I must really love him. That mantra keeps looping in my head as I check off task after task, the grinding minutiae of gathering up one’s life and transplanting hundreds of miles away. Cable providers to call, storage units to cancel, and an opportunity to streamline my wardrobe. Caitlin called first dibs, which I said she could have as long as she spent some time with me sorting through my possessions. (She’s a touch big around the middle for some of the dresses I’m looking to offload, but I wouldn’t dare mention it — she could pin me, easily. I learned this the hard way in second grade.)

At one point early on, Al suggested we rent a U-Haul and do it ourselves, since there really isn’t that much in the way of furniture to move except for his fake Danish Modern sofa, my blue velvet loveseat and ottoman, the little kitchen table and a half dozen folding chairs I picked up at Crate & Barrel when I first got here. He’s completely right, but I have no appetite for driving a truck 400 miles through the Central Valley in one day, even if we share the driving.

Instead, I imagined we’d take our time, rolling gently down Highway 1, hugging the majestic coast in our farewell to Northern California. We’d stop in Half Moon Bay for breakfast (I love the chocolate croissants at Cafe Society), and then cruise through Santa Cruz and stop in at the Literary Guillotine so I can buy more used books. (Ben has transmitted to me the bookseller’s curse of never being able to acquire enough books, but if we’re travelling in a car not full of much, I can certainly buy more books.) Lunch in Monterey, and an overnight at a lodge in Big Sur so we can wake up, perched on a cliff to take in the ocean breeze and the scent of redwood. The following day, a visit to Hearst Castle in the morning, lunch in Avila Beach, and then a little detour to Ojai for a spa wind-down, centering and some yoga before bed (for me at least — I suspect Alex will be up for a massage but he’s more likely to pass up the warrior pose for a pint or two).

“And then,” I bubbled to Alex as I packed more books into a moving box, “we take the scenic route down through Malibu to Santa Monica. To our new home.” Despite Al’s insistence that there wasn’t really that much to do in terms of packing, I didn’t want to leave organization of a long-distance move until the last moment. Packed boxes also meant that there was no turning back for me, that I would be leaving with Alex in January. I need to ensure there is no excuse for me to call it off — it’s not like I’m actually needed in Santa Monica like he is, and I could easily postpone and postpone for weeks and months and years until… I’d delayed my whole life away, out of fear of getting love wrong, again.

He stayed my hand as I was tucking my dog-eared copy of The Sorrows of Young Werther on top of a shameful stack of historical romance novels (still a weakness). “No.”

Dropping the book, I rose back on my haunches. “‘No’? Like, how ‘no’?”

Al pinched the bridge of his nose. He was sitting cross-legged in yet another pair of new selvedge jeans from Japan, some niche designer he’d read about in The Rake, that cost about three times as much as my own not particularly cheap Joe’s Jeans pair. “Mel, that’s three days. Three days to drive, what 500 miles?”

“400,” I corrected. “And it’s like a mini-break. We could leave early on Saturday morning, and be in the new place by lunchtime on Monday. Jenn already said she’d supervise the movers and the delivery guys from HD Buttercup and that little place on Melrose on Monday morning. We’ll walk into our apartment already set up. Doesn’t that sound perfect?”

He shook his head — if I hadn’t marched him to the barber the weekend before, his curls would have been bouncing everywhere. (Though I have always loved his hair on the longer side, Trevor the-boss’s-boss does not, and has taken to calling him “Slash” even though Alex’s hair certainly never got longer than the top of his ears, and he would never wear a ridiculous hat like that.) “No, none of that. We need to compromise, sweetest. I compromised by not insisting that we move ourselves. You need to give a little, too. I don’t want to make a production of this.”

“I thought you said I’d been pushed around enough in my life,” I harrumphed, folding my arms across my chest.

“That doesn’t mean you get your way in everything. It just seems like a colossal waste of time and cash to gallivant about teashops and stay in tarted up cabins and listen to someone chant ‘om’ while enough sage to choke a muskox burns in the background.” He rested his elbows on his knees and made little “OK” signs with both hands like he was trying to do a chin mudra while he said the last bit. The mockery snipped at me.

“That’s mean.” I slapped at his hands and he chuckled, which made me only more irritated. “It’s not like we can’t afford it.”

“You can afford it, more like,” he replied. “Fenn wants more canvases this month, and what with Christmas presents for Lucy, and her trip with Min and the Bosworths to the Ardèche for New Year’s, and the deposit for the new flat, and having to get a car…” He trailed off and looked out the French doors to where Steve was pruning the manzanita shrubs; the two men raised hands hands in recognition. “Just no. Another time.”

Scowling, I sealed the flaps of the book box closed, rejecting Alex’s offer of assistance with a polite palm up — a “no” of my own. “Fine. Let me pay then. Or I can get Julian to buy Fenn her canvases.”

“No… and no. Especially no to the second of those. I don’t know or care to know what is going on between them right now, but I’m not enabling it.” I started to protest but he hushed me with an index finger to my lips. “Even if he is her patron. Or lover.” (He flinched to say it.) “If she wanted it from him, she’d ask.”

A little update on Julian and Fenn might be in order here. It’s not giving away too much to say that the truth does hate to keep its lustrous self hidden away in a drawer or a box or a mind.

After three days of tending to and getting to know a rambunctious and occasionally suspicious Lucy (“you’re not my real mummy, and you won’t steal me and take me away to America, will you?”) in soggy Lyme Regis, I was ready to fraternize with adults again and couldn’t wait to get to Pitlochry. Even if it was with people who were adults only chronologically.

I will say this: I think my stepdaughter-to-be is possibly the most interesting and charmingly bonkers child I have ever met. Never before had I met a six-year-old — even my peculiar and angsty little childhood self — who was gleefully, well, morbid. Lucy likes graveyards and gravediggers, ravens and tales of damp castles (useful if she ever inherits the house in Pitlochry, I guess) holding maidens in chains, skeletons and ghouls and anything involving Black Shuck. When I expressed concern about how this might affect her, Minty shushed me and told me that the doctor said it was “normal enough,” and not to suppress a child’s wonder at the world. Plus, it was hard not to love the cheerful little tales Lucy would tell about the people whose names she read on gravestones. (“James Redwell, 1812 to 1870. I think… he loved his dog Hector and playing table tennis and eating turnips, because someone needs to love eating turnips since I don’t.”)

But no matter how much I enjoyed getting to know this strange little Alex-clone, brave and strong and forthright, I wanted to know I’d have an afternoon to myself where I could read undisturbed by questions about what octopi eat or when we were going to have tea or why Mummy doesn’t love Daddy anymore because daddies were supposed to love mummies unless there were two mummies or two daddies but I have a mummy and a daddy and they don’t love each other anymore but daddy loves you Melissa and will you be my new mummy and does that mean I have two mummies now? Exhausting. Being around Lucy was an excellent prophylactic — I couldn’t even imagine having sex with Alex the entire time Lucy was down the hallway in our holiday cottage knowing that it might result in another overly curious, black-haired oddball. In any event, I ended up switching bedrooms with her on the very first night, and let her sleep with Alex in our bed. She’d claimed to have seen a badger sitting in her bedroom, staring at her. (I slept in her bed all three nights and I never once saw a badger.)

I’m not made of stone though. The little Lady Lucy of Dorset, late of Cadogan Square, won me over enough that when Minty came to collect her early on the morning we were headed to Pitlochry, I felt a small piece of me snap away as I kissed her silky curls goodbye. She should have had a sister or a brother. I just don’t know if I have it in me to give her one.

Later that morning, Al snored the entire way from Chard to Bristol Airport; I had to jab him in the ribs to bring him back into the land of the conscious as we rolled up to departures. (“I swear you sharpen those elbows, Mel.”) And after a brief flight to Edinburgh, we were soon banging our way further north to Perthshire in Fenn’s new Volvo, the nicest automobile any Carr had owned since John Carr, of similar brilliance and wit and darkness as his son Alexander, had noped out of existence over 25 years before.

Their house, which I’ll call Balcraigie (not its name — I’ve learned to be coy after the doxxing Julian and I went through on my last blog), is on the outskirts of Pitlochry, set down a long and rutted drive flanked by stands of ancient oaks. In summer, the land is plagued (like much of that part of the world) with midges but at any time of the year it is one of the most beautiful locations I have ever visited. Ben Vrackie and Beinn a’ Ghlò loom in the near distance, and at night the wine-dark sea of sky droops over the world, the Milky Way a clear swoosh of swirl in the heavens. The stream Alex splashed in as a child hiding from tutors still cut through the jade of the overgrown grass, and while much of the land Balcraigie once overlooked had been sold by Carrs past, there were still a few acres of solitude for a young boy and his little black cloud to lose himself in.

Balcraigie itself is not nearly so stunning. The summer before I returned to the US for my senior year, Julian floated the idea of a road trip north so I could see more of the country he hoped I might eventually make my home. Since the end of term in early June, I’d been staying in a holiday flat in Victoria to be closer to Jules’ family pied-a-terre. Though I spent most nights in the Cranford flat in Morpeth Terrace while Mr. and Mrs. Cranford summered on the Riviera, the dingy bedsit was a fiction to assuage Jocasta that we weren’t living in sin. (That would come later during my six month sojourn in 2008, after Ed Cranford forced the point with his wife: “Jules is a man now, Jo. Not right to deny him his due.”)

“I’m sure Al would be grateful for a trip home before he starts at Goldmans in August,” Julian suggested over a glass of cider over at Chimes in Pimlico. (Oh Chimes, RIP — a much-missed drinking den and provider of savory pies and apple crumbles with custard. Please accept my post-mortem apology for Will’s dine and dash back in September 2008.) Al had just moved into his flash pad in Chelsea — Uncle B had loaned him the deposit, with 10% interest — directly from Bristol, and by Julian’s telling Cora wanted her two boys back home for one last visit before adulthood claimed them both. (If I am melodramatic, I pale in comparison to Cora Carr, for whom all pleasures are “pure bliss” and each setback “absolutely the worst luck ever, darling.”)

“You’ll like Cora,” Jules continued between bites of chicken. “She’s younger than my mum, or yours. She was only 19 when she had Alex and Fennella, bit too young, if you ask me, but she and Mr. Carr were married for nearly a year when she had them, so no funny business about it.” (Julian has always been old-fashioned about things like children being born out of wedlock, or patriotism, or knowing which fork to use at dinner.) “A bit mad, but then again, all the Carrs are. And Fenn’s a lunatic, but she’s mostly good-natured. You’ll love each other, I’m sure of it.” (We did not.)

As expected, Alex jumped at the chance of a freebie from Julian. Three days later, we were bombing up the M1 from London, Julian behind the wheel of his Mercedes CLK350. (I hadn’t even known he had a car — he wouldn’t keep it in Bristol for fear of “hooligans” keying it, so it stayed in a secure garage in Westminster.) Alex had warned me not to expect too much. “It sounds a lot more impressive than it is,” he cautioned. “Yes, it was built — partially — in the 16th century, but it’s been falling apart since then. It seems like every hundred years or so some well-meaning ancestor stuck a new wing or orangerie or bathroom on, but none of them match each other and all seem set on disintegrating on their own inscrutable schedule of planned obsolescence.”

“What Al means to say,” Julian said, patting my hand where I had it resting on his left thigh, “is that it’s a bit shit but he loves it anyway.” I looked up and a small smile quavered on the edge of his mouth, but not one of mockery. I was pretty sure I’d heard those words before from Alex. (I was right — from the backseat came a laugh and a shout of, “Not on, Cranford. Only I get to call it a bit shit.”)

And it is a bit shit. I now can say this as it will be mine — or partially mine — one day. The frontage hiding its 16th century origins is mostly dour, chipped 18th century Palladian, with a missing pilaster on the second floor and a broken pediment that isn’t meant to be broken. To the west is the 17th century brick of the main body of the house, tall and red and quite handsome in its domestic homeliness, half-covered in ivy. Around the back is the tumbledown Victorian greenhouse where Fenn keeps her studio — though it’s messy, it is almost picturesque in its decay. A Georgian orangerie on the other side of the house used to house Cora’s workshop, though these days she’s moved inside to a disused suite of rooms since the orangerie has lost so many windows it’s mostly open to the elements and full of dead leaves. 100 yards away from the house is a former icehouse, the site of Cora’s kiln which for many years was the only source of income for the family. Rumor has it that Capability Brown drew up designs for the gardens, but no one had the cash to pay him.

Inside, the battle against damp in the bathrooms is one that involves constant vigilance, since clumps of moss flourish in the grout when left unchecked. (In spite of what I told Julian, I do subsidize one aspect of Alex’s life — I now pay for a housecleaner to come every week to Balcraigie. I think of it as an investment in what will eventually be my property.) Leaks spring in the roof at irregular intervals, sometimes causing mere inconvenience and others the loss of family artifacts. (“Who needs a poxy medieval tapestry anyway?” Al had scoffed when I expressed sorrow for the destruction of what looked in family photos like a stunning piece of art. “At least it was insured, and that paid for the roof and groceries for three years.”) The floorboards creak in nearly every room, and the annual bill for mousetraps is higher than my yearly spending on public transportation.

Most of its demons — the leaks and the terrifying taxidermied wild boars and the legends of several apparitions — all dwell in the attic, where Alex hid when the black cloud rained too heavy on him. I have never liked its shadows and sheet-draped, gilt-framed paintings and the five oak looking-glasses which give one corner of the space an eerie funhouse air. For a space that large — it must be at least 2,500 square feet — it is awfully claustrophobic. At every turn is some monstrous old iron bed that looks more like a torture rack, or creepy photographs of distant Carr relations in a photo album bearing the title “The Bad ‘Uns” on the cover, or stacks and stacks of Financial Times that are so old, they’ve gone from pink to grey.

And here I was again, some 13 years and change later, sans Julian and now on the arm of Cora Carr’s precious, prodigal son. The roof had been repaired twice since my first visit, but Cora’s misgivings about me had not completely. She’d never quite trusted me the first time I came as Jules’ girlfriend. Alex had rung her several times in the months before he and I had our liaison to ask her opinion about certain “signals” he thought I was sending him. A good girl, she told him, didn’t send signals to men when she was dating someone else.

“After I met your father,” she supposedly told him, “I never looked at another man, let alone send one ‘signals.’ Julian deserves better. So do you.” Cora always neglects to mention when telling any part of her Grand Love Story that she was 17 when she met John Carr, and he was 33, just a hair younger than Al is now. (Gross.) Cora didn’t look elsewhere because John Carr got her underage arse out of her family home in Kensington and into chic nightclubs where she could drink as much as he could pour into her. (Rather a lot, as it turns out.) She was desperate for life to begin, to do something more than scrape maybe one A-level at the end of sixth form, to be out of what Alex describes as an emotionally smothering relationship with her mother. (Some dynamics just keep repeating themselves in families.)

Primrose St. Clair, Cora’s mum, was one of the top debs of the Season the year she was presented at Court — one of the last years that even happened — and never let her only daughter forget that. Cora would never be quite the well-tamed, decorative girl her mother wanted. She’d been a little too young to become a punk (much to Mrs. St. Clair’s relief), but had started dressing like the fourth, and very most hottest, member of Bananarama, all baggy overalls and teased out hair. To her parents’ horror, she had brought home a young man from Croydon who worked in the City as a trainee accountant and introduced him as her boyfriend. It simply had to stop, one way or another, or Cora would end up raising three middle-class children in a flat in Clapham if she wasn’t careful, or so said her mother.

John Carr was a path away from that future that both generations of St. Clairs found acceptable, despite the appalling age difference. Coming in from school one afternoon, still in her school uniform, Cora came upon a tall, black-haired man ringing the bell to the garden flat beneath her parents’ maisonette a few streets down from where her father was a professor at Imperial College. He pressed and pressed on the bell, but no one came to answer the door. By Cora’s telling, “he looked like a film star who’d been thrown out of the love nest he shared with his paramour,” wrapped in a beige mackintosh and clutching a tatty suitcase. It actually wasn’t too far from the truth — John had been living rent-free in the flat of a Ph.D. candidate at the University of London, until she got sick of feeding and housing him. With another four months left in his visiting lecturer gig at the London School of Economics, he packed his small bag and took the Piccadilly Line from Russell Square to his Great Uncle Archie’s flat in Elvaston Place. The flat just below the St. Clairs.

When I recall being 17, I don’t remember thinking much of men in their mid-30s. It’s not that I assumed they were predators — I knew enough from my time with Josh to understand that those can be of any age — or that they were boring or really much of anything. They sort of just… were. Not young enough to be sexy, not old enough to be, well, old. Not Cora. For her, John Carr was “sex on legs,” as she told me the other month over a cup of tea and a few biscuits. (I’d tried to teach her how to bake shortbread that afternoon, but she gave up and declared, “It’s too boring, you do it,” before throwing me her apron.) “The biggest brown eyes and this long, long nose and this funny scowl which I guess one might call ‘resting bitch face’ now. And he was there on my doorstep, looking very grumpy that Archie wasn’t in, and that it was February and raining. So I brought him inside and he made me tea and we watched Bonanza until my mother came in from her art lesson. Pretty sure she was having an affair with the instructor.”

After the shock of finding a strange adult man in her living room watching television with her schoolgirl daughter wore off, and introductions (and apologies) were made, Primrose St. Clair deduced that this young lecturer was not exactly what he seemed. Scuffed wingtips, yes, stained mack, yes, slightly threadbare corduroys and tweed jacket, perhaps. Messy hair, too, and the yellow stains of a cigarette smoker on his his right hand. But as Archie Carr’s nephew, John was likely to be someone, or at least someone respectable. (Debatable point.) Over more afternoon cups of tea, Mrs. St. Clair learned about Balcraigie, which John described as “majestic in its Highland glory,” and quite how far away his branch of the family was from the title Archie Carr had hinted about (John fudged it, drawing his line as a mere twiglet away). He was, by his telling, an academic because it was a gentleman’s pursuit, a way to exercise the mind and keep the nation supplied with economists to guide its bright, privatized future. (All a load of hooey — the Carrs had been broke since Great-Grandmother Sarah’s generation, and this latest generation of Carr boys was expected to marry well.)

“He was absolutely mad for me,” she explained. “But I know what I looked like then. Who wouldn’t have wanted me?” (As embarrassing as it is to admit, I felt an uncomfortable kinship with Cora in this moment.) “And he was brilliant and hilarious and gorgeous, and knew so much about everything, and was never condescending. He had a soft burr in his voice that made him sound like every word was velvet. I wanted to run away to Scotland with him immediately and go roll in the grass with him and drink whisky and potter about in a big old house without any boring parents around. Especially Mummy, who I think would have preferred John for herself if she wasn’t so old.” (She made a sour little purse with her lips when she said this last bit, looking so much like a much fairer Fenn.)

So with her parents’ blessing, Cora dropped out of sixth form and married John Carr at the Chelsea registry office some nine weeks later, right after her 18th birthday. Alex showed me a photo of the day: Cora in a sweet, tea-length white lace dress and little white gloves, her hair swept into a respectable chignon instead of in the poodle-y poof she preferred at the time, her head tilted towards her new husband as she clutched his arm; John in a new tweed jacket Uncle Archie had gifted him for the nuptials, one long, black ringlet falling over his left eyebrow, looking down at his child bride with the gaze of a man who knew he’d hit the jackpot in more ways than one.

Later that week, Cora was packed off to Scotland with John on the Caledonian Sleeper to start her new life at Balcraigie. “I was so young, I saw it all as a terrific adventure — leaky roof, crotchety father-in-law living with us, Uncle B drifting in and out and trying it on with me. But there was a housekeeper and a gardener and someone who brought in all the groceries, so it wasn’t like there was too much to do besides have a fantastic time exploring the house and setting up my studio. It was heaven, darling. And the twinnies came along not too much later, and suddenly I was so busy I wasn’t paying attention to John.”

Looking into her mug — one of the “vessels,” as she calls them, from her kiln, cobalt blue flecked with white and grey — she avoided my eyes. “Don’t lose sight of Alexander, Melissa. No matter how much you have going on in your life, if you bring me another grandbaby or not, don’t stop paying attention.”

How could I ever ignore him? I asked her. “He’s spent 14 years trying to get me to pay attention to what he was saying. I finally listened,” I promised her. “And I will never stop.”

If I will obey anything in my wedding vows, it will be that promise.

***

Now that Cora is at least trying to be kind to me, even if she doesn’t completely trust me yet with her boy, I expected our visit to Balcraigie to be, well, if not devoid of high drama (these are the Carrs, after all), at least more calm from that familial quarter. I suspect it has taken considerable shouting (as this passes for an appropriate volume of conversation chez Carr) over the telephone between Al and his mum to convince her I am not Salome, come to demand the head of her son and present it, bloodied and silent, on a platter for my own delight.

Over a decent (because I was cooking) supper of kedgeree and minted peas on my second night at Balcraigie, the truth about Fenn and Julian clambered out from its foxhole. Cora had been sipping sauvignon blanc since teatime, with the excuse that “it’s raining,” which actually isn’t that bad of an excuse, come to think of it. By the time Fenn was helping herself to another three spoonfuls of kedgeree, Cora was completely ratted, but doing an admirable job of staying upright.

“Just to think,” she said, apropos of not much, since Alex had been chatting with Andrew about the upcoming St. Mirren v. St. Johnstone match, and Fenn and I had been mostly silent — things had become quite awkward that afternoon between us when she asked me if Julian had fucked Amanda down in Sussex, and I elected not to lie.

“Just to think,” Cora repeated herself, “that someday soon, we might have Julian at the table for dinner and all four of you children will be together again.” There was a dreamy cast to her eyes, like she was recalling the often tense dinners we’d shared in years past in far more golden recollection than I had, but it could have been the wine.

Alex put down his fork. “And why, Mum, might that be? I explained to you that this” — he pointed to the bruise in his eye socket, which had turned from dark purple the day after the wedding to the sickly green he was then sporting at the dinner table — “is from that little shit. I don’t care that he’s helping Fenn. I do not want to be near him again, and that includes being in this house.”

“Hear, hear,” Andrew chortled. “Didn’t trust the cunt when I met him. Typical English toff.” (Alex did know by then that Julian had visited the house briefly in September, so a meeting with Andrew Kil-whatever was not a surprise. Al also appreciated that when Cora had mentioned to Andrew that I was Jules’ ex-wife during our introductions the day before, Andrew remarked, “You were married to that arse? You’re a brave lass.” Andrew and Alex were going to do just fine rubbing along.)

Cora tutted at the two men. “Andrew, no need for that kind of language at the table. It’s bad enough that my children can’t bring themselves not to say it. And Alex, sweetie, you did kind of start it.”

“Start it how? By defending the woman I’m going to marry?” Alex picked up his fork again and pointed it at his mother. “And how would you know who started it, Mum?”

From the corner of my eye I saw Fenn give her mother an almost imperceptible head shake, but Cora wasn’t paying attention. She was too focused on pointing her own fork back at Alex. “Julian told me when he brought Fenn back from London on Monday. I asked him why he was limping, and he told me you’d had a go at him. And don’t point your fork at your mother, Alexander. It’s rude, and it’s not how I raised you.”

In grade school, I want to say fourth grade, because I know Jenn wasn’t with us yet, we learned the basics of the color wheel. The primary colors are red and yellow and blue, and the secondary colors are green and purple and orange. Secondary colors complement the primaries, and vice versa. For me, the most pleasing of the triad of complementary duos was red and green, not only for its Christmassy connotations, but because I found the combination calming in a way that I found the other dyads unstable, even disturbing and jarring. At the Balcraigie dinner table, however, the green of Alex’s left eye and the rising red in his surrounding complexion did little to steady my nerves. I knew the storm was about strike land at the dinner table, with all three Carrs likely to unleash gales of invective.

Across the table, Andrew folded his napkin and began to push back his chair but Cora stopped him. “Don’t leave, darling. My son can be quite the little beastie when he wants.”

“Mummy,” Fenn pleaded, looking uneasily between her brother and her mother, as if she didn’t know whose favor she needed to curry more. “No.”

“Oh pish, Fennie.” The twins’ mother turned the fork towards her daughter and looped it in a figure eight in the air. “It’s about time your brother got over his ridiculous blood feud with Julian.”

Behind us the fire popped little cricks as the kindling was consumed in the grate. (I’d also started paying for a chimney sweep and regular delivery of wood, so that Fenn and Cora didn’t have to rely on that inefficient Aga in the kitchen so much.) “And why,” Alex ground out, “was Julian bringing Fenn back from London?” He swung his fork towards his sister, whose eyes were by then pooling tears. “What were you doing in London? Huh? Where were you?”

Andrew caught my eye — I saw the invitation to flee there, but mouthed “wait” at him.

“I was meeting with a few gallery owners, that’s all,” Fenn hiccuped. “Julian set it up because he’s my patron. We stayed at the Ritz, I mean –“

“‘We‘? Who stayed at the Ritz? Was he with you? Huh? What is Julian to you, Fenn?” Alex’s dropped fork clattered against the ugly Wedgwood china plate before him, some 1970s monstrosity featuring a red cockerel that Cora had brought north with her from Kensington as a teenager.

“Pfffffffffft,” Cora sighed. “Be a good girl, Fennie. Your brother really should know. Especially now that you and Julian are… I don’t know what you’re calling it. Together, yes, that’s a good word.”

“‘Together,” Alex echoed, far more calmly than I’d expected given the crimson of his face. “Fenn, what does ‘together’ mean? Enlighten me.”

Cora tucked her light brown bob behind both ears, left, right, as if to hear Alex more clearly. I certainly caught sight of the massive diamond earrings in each earlobe — they weren’t part of the family set, I have since learned, but were recent presents from Andrew. At 53, she is still stunning — tall and lithe like her children, with Alex’s long, tapered fingers and Fenn’s full lips. Far prettier than I’ll ever be, or her daughter for that matter, a fact of which all three of us are quite aware. In the center of her heart-shaped face is the most precious dot of a button nose, which was at that moment a little red from the wine.

“Don’t be boring, Allie.” Cora squinted at her son. “Let Fenn have a little fun.”

“Fun.” Alex snarled the word. “What kind of ‘fun’ are you having, Fenn? The kind where he tells you how you will live your life according to his rules? The kind where you accept humiliation as part of your day-to-day life? Where you forget who you even were when you met him?”

Alex slammed his hand on the table and knocked over his wine glass. I reached to clean it, but he stopped me. “I can take care of myself, sweetness. Not like that monster she’s having so much fun with.”

“STOP IT!” Fenn screamed, pulling her hands through her hair before holding her own pink face in her hands. “Mummy, I asked you not to talk about it. I wanted to talk to Al on my own terms, not yours. I am not a child!” I watched as her tears dropped onto her plate, plip plip.

“You are MY child, Fennella.” Cora smudged her pink lipstick where she dotted at the corners of her mouth with her napkin. “And your brother is just going to have to come to terms with the fact that Julian is in love with you sooner or later. I think sooner is better.” She gave a little shrug and returned to her kedgeree, ignoring Fenn’s keening. “Melissa, this is delicious.”

“No,” Alex growled. “I will not allow this. You will not allow him to touch you any longer. Do you even know what he was up to down in Sussex? Do you think you’re the only one in his life?”

By now, Fenn was gulping down her sobs, trying to drink her wine but not being able to get much of a sip through her emotion. “Mummy, I… Melissa told me he’s sleeping with Amanda Harrington,” she choked out.

“Even more of a cunt than I’d first judged,” Andrew grumbled.

Alex pulled at the arm of my sweater; I didn’t want to look at him so I focused on Fenn’s face and the twist of her grimace. I already knew his question, so I answered it before it slipped from his mouth. “She asked me if I knew if Julian was seeing anyone. I told her. That’s it. She should know the truth.”

Alex snorted. “See? That’s your Julian, Mum. Not enough that he ruined your daughter-in-law’s life –“

“Daughter-in-law-to-be,” his mother corrected with another flourish of her fork in his direction.

“– he also goes after Fenn. And why, Mum? Why? Because he will never let me be happy.” Alex ground the tines of the fork into the tatty blue tablecloth.

“SHUT UP!” Fenn’s cry was even louder than before. “Do you think I’m crying about Julian? HA! I don’t care that he’s sleeping with Amanda. He can marry her for all I care. I won’t live my life on his terms, and he knows that. He accepts it– can you believe that?” Throwing her napkin on the table, Fenn rose from her seat with a slight wobble and advanced on her brother. Leaning over him, she stuck her scarlet face in his. “I am not your girlfriend. And I am not YOU.”

“If it’s all just hunky-dory that your –” Alex paused; he could not make himself say the word, which Cora thoughtfully interjected (“lover”).

“–he,” he continued, ignoring his mother, “is fucking some other woman, my ex-girlfriend, if either of you two hens remember –“

Cora chuckled and popped a single pea into her mouth. “Oh, I remember Amanda. Quite the bosom on her. She stole your Nana Elizabeth’s mink hat, if I recall correctly, but I didn’t mind. Hideous thing.”

Fenn wiped her hand over her face and blew her nose on the faded napkin, rolled her head from side to side and in a lazy circle as she composed herself. One black curl dangled from the messy bun she’d fixed on top of her head, refusing to submit to even the least disciplined of styles. “Mummy’s right. Alex, Julian is in love with me. I’m not sure that I am with him, but I might be.”

Al started to speak, but his sister cut him off immediately. “I don’t think it’s a put on, and I don’t think he meant to. He…” Fenn looked over to me, as if seeking my dispensation for some confession she hadn’t yet made. “He told me that at first he just wanted to feel something again, anything again. It wasn’t meant to be anything more than for us both to be connected to some other human body again. But Al, he started feeling more. More than he had in a very long time, not since he was with Melissa, he said, in their very first days. He scares me with how much he cares. I’m not used to this, having anyone love me like this. It’s too much sometimes, and then not enough.” She blew her nose one more time. “I’m crying because I don’t want you to hate me. Could you hate me, Allie?”

A remarkable feat — all three Carrs were silent, or near enough. Quiet enough that when Andrew whispered, “Let’s let them work it out, lass,” it rang loud in my ears before he and I slipped away to the library. Alex’s unspoken “no” hung in the space between his tense body and his sister’s.

Of course now Alex knows, or knows enough. (He does not know about what I know, or the extra two grand a month I’m still getting, since I never breached my end of the agreement.) He knows that Julian is in love with Fenn, and that it’s no mindfuck for anyone but Jules himself, since Fenn won’t commit to him. She won’t tell him she loves him — “What is love, anyway?” — and would not agree to entertain moving to America to be with him. Even when Julian protested, and reminded her that Cora has Andrew now, so she wouldn’t be abandoning her mother, Fenn refused. “It’s not about her, or you. It’s something… bigger,” she asserted with a touch of murk, since she would not say what that bigger thing was.

And it’s all driving Jules completely mental — he texts me asking for advice, which I will never give. He calls me, too, and sometimes I’ll answer if I feel like I need to hear his suffering. But I don’t weep for Julian, even if he is being ripped apart by love, even though he is the victim, just as he always considered himself to be. St. Sebastian on the cross, as Miranda had once described him, his body riddled with arrows, pierced and aching with pain. Amanda is with him as I type, deciding whether she could make a home in Los Angeles after all.

she is just a means to an end as am I for her, he texted me yesterday. She will let me have Fenn, if Fenn will let me have Fenn

Why should I even care? I tapped back. Don’t get me involved!

For twenty minutes, no response. I continued to pack boxes — the least-used crockery, the extra pillows, the large bowl from Cora’s studio that used to hold fruit at the Cow Hollow apartment, the Jo Malone candles, still hardly a dent in their beeswax. I shoved Julian and his heartsick yawps from my mind, distracting myself with the impeachment hearings on the news. A foregone conclusion, but one I wanted to observe anyway, to be able to tell Lucy, or any dream-baby of our own, this happened, and I saw it.

My phone buzzed to life in the back pocket of my jeans, an incoming text, and another.

two things

I still miss you and you will be my forever girl

Please, I thought. I waited for the second thing nevertheless.

also another letter from that publisher came to me, the one you get every year around this time — Josh still wants the rights to that story and he doesn’t know how to reach you besides going through your father and he says that’s a last resort. I won’t tell him you’re coming back to LA. No matter what happened between us I would never do that to you, my love

Ah, yes, my annual Christmas reminder that Joshua K. Brookes, he of the bestselling novels and droll sketches in McSweeney’s and serious prose in serious places, is still trying to get from me the one thing I won’t give him, and never will. My response remains a forever “no.” And Julian, with his deep pockets and long memory, is my main line of defense, whether I like it or not. I like it not, but as in anything related to Josh, I will take help wherever it is offered. Even from a bastard like Julian.