankness just made me more conscious that he was not there to be wearing it himself.

And I did miss him terribly, catching glimpses of him on nightly video calls from London (none of which were ever long enough), or spotting him in a picture or two posted by Miranda on Instagram as he downed another pint of bitter. Or in the selfie he sent me of the two of them stretched out on the grass on Parliament Hill, bundled up in sweaters and coats, their dark heads touching. Or the video posted by Sasha on Facebook of Miranda trying to teach Alex how to make an omelette (it ended up on Sasha’s floor). I don’t (and mustn’t) begrudge him his leisure time — his office works him hard when he’s in London — but the old jealousy of his enduring friendship with Miranda, and the thoughts of what might have been had I not nudged him to move here, blaze in me sometimes.

Oh, I never mentioned that, did I? I don’t think I have. Let me be clear: Miranda and I may be each other’s “dearest heart” now, but that wasn’t always the case. She detested me for purloining her boyfriend out from under her nose. That Alex would ever really leave Miranda for someone else seemed impossible, not only to her, but to everyone else. That it was for his best friend’s girl was even more implausible — Alex and Julian’s bond was so strong, one was rarely mentioned without the other.

Miranda had been complacent. Alex had left her many times in the past, but each of the prior times he’d walked out, he’d done it for himself. He could feel oppressed by her need for her constant presence in his life — what Fenn called smotherlove in Cora — and would stake out his claim of independence not only from her, but from all women. Invariably, he would find himself back in her bed within weeks. “What can I say,” she explained to me later. “Al used to say back then I had a trick fanny, because he couldn’t understand why he enjoyed sleeping with me so much when I was the most bothersome creature outside of bed.”

When it came to light that he’d left Miranda for me, the gauche and emotional American, it didn’t compute for almost anyone: Miranda was handsome, brilliant, witty, rich and fantastic in bed by all accounts (and even Miranda will admit, there were a lot of accounts — though she wanted Alex as her consort, she never could keep her trousers zipped). I was… pleasant. Pretty. Provincial. Middle class. And while Julian had bragged to his male friends I was “a tiger packed inside a pussycat” when it came to sex, most had dismissed it as Julian’s usual hyperbole. I didn’t have the raw sex appeal of a Miranda, after all — why would Alex pick up with me?

It was shocking for everyone to think of Alex with someone else, after years of his intermittent, spiteful romance with Miranda, and his friends castigated him for his “bad form” in ditching Miranda for someone else. Had it been for studying or wanking or playing more GTA San Andreas, it might have been understandable. Rather, he’d allowed himself to consider a relationship where affection and pain weren’t doled out in equal measures. (It’s not like my love affair with Julian suffered less from this sickness, but I’d been primed to expect it from Josh — I didn’t think I could expect more.) We might have escaped, the both of us, had we thought we deserved happiness, and if Alex hadn’t needed Julian’s money so badly. Instead, we’d reverted to our prior relationships as if we’d just went out for a walk and returned three weeks later with that pint of milk we’d gone out for. Better to pretend it never happened.

But we never really did. Alex never stopped regretting his cowardice in sending me back to Julian, wishing that he hadn’t tried for me once Fenn was better and the payments stopped. I never stopped wondering if I hadn’t fallen back into line with Julian, if I’d just waited for Alex to leave Miranda for good (which he did, only six weeks later), we might have had the good life we have now many years earlier. Yet there was a time, quite recently, when Alex might have returned to Miranda instead of launching off into a new life with me.

When Julian said he was done with me, it wasn’t as simple as me opening my home and my legs to Alex for a brand new life with my sweetest old love. Our relationship stuttered into existence as I grappled with a life without my husband in it. I sometimes wondered if Alex had been trying to seduce me for years, and I’d finally fallen for it, just as Julian told (shouted at) me. I distrusted him at times. I knew he was capable of lies, even if they were told to protect others, and not himself. And I knew quite well Alex’s weaknesses — his rages and silences, his overindulgence of his avaricious mother and flaky sister, his tendency to let money flow through his hands, and the problematic drinking that had emerged in the immediate wake of Minty and Lucy’s departure. (He’s managed to conquer the last of these only.) Alex looked like a terrible bet, and I didn’t have that many chips to play with.

I prevaricated. I cavilled. I wanted to be with him, but I was terrified that once he knew me as more than an idealized, perfect Melissa on the other side of the phone or a screen, he’d leave me. So I pulled him to me and pushed him away once he got too close. He said he’d waited for me for too many years to accept anything more than my final word that we were over — “I thought you’d know I was patient by now.”

And Miranda was there for him, for both of us, really — bossy, sensible Miranda, who listened and cajoled, who rarely judged as acceptable my equivocation or Alex’s need to lock me into another relationship immediately. As his wife’s best friend, Miranda had been a regular presence in his life and his home, and their formerly volatile connection had mellowed under Minty’s kind but firm influence. During Alex’s divorce and the terrible custody battle that was its companion agony, Miranda had played the role of peacemaker between her friends, helping them to think first of their daughter, guiding them to put aside their vanities and selfishness. It was natural for Alex to lean on Miranda when he needed someone to keep from his worst impulses.

I shouldn’t even dwell on it — it was only a moment. But it’s another image I peer upon when I am feeling particularly sorry for myself, when I want to indulge in the worst excesses of self-pity. It was the summer of 2017 — Alex and I were living in constant jet lag as we tried to conduct a relationship over the nearly 6,000 miles between us. His employer had just opened a satellite office in San Francisco, and Al had managed to convince them that what the new team needed was a face from London to show up twice a month, to keep the guys (and they were all guys, not so uncommon in his line of work) feeling like they were part of the company, that head office cared. It was a fantastic con (Alex scoffs at that word) — he’d get flown out first or business to SF for the week and put up at the Ritz-Carlton, and I’d hunker down in the hotel or go on wine tastings with Caitlin or get yet another spa treatment. We’d fly down to LA for the weekend and party with the Jen(n)s and Mack at the Standard; occasionally I’d sneak Alex into my home, very much against Julian’s orders, which made it even sweeter. And I’d return the favor by flying to London for a week or so, and into the arms of my adopted family of Will and Miranda. It was punishing on my body, but the more time I spent actually with Alex, the more I found myself wanting to commit to him.

But for all our time together, and all the love Al and I had for each other, I still wasn’t sure I wanted to couple up again. I was cruel. (I wrote it at last.) That August, he begged me to leave him for my own good if I would not commit, but I would not. He brought in the big guns one night — Miranda. Over Skype, and with Alex sitting beside her, she laid it out for me: respect Alex and the love we clearly had for each other, or end it. “I’m not asking you to marry him,” she said, pointing her finger at me through the screen. “I’m asking you to take responsibility for his heart. It’s yours, you blithering idiot, and it always has been.” She gave me 24 hours to make up my mind.

And ninety minutes later, after nearly two bottles of wine over Alex’s kitchen table in his sorry little studio flat in Kentish Town, she kissed him. Oh, to be fair, Miranda called me the next day to confess. I will give her that.

“He was just so sad,” she sniffled. “He didn’t even shout about how unfair it was that he finally thought he had what he wanted, only for you to refuse to be clear. He just wept these horrible tears, and his nose got snotty, and he asked me if I’d just kill him, he didn’t deserve to be alive any longer, didn’t want to have yet another thing taken from him. So I gathered him in my arms, and I kissed his forehead and told him he’d always been a good boy, and he only had to wait another day to know your answer.”

I wasn’t paying complete attention to her, I admit — it was two in the morning in Pasadena, and I’d been drinking myself into low-grade insobriety for several hours. “Yeah, I’ll tell him tomorrow. I think you know what I’m going to say.” I hope she did, because the red wine I was drinking wasn’t deciphering the mess in my head and my heart.

“Melissa” — that got my attention, since she never addressed me by my full name — “I did something foolish. I kissed him. I’m sorry, I don’t know what I was thinking.”

“You kissed him.” My voice sounded flat and blurry in my head. “You kissed him on the forehead.”

“No. A kiss. Not that it’s any excuse, there IS no excuse, but I was drunk, and I thought he might feel better if he knew how very much he is loved.”

“I see.” (I didn’t see. This sounded exceedingly lame, even to my tipsy consciousness.) “What did Al do? Did you two have your carnal embrace just for old times sake?” I was getting louder, and I really didn’t care — not that there was anyone left in this massive, empty husk of a home to scold me for shouting. “How was it, Miranda? Was it just like you remembered? Did you do it to show him what’s waiting for him when I tell him ‘no’?”

Miranda blew her nose, cleared her throat, and said in the meekest tone I have ever heard her utter, “I deserve that. It was one kiss, and Alex told me to fuck off. So I did.”

Thirty minutes later, I was telling Alex that I wasn’t going to waste his time any longer. If he wanted me, I wanted him, too, but I wanted him here. I would commit if he could get a transfer to the San Francisco office. We could figure the rest of it out in California. I made no mention of the kiss, nor did he. Two years later, I still don’t know if Miranda made up the kiss to force my hand (if she did, brilliant move, Rizz), or if she downplayed something far more intimate.

So even though Miranda is my dearest heart, my sister, my love, I will never completely trust her around Alex. She’d tried her hand (maybe) at taking him back when he was weak — it might happen again. Miranda is the cleverest of the bunch — if she truly wanted Alex back, I sometimes think she could contrive his return. I will take their selfies and videos and hugs and chaste forehead kisses for what they claim them to be. I must, after all that has come before, I must believe.

I stepped back in the studio and kicked an errant and dog-eared copy of “Liar’s Poker” in my path out of the way, stretched my arms far above my head and centered myself before picking up the phone to call.

One ring, two, three. “Sandra Dee de Mornay. I thought you’d never ring me back. Come home to England, darling, we all miss you.”

***

I won’t lie — one of the perks of Julian’s money — my money — is the cosseting that is afforded the rich. I live simply in my little studio, take the bus and walk, cook at home more frequently than I eat out, and I do so because I prefer to. I don’t have to. I will spend the money where it smoothes the less tidy edges of life, and long-distance travel has so many untidy edges. I try not to think of the obscene cost of a first class ticket to London, or the price of a private hire Jaguar from Heathrow to Crowborough, or my share of the 18th century vicarage we’re staying in for the duration of the wedding. Jocasta, Julian’s mother, would have said to concentrate on price rather than value was a mark of my bad breeding, and while I wouldn’t use exactly the same words, I tend to think she’s right. What use is all of this money if not to add value to my life? Trust me, 10 and a half hours in a pod where one might be completely prone mid-air, rattling through the atmosphere in a tin can, rather than jammed knees-close between tourists in a bank of five seats in economy, adds significant value.

At the border, I got the usual question — are you still married to your British husband? — and for the first time since 2010 I was able to answer no. I tried to do so politely, but I let slip the tiniest of laughs. The border guard looked up at me with a wry smile, and asked, “That bad, was he?” I giggled, and assured the guard Julian was even worse than he could imagine.

Will and Alex had wanted to collect me at Heathrow, but I passed. Will’s three months into a six-month driving ban at the moment — too many points for speeding — which would leave the drive to Alex, whose hatred of the M25 explodes into graphic swearing and steering wheel pounding whenever he feels another driver is even thinking about cutting him off. No, passing out in the rear seat of a Jaguar for an hour and a half, with a driver who had no interest in speaking with me, would be far more civilized and a terrific value.

I dozed as we passed through the suburban sprawl of Surrey, through Sevenoaks, Tunbridge Wells and the High Weald. I was drifting in a dream about my own future wedding: I was wearing not white, but a blush pink confection with a hooped skirt that made me look much like a strawberry cupcake, to my dismay. The ceremony was reaching a crescendo — instead of the bride, it was the groom who was veiled, and I was reaching up to uncover my husband-to-be, whom I suspected was not Alex.

“Excuse me, madam,” the driver’s voice tore me back into consciousness. “I’m terribly sorry, but we’re here.”

Before I could thank him, Alex’s face loomed into view through my window and he flung open my door. “Sweetest. Don’t ever let me stay with these lunatics again if you’re not here.” Behind him, I could see Will, Miranda and Sasha running from the front door of the squat brick home. “Only you can save me.” He handed me out of the car, his hand remaining possessively on my back as Miranda and Sasha crushed us in an embrace.

Will waved at me meekly as he crunched through the white pebbles that filled the drive. “We do group hugs now?”

Sasha shot him a cold look. “Yes, you twit.”

“Can’t figure out the rules these days,” Will grumbled, throwing his beefy arms around the four of us.

As Alex tipped the driver and helped him bring my bags inside, Miranda and Sasha shepherded me into a snug library where a fire snapped and blazed cheerily. Sasha fussed with getting me out of my coat as Miranda smoothed my hair and peered closely at my face. I felt like an overgrown eight-year-old coming to visit two particularly posh and mad aunties.

“Sash?” Miranda called out — Sasha had stepped outside to hang up my coat on a peg in the vestibule. “Something’s different about this girl.” Miranda walked around me, pointedly looking me over and poking at my belly with her tapered index finger. Her dark brown hair was pulled back in a messy bun, and in her sensible tweed trousers and navy cashmere jumper she resembled a very serious schoolteacher. “Can you tell?”

Sasha slid back in the room and paced around us, tapping her chin with a finger. She was improbably even more beautiful than the last time I’d seen her in the summer of 2017. Though she’d left her modelling days behind her after graduation for a career of sorts as a party planner (it was kind of as much of a made up job as my own at the bookshop), Sasha still moved through life with the willowy grace of a sylph. But the sylph had grown out of girlhood, into an Athena, a delicate and lean huntress, all honey blonde waves and grey eyes and peachy complexion. “I think I can, Ran.” She leaned in close and theatrically sniffed at my neck. My skin pebbled at the proximity of her beauty — no wonder she had little difficulty in picking up women if she could evoke this kind of response in straight and loved-up me. (She and Will made a dangerous tag team when they went out on the prowl — they could divide and conquer.) “I can smell it on her.”

Under their gimlet gazes, I felt a blush bloom across my face. “There’s nothing different,” I mumbled, purposely looking away from them towards the fire, and wondering where the hell Alex was to put a stop to this.

Miranda and Sasha grinned at each other and in unison shouted, “YOU’RE DIVORCED!”

“Oh yes, that. That is different,” I chuckled. “Is Julian here yet?”

Charlie kicked open the door, tea tray in hand. “Hullo, Mel. Thought you could do with some tea and whatnot before this evening’s festivities.” Of course it was Charlie, practical and thoughtful as ever, who’d been considerate enough to make tea — my friends are lovely, but they do tend towards the selfish at times. Charlie lifted the tea cozy up to reveal a blue and white chinoiserie teapot. “Here’s the tea. And here” — he pointed to a decanter half full of amber liquid standing on the tray — “is the whatnot. Some brandy, thought you might need it.”

“I’ll have some whatnot,” Miranda announced. “I think we all could do with a little whatnot. ALEXANDER! WILLIAM! Stop skulking about and join us.”

Charlie shoved a cup of tea in my hand and took me aside while Miranda and Sasha bickered over what time we should leave for Bex’s mini-hen party. The “real” one in Dublin had been two weeks before just for the bridesmaids (and none of us in this AirBnB fit that description); ours was going to be a low-key booze-up for the benefit of Jamie’s female friends. Minty and Amanda, who were staying in another house with Julian and some of the wedding party, were due to join us.

“I put a splash of brandy in it for you. Good for jet lag, according to my professional opinion.” Charlie had surprised everyone by choosing a path in life that required actual work — he was a GP in a very busy practice in North London. Only Alex had followed a similar post-graduation path that required hard work, long hours and postgraduate education. (Julian would argue he works just as hard, but much of his labor, as far as I can tell, is glad-handing and taking credit for his underlings’ efforts.)

I took a sip and the brandy stung my mouth deliciously. “Perfect.” Miranda and Sasha had by now wandered off to find Al and Will, and I settled myself cross-legged on the overstuffed beige and pink floral sofa while Charlie fixed himself a similar cup.

“Can I ask you something?” he said over his slim shoulder as he added a little cream from a small silver jug. “Is Alex usually this… cheerful?”

“Cheerful?” I asked, and swallowed a large gulp of brandied tea.

“Mmmm, yes. ‘Cheerful.'” Charlie swirled a teaspoon in his willow-pattern teacup, and looked at me with a sober expression, his mouth set tight and firm. Like Will, he was also just starting to lose his hair at the temples, though he still had a stiff thatch of bright red hair that he styled to cover it on one side. “I know you two must be quite happy now you’re together –“

“Extremely happy,” I interjected.

“– but there’s something a little… off. There’s something slightly forced. I think I have an idea, and I’d like your opinion.”

“My opinion as an Alexologist?”

Charlie laughed, his eyes crinkling at the corners. “Yes, as a seasoned Alexologist with the most up-to-date research, though it’s almost certainly not peer-reviewed.” He lowered himself onto the sofa next to me and stretched his legs out to rest on the old tea chest in front of us. “I think we have trouble coming. It’s just a hunch, just something I put together from observing him.”

“Observing the patient Alexander Carr?” I took another sip and smiled at him over the cup.

“Yes, he does have a terminal case of the Carrs, I do hope you realize that. No, it’s little… tells. Little half-comments. We all got here last night, and were up until three catching up. Well, Will and Sasha passed out around midnight from the red wine, but Miranda, Alex and I stayed up. He’s really loved you all this time, I hope you know.”

“I do. We really fucked it up, didn’t we?”

“Pish posh, we were all idiots back then. Some of us still are.” Charlie got up and started pacing on the threadbare Persian rug in front of me. “Alex’s cheerfulness speaks to me not of his happiness with you. I — and correct me if I am wrong — I think he’s actually relishing the idea of seeing Julian. Whether it’s just to rub Jules’ nose in how happy he is these days, or something more… physical. I don’t know. Does this sound possible?”

Oh god, no. “It does sound possible.” I explained how my father had tried to engineer peace talks the other month, and that Alex had fumed for a week after our return from Burbank about how Julian was a “rancid little shit who needed a slug in the mouth.”

“Another professional opinion for you, then. We should probably just leave them to it. It’s time all this nonsense is over, for everyone’s sake.” Charlie reached for my hand and pulled me up. “Well done, you, for finally coming to your senses and saving our Al from himself. Treat him gently, Mel.”

Will burst through the door at that moment, propelled by a push from Sasha. Alex brought up the rear. “Ooof! I say, Sash, not necessary. Not necessary at all. You are a bit of brute. Hullo, you two. Have you finished the brandy?” Will rubbed his hands together, and finding most of the liquor still in the bottle, poured himself a good measure into a teacup. “Ran’s scaring up some glasses in the kitchen, told her it was woman’s work.”

The crash of cupboards echoed from the back of the house, accompanied by Miranda’s shouts of how she was going to separate Will from his manhood with the cake knife she’d found. Alex pushed Will back out the door (“Is this Shove Will Prater day?”) towards the kitchen to help, and stalked back towards me to take me in his arms. “Welcome home, sweetest. Did you miss these monsters?”

Tucking myself under his chin, and nestling in the scratch of his black Shetland sweater, I relaxed at last. Miranda and Will jostled each other as they bustled back in the library, both bearing a clutch of champagne flutes and a bottle of Bollinger, snipping at each other about the patriarchy. Charlie stoked the fire while Sasha turned up the Bluetooth speaker — Satie’s “Gymnopédie No. 1,” one of Charlie’s favorites. Alex swayed a little with me to the music.

I breathed in, the scent of his sweater one of the rain outside, the Silk Cuts I knew he must be smoking again, and a faint trace of the hearthside. It smelt like home, though I knew that would be wherever he was. “I don’t know why I ever left.”

***

So much has happened since I arrived here on Thursday; I am currently in Lyme Regis with Alex and Lucy, who are this moment eating soft-boiled eggs and soldiers in the kitchen of the little cottage we’re staying in. I want to start getting this down while it’s all still fresh in my head. The rehearsal was… eventful. The wedding, even more so. No one was arrested, but frankly, it might have happened, should have happened. But these are stories that will take far longer than the time I’ve had so far to type. The rain of the weekend continues, so Alex and I have a strange and wonderful little black-haired girl to fuss over indoors, the spitting image of Fenn. (Oh gosh, Fenn. I hope word hasn’t leaked back to her yet.)

And if I never see Julian Charles Crispian Cranford again, I will only be too happy. If I could lock him up in a little room, obscure the keyhole and forget its location in the hallways of my mind, I’d gladly do so. If Josh was the alpha of my troubles with men, Julian is certainly the omega.