You know when you trace back some calamity for the initial grain of sand around which the pearl of catastrophe has built itself, layer upon layer? I’ve had a good four months now to think on the catalyst for the disasters of that dreary October wedding day, four months to strip down my memories to their components and rebuild them with the knowledge of the who and the what of it all, if not necessarily the why.

This conflagration was built far more poorly than the fire Jules had laid for me only two evenings before. Its fuel was sound — the years of love and hate and interlacing of identity between Alex and Julian were sturdy, seasoned logs, to be sure. The kindling was nearly as hardy, ready to keep the blaze of bitterness crackling at a searing heat; after all, that much alcohol will tend to ignite at a mere flash. Tinder? Oh, that would have been me, and my insistence on inserting myself where I was not wanted nor needed nor in any way of service. Not particularly stable, not at all. And the spark, well, I blame Miranda for the spark. It really was her idea, after all.

While Minty generously applied tit tape (her term) to the neckline of Amanda’s dress to keep her double H’s visible but not spilling out of the top, I’d gone downstairs for some help with my fascinator. I felt ridiculous wearing a tiny, silly hat for only a few hours (really only for the ceremony), but I knew the drill from Alex’s wedding: a hat was pretty much a female wedding guest’s price of admission. Finding one I could stomach wearing had taken me longer than I’d wanted — I came very, very close to buying a tiny pillbox sprouting tendrils of azaleas reaching to the sky from a shop in Berkeley, but the feathers that curled down kept wandering into my mouth. I tried online wedding stores and Etsy, and I purchased a (thankfully) cheap one from Amazon that was made for a child’s head, as well as being hideous and not even the red I’d ordered. In the end, I did what Miranda told me to do: have her choose me something from Philip Treacy “and be done with it.” (Her words, after listening to me moan about the impossibility of it all for several weeks.)

I let Miranda fuss with the headpiece, more of a headband than a fascinator — a black velvet strip topped with a slightly overwrought double loop of a bow. “Black?” I’d asked when she’d first lifted it out of its tissue-lined silver hatbox for my inspection during a video call.

“Yes, you moo,” she’d chided. “Black goes with everything and you hate fussiness. You’ll actually wear this more than once so it’s excellent value for money.”

And she was right. The plush velvet didn’t dig into my head, as all the pinchy Alice bands of my girlhood had. It wreathed the crown instead, barely touching me except for the slightest pressure of its grip above my ears. The bows were sculptural and thick, rising gently from the band, resting along the crown of my head without crushing the waves of my hair. Miranda had chosen it with precisely my taste, and I felt the sting of guilt for being so jealous of her when all she’d been was kind. (It would have helped immensely if she didn’t trail her arms all over my fiance, without too many whispers of protest on his part.)

Standing at the other end of the library from where I was perched on one of the leather chairs, she tapped her finger on her even pinker than usual lips and squinted at the headband’s placement. “Hmmm. How does it feel? I wouldn’t touch it by the way — it’s exactly where it should be.”

“It feels fine, I guess,” I replied, touching it gingerly anyway. “Not too tight. Thank you, Rizz.”

She scoffed a little, but I know she was pleased she’d hit the mark. Miranda was in navy velvet herself, a very 1930s Agatha Christie rich bitch at a country house killing vibe. The sheath was cut on the bias and skimmed her hips, flaring near her ankles. Her own hat was a chic cloche, a slightly deeper blue, nearly midnight, trimmed with a sprig of bright red berries. Just as always, I wanted to be Miranda, just for one day — saucy, sly, a little despotic, in the best possible way.

Upstairs, what sounded like an argument about hogging tit tape between Sasha and Amanda was breaking out. Miranda clucked her tongue in derision and clicked her Ferragamos towards what was left of one of the last bottles of Charlie’s brandy. Will had abandoned his tumbler with a couple of fingers left, along with another of Miss K’s hankies. I watched her shake out the yellow square and run her finger over the stitches — this one looked like a bluebell — before stuffing it in her purse. “Let’s you and me have a sip, before those old whores come down.”

Now, this was too tempting an option, though a thoroughly rotten one. It was also one I’d thought on while Chelsea had carefully replicated my makeup from yesterday: Just a drop. Just a little something to take the edge off. As she picked out the planes of my face with a kiss of highlighter, one of the empty bottles of Julian’s Bollinger caught my eye on the counter. It would plane away the harshness, you know it would. And much like Minty had sloshed her way into accepting that she’d have to see her ex-husband, someone she’d once loved so hard, sharing himself with some other love, I would have to see Julian’s attention trained on someone who was not me.

The night before had been the very first I’d seen any woman pawing at Julian since… There had been one time, one time that I knew of, some party in the Hills. A Republican fundraiser, some young guy raising money to defeat Adam Schiff, that much I remember, even if the would-be candidate’s name no longer echoes in my memory. I detested going to these events, not just because the candidates or causes they were in aid of were odious to me, but because they were almost uniformly yawnfests. Sometimes I read in Politico or the Daily Beast about shocking statements made at conservative events, really outre stuff that’s almost violently homophobic or sexist or classist or whatever. Not these ones. The drill was usually mill about in a cocktail dress in a hotel ballroom on Julian’s arm, hover over the crudites (usually wilted and rubbery) and spinach dip (which often smelled a bit fishy), and try not to get too offended when drunk, older men talked to my chest or pawed at me in the waning hours of the event. If I were lucky, I might be able to disappear to the ladies’ powder room for a half an hour and chill out in an oversized club chair before I’d get a text from Julian: where the fuck are you???

This party in the Hills was a little different. It was more Rachel’s crowd than Julian’s — all the women were under 40, to begin with, and looks-wise I’d give the crowd a 7 if we’re averaging things out. (The flabby, perigeriatric film producers really brought down the number.) We weren’t in the ballroom of the Beverly Hilton for a change, but clustering over cream damask-draped tables dappled around the edge of a massive illusion pool. The house itself was a mid-century cantilevered fever dream clinging to the side of a hill, with views over both the city and the Valley, flat plains of deep velvet whose veins and arteries were picked out in streetlights and the chug of cars.

“Poolside Chic” was the dress code, which for men meant anything from cargo shorts and Hawaiian shirts (sadly) to sharply tailored blazers in slightly wild colors (nothing too too) paired with dark selvedge denim. Julian was in slightly rumpled cream linen trousers, quite trim, which he’d paired with an aqua linen buttondown, open at the neck and untucked. It suited him, this look, though it was quite deceiving. It was the style of a man who hadn’t a care in the world about how the world perceived him, because he knew himself to be worthy of adulation, which couldn’t have been farther from the truth.

Although I was thoroughly miserable in our marriage by this point, banished from the workplace to focus on my fertility, he was still so beautiful to me. Five and a half years in the California sun had burnished his dirty blonde hair into a glorious gold and it still drooped over one brow in a British schoolboy’s flop of a hairstyle. He’d completed his third Iron Man only the month before, and beneath all that linen was a body that was lightly corded with muscle, never too much, too common. Lean and strong and elegant. For all his imperious manner and the discipline he meted out, I still ran so hot for him.

These fundraisers were one of the few social functions we attended as a couple where he didn’t keep too close an eye on me, as long as I checked in every so often and looked like I was actually socializing with other Republican wives. “You can’t mope about like a sullen teenager, Mel,” he’d remind me. “The wives talk. And their husbands mention it to me. Don’t put me in a position of having to defend your atrocious behavior.” Julian was too busy schmoozing with some florid Cuban producer, all hound dog droopy jowls and Panama hat and Cohiba ashing all over the brilliant green grass lit up by the tiki torches planted in the still-damp earth (we were still very much in a drought, but you know, money can buy you as much water as you desire), to pay much attention to me anyway, so I slipped away to make the rounds.

I quickly found Samantha Geddes (don’t quote me on that last name), one of the only other young-ish wives, dipping her toes in the pool. Like me, Sam was a progressive married to a conservative, and freely boasted it just made sex “fucking fabulous, like a glorious hate fuck every time.” Sam admitted to being 38 and didn’t give a shit about looking like a Fox News blonde bomblet or a country club matron. Tonight, she was in a floral cupcake extravaganza of a strapless dress — blush pink tulle with pastel flowers embroidered and appliqued down its length, seeming to grow from the great green vines that wound around the skirt. She was tipping back the dregs of one of the “American Greatness” signature cocktails the actress/model/whatevers were passing around. I caught Sam’s eye as she rubbed a pinky finger around the rim of the martini glass and raised my hand in greeting.

“Oh, thank GOD you’re here, Mel,” she cried out to me, awkwardly pulling herself to her feet to greet me properly — a brief air kiss, right, left, in a brume of Miss Dior. (Quite lovely and fresh on Sam.) “Let’s get a real drink. These things are nasty — what the fuck did I just drink? And are my lips blue?”

“It was grenadine on the bottom with lemonade and vodka in the middle. That blue stuff on top was curaçao,” I explained, steering her towards the bar. “Your lips are fine. Where are your shoes?”

Sam waved her hand dismissively. “I wore flip flops. Lost them in the pool.” At the bar, eight pre-poured glasses of champagne were arrayed like tin soldiers, the fizz rising from each flute’s bottom to burst pop-pop-pop. Sam grabbed two and passed them to me before nabbing two for herself. “Tell me — how’s your friend Alex? Has his wife come home yet?”

It had been about a week since I’d seen Sam, that time in my own home. Julian and I had hosted the Geddes for a games night — Monopoly this time, Julian’s choice after Sam and I annihilated Julian and Luke the time before at Trivial Pursuit. (“Not bloody fair,” Julian had groused on the way home from their house in West Hollywood. “All the questions required significantly higher fluency with middlebrow American pop culture than I could possibly be expected to possess.”) Before we got to fighting over who got to be the little dog, and while our husbands talked politics and real estate, Sam and I loitered in the kitchen, picking at what was left of Rianne’s blueberry crumble. Alex’s first, misdirected call had come through just over six weeks before, and I’d told Sam all about the mess Julian’s best friend — my ex-boyfriend, I’d confided, a little boozily — had found himself in.

Now, high on a hill on top of this great, crouching monster of a city, I filled in a little more for Sam. Minty wanted a divorce and full custody of Lucy, and even though she knew the flat had to be sold sooner rather than later, she wanted everything out of it that the creditors couldn’t touch. “Alex is such an idiot — a lovely idiot, but an idiot,” I added. “Everything that he might have put in his mother’s name or his sister’s, he put in Minty’s. The Jag and the horses were the big ones. Everything except for the flat. It’s likely to fetch an excellent price, and there’ll be about a hundred fifty grand left over, by the estate agent’s reckoning, maybe more. Almost all of it’s going to Minty, except for a few months’ rent and deposit on his new place, and five grand to keep him going until he gets a job. That’s the deal Minty’s brother wrung out of him.”

Sam let out a low whistle before finishing off her second glass. “What a mess. Poor guy. Makes you think, we live these beautiful lives here, so much money for so long that there never seems like there’d ever be an end to it and yeah, one bad choice.”

“One bad choice,” I echoed flatly, hardly an expression of the grief I was sharing with Alex day after day over the phone. “Want another glass?”

I was halfway to the bar from the green and white cabana where Sam and I had been hiding when I saw him. Them. A flash of blue half-obscured by a topiary of what might have been an elephant. I wasn’t even completely sure I wasn’t composing an image out of nothing, some curaçao-induced fantasy, maybe, rearranging some other body into Julian’s out of force of habit — I was always looking out for where he was, sometimes for the safety he offered, sometimes out of fear for my own safety from his disdain for whatever disgrace I was surely about to have to atone for.

Other men had bright golden hair, as golden as the 18th-century sovereign Julian carried in his wallet. Other men had trim blonde beards like that, threaded through with streaks of a darker brown. Other men were wearing linen trousers and aqua shirts and blucher moccasins in that exact sun-aged shade of cognac. Julian would never let a woman who was not me hold his hand like that, never let her stroke his cheek or fall into the crook of his arm just so, like she’d always belonged there. He would never disgrace his marriage vows: “I made a promise to God, not to you. A vow to the Almighty cannot be shattered without divine retribution, and I have no intention of invoking His wrath.” (This was said as we sat shivering together beneath the great medieval beams of St. Edmund’s in Southwold during Christmas services the year before, when I’d asked him if he still loved me.)

I knew it was him immediately, of course. I’m not a complete ninny, even if I frequently still feel like one. Had I been then the woman I am now, I might have strode over in my Jimmy Choos, a bright smile on my scarlet lips and greeted them with a cheery, “Oh, there you are, darling! Thank you for keeping him safe, he has a tendency to wander off.” But then, oh then I would not have dared, did not dare. I corrected myself in my stumble and kept walking to the bar. When I returned with an entire bottle for Sam and me, I was careful to keep the focus on what were surely greater calamities — Alex’s descent from the top of his game, and the seemingly unstoppable ascent of Donald Trump. Much safer topics than my husband’s infidelity, as much as that theme played through my consciousness like a particularly noxious earworm.

I knew Julian had seen me, seen me see him, and yet we never spoke of it. Not on the way home, nearly silent in the white cream leather interior of his Mercedes, not as we got ready for bed. Not after he’d woken me at 2:30 a.m. with his insistent groping of my breasts, nor after I’d let him paw at me enough to arouse me sufficiently for sex only he truly enjoyed. That he’d finally put a baby in me that night seemed fitting, somehow, like my own divine retribution for letting him get away with it. When I lost the pregnancy in August, to my shame it felt like my salvation.

That time in the Hills was the only time, but there were other women, women whom he’d kept hidden from me, lurking around the edges of my vision but never snapping into focus. Julian is sneaky, as much as he is greedy. And there are loose strands of time that I’ve tugged at occasionally to reconsider, cancelled dinner plans, the times he nudged me to take Jen or Jenn (or both) for a spa weekend, the silent retreat in Sedona he’d surprised me with one April.

“You need a rest,” he’d explained, very patiently, while I protested that I didn’t want to spend a week speaking to no one and sitting in saunas with middle aged women and doing yoga in the desert with someone who called herself High Priestess Amiee. “You do such a hard job taking care of our home, you deserve a chance to, um… what does the brochure say?” He snatched back the pamphlet he’d presented to me a few minutes earlier. The cover featured a desert sunset, before which a lithe, brown-haired woman about a decade older than me sat in the lotus position, a look of orgasmic, empty-headed bliss lighting her face. “You need ‘a chance to reconnect to your inner Eve, the essential woman within you.’ Doesn’t that sound lovely, darling?”

Though I told him I was quite happy with the woman I was and saw no need for keeping quiet, still I was on a flight to Arizona at sunrise the next day. I’d returned even more resentful of my life at home than when I’d left. After hour upon hour of time to reflect upon the foolishness of relying on Julian for nearly everything, the essential woman within me said: something is not right, Melissa. Look around you. A few days after my homecoming, which Julian had celebrated with a pear-shaped ruby solitaire pendant the size of a Jordan almond, Rianne took me aside for a discreet word. The cleaner had flipped the mattress in one of the guest bedrooms the day before and found a black lace thong. “I removed it,” Rianne assured me. “But I thought you should know.”

Though I thanked Rianne, I said nothing. Nothing to Julian, nothing to Jenn or my mom or even Rachel. Better to push it down, deep down. Did you really think he meant it when he said it would only ever be you?

At least he wasn’t hiding Amanda, like he’d hidden whomever he’d fucked in the navy blue bedroom. And like he was hiding Fenn. As I watched Miranda slosh out a few fingers of brandy for us both into some clean teacups Charlie had left next to the still-warm teapot, I thought about Charlie’s earlier comment that I was more like Minty than I wanted to acknowledge. He wasn’t wrong, and if being half-cut was the price to tolerate watching another woman be my ex-husband’s wedding date, then I’d take a leaf from Minty’s book and have a nip. Just to take the edge off.

“There you are, San.” Miranda favored me with a half-grin when I took the china teacup and saucer from her. “A little might make it easier.”

The delicate cups clicked briskly, a sweet little clink as we brought them together in cheers. The comforting burn of alcohol coursed down my throat, whispered a husssshhhhhh in my ear. Shhhhhh, the brandy reassured me, it’s no great thing to see him there with Amanda.

Actually, that was Miranda who said that last bit, but I hadn’t eaten more than those two pieces of toast that morning, and the brandy was hitting harder than I’d anticipated. “You all right?” Miranda quizzed, tipping her head to one side while she tucked into another sip. “You look a little too serene, but a bit queasy. You’re not pregnant are you?” she gasped, grabbing for my cup.

“Hardly,” I snorted, defending my drink from her grasp before sinking the rest of its contents. “Not going to even think about that until I’m married.”

“Good girl,” Miranda agreed. “Last thing you need is another little hooligan Carr running about until you’re ready. Lucy’s exhausting, and I’m only her godmother. Carrs come in one flavor: exasperating. Poor Minty had a double dose.”

As if someone had whispered that it was her cue, Minty’s shriek of frustration carried down the stairs. “MUMMY! Just GIVE her the bloody biscuits if she won’t hand back your tiara! You’re the one who let her wear it in the first place!” Araminta Bosworth-Carr was royally pissed, an emotion I’d rarely (ever?) seen her display; I savored the piquancy of knowing she wasn’t nearly as sanguine about parenting as Alex had assured me she was.

“See?” Miranda patted me on the back as the sound of three pairs of heels clattered down the stairs, Minty still bellowing into her phone. “Exasperating. More brandy?”

“Love some.” In for a penny, in for the whole bloody Bank of England.

***

By the time the two Ubers had dropped the five of us off at the church for the ceremony, I’d quite forgotten why I thought Julian and Amanda was such a shocking idea after all. The brandy with Miranda had gone some way towards polishing away the rough reality of Julian truly moving on. She only guided me further towards acceptance by letting more alcohol flow in the sluice I was floating down.

Before we’d left the vicarage, Miranda had called us all to attention in the rancid pink chintz sitting room. “Listen close, whores,” she’d scolded us from a slightly raised position on top one of the puce-trimmed ottomans. She still had her navy cloche on, and under the influence of three fingers of brandy in the late Edwardian fussiness of the room, the effect was something like being called to attention by a stern but slightly hip headmistress circa 1931. “I shouldn’t need to tell you, but it bears repeating. Every one of you needs to behave yourselves. We’re all here for Jamie, not to settle scores or make it all about us.”

“Pish, Ran,” Sasha scoffed. “I’m hardly going to take my clothes off this time and go splash in the fountain.” This had happened when they were first years in the big fountain in front of the Victoria Rooms — it had caused a minor sensation at the time when Sasha had posed in a nude string bikini, draped over the mermaid statue. She’d gone for deep plum rather than a flesh tone for the wedding, a slightly more respectable bell-sleeved dress in a thick crepe, though it did have a slit nearly up to where her knickers (probably) were. (Hopefully the lingerie tape she’d fought Amanda over was to keep Sasha from flashing somebody’s aged family member.)

Miranda trained her slightly glassy brown stare on Sasha. “You know what I mean. For you, no baiting Bex. No monopolizing Jamie. No snogging her bridesmaids unless you actually want to go home with them. And don’t give me that look.”

To my right, Amanda snickered. I truly hoped she’d won the battle of the tit tape with Sasha, since her breasts seemed likely to heave over the neckline at every guffaw.

“And you!” Miranda jabbed a finger at Amanda, then thrust it at Minty and me in turn, a little too aggressively, given that I had no idea of the nature of my sins, nor Minty’s. “All three of you! You’re tearing yourselves up over those two drama queens.” Miranda hopped down from the ottoman to inspect us, like we were her troops she was about to lead into battle. I half expected to hear that Henry V speech again.

“Alex isn’t a drama queen,” I sniffed, flicking away Miranda’s hand as she recentered Josh’s locket where it draped around my neck.

“HA!” Minty barked, then slapped a gloved hand over her mouth.

“Oh, please,” Amanda drawled. “All that shouting and stomping and door slamming and that ridiculous alpha male display last night with the shoving to defend his lady. Don’t delude yourself. Right, Min?”

I looked to Minty — surely her meltdown earlier today meant she was at still a bit fond of him, still had a few rosy memories of how tender and loving and practical Al is. “Alex is… he has some big emotions,” she hedged, straightening the side ruching on her forest green dress to avoid my gaze. (She was quite correct that it really was a “yoink it over your head” outfit — not a zipper or button in sight, and the ruching went some way to camouflage that midsection she moaned over as yet another impediment to ever getting remarried.)

“He’s different now,” I huffed while I shifted my weight on my crimson heels. “He’s not so shouty anymore. Last night was an amolalie. An amonaly? An anomaly.” Shit, how much had I had to drink? “And Julian’s far worse anyway,” I shot back. “All his ‘oh, woe is me, poor, poor, Jules, so misunderstood.’ I always thought you were smarter than that, Amanda.”

“Don’t play to my vanity,” Amanda sneered. “I know exactly what games Julian plays and how to play them. Just because you couldn’t stop yourself from throwing yourself at the only two men I’ve ever loved — OW!”

Miranda was pulling at Amanda’s hair. “That’s too far. Both of you. Mel, if Amanda wants to waste her life on someone who’d fail the psychopath test like Julian, that’s her decision. Man, if Melissa wants to marry someone who’s barely able to keep himself alive without a woman to run his life, that’s down to her.”

Minty stifled a giggle, drawing Miranda’s attention from where Amanda and I seethed, mostly because we knew she was right. “And you.” A dangerous alligator’s grin slowly spread on Miranda’s face as she cupped Minty’s chin. “Araminta Bosworth, so hard done by. Get over yourself. You had multiple chances to take Alex back and you let yourself be bullied out of your marriage by your nasty, sleazy brother. Do you blame Al for moving on? You’re worse than either of them because everyone takes pity on you and you like it. Grow up, Min.”

“Damn,” Sasha whispered to me. “Brutal.”

Miranda shot her a filthy look that read: you got off lightly. None of us dared take on the imperious Countess Miranda. None of us ever had, even in these moments where she dressed us down with such vicious, surgical incisions that our clothes lay in precisely cut shreds at our feet when she was done, leaving us completely bare. I’d seen Amanda try to take her on, try to land a few punches, but Ran never had to bob or weave to avoid impact — Amanda’s reach wasn’t ever going to be long enough to touch Miranda.

Too clever by half, Cora had said of her, and wasn’t sad that Minty made a more suitable wife for Alex. Clever, yes, and naughty and untamable. Miranda had nearly been the death of her serious, shy parents on so many occasions. There was the time she slipped away at age 15 on a school trip to Paris to go bar hopping with a couple of twenty-something American MBA students who were aghast to find she was underage — they’d been plying her with champagne all afternoon. (One is now a CEO in New Jersey and still sends her a Christmas card every year, addressed: “Dear Jailbait.”) Or the time she quit her sensible trainee position at Penguin Books to become a freelance travel writer, sending herself on her first assignment to Vietnam, knowing nothing of the native tongue and muddling through with her semi-fluency in Spanish to fudge her way in French. (It was her calling card for pieces published in Elle and Marie Claire later that year.) Or the time she nearly got married to Bob.

I really must write about Bob one of these days.

Miranda fussed with a brown kraft paper bag I’d watched her bring in earlier when she’d herded us in the room for our whippings. Now that we were all bleeding at the hands of a master, it was time for the mistress to apply balm to the wounds she’d inflicted. With a bright smile, she clapped her hands smartly to bring us to attention. “Now! I have a present for each of you. Something to remember this day, and how very much we all love each other.” (That sounded more like a threat than an expression of harmony.)

“Oooh! Me first!” Amanda squealed, bouncing up and down in delight at a freebie. (Another moment when I thought her breasts might breach the barrier of her neckline.)

One by one, Miranda pressed a pink enamel flask into each pair of our waiting hands before pulling out one for herself. Sasha gave hers a shake to judge how full it was; Amanda unscrewed the top of her flask and sniffed at it tentatively. “Whisky,” she announced, with a serious furrow of her brow.

It was a pretty thing, flamingo pink with a gold screwtop that was held onto the flask with a matching gold guard. I flipped it over, and read in matching gold script: O M A M A

“Obama?” Minty was peering at the little bottle in my hand. “Ran, did you mean to have ‘Obama’ written on these? Because if you did, there’s been a bit of a mistake.” Minty turned hers over and tapped on each letter with the tip of her gloved index finger. (Quite a nice little touch, those kid gloves with her three-quarter sleeves. Retro without being costume-y.)

Miranda rolled her eyes. “No. It’s O-M-A-M-A.”

“Is it, ‘O, Mama’?” Sasha ventured carefully. “Like, that song by Twin Peaks that just came out?”

“Oh, I like that one,” I whispered to her. “You know about Twin Peaks?” I hadn’t pegged Sasha as into rowdy American indie rock, but then again Julian really likes Lil Jon, so you never can tell.

“How can you all be dim in precisely the same way?” Miranda shook her head in disgust. “It’s our initials, you twits. Oleksandra, Miranda, Amanda, Melissa, Araminta. Or however you want to order the M-A-M-A.”

Sasha gasped lightly and grabbed for my free hand. “She let us in, Mel! She let us into the MAMs!”

With the smallest smirk, Miranda ducked her head and blushed the faintest rose. “I thought it was about time. We’re the OMAMAs from now on, even when we’re not all together. The last thing we need is all this…” She waved a hand in front of her towards the four of us, though mostly towards Minty and me. “Fractiousness. All of us — bar you of course, Sash — have let Alex and Jules mix up our lives too much. They’re a terrible example of how to be friends who disagree from time to time.” (This was accompanied by a bony finger jabbed into Amanda’s shoulder, and then mine. Mistress Miranda was doling out punishments again.) “Time to show the boys how to adult.”

“Hear hear!” Minty trilled, smiling at last. I shouldn’t have, particularly at this moment when Miranda was laboring to knit us closer, but Minty’s acceptance — feigned or otherwise — of Sasha and me into their snug friendship of three made me even more jealous of her essential goodness. So forgiving, she’d have had Alex back had her family let her. She dreamed up Lucy in her body, fostered that shimmering beauty in her womb when I… I brought Julian nothing, might bring Alex no further child, whether through accident or purpose. That I may be smarter or prettier or wealthier (she can thank Alex for her smaller bank balance, I’m sorry to report) means little; I’m peevish and resentful and snappish in ways she’ll never be. Minty’s always been so gentle, so eider-soft. No wonder she made an excellent foil for Alex, who needs a safe harbor for his storms.

I will give Amanda credit — she was the first to raise her flask in celebration. “About bloody time,” she cheered as she tucked a long copper wave behind her ear with her free hand. I decided not to take her decision to wear the ruby earrings Julian had planned to give me for Valentine’s Day before he dumped me as gloating. They were pretty stupendous — I’d found them quite by accident the week before he walked out, each one a glinting pear-shaped four carats set in a platinum drop. I had been performing my weekly inspection of the least obvious corners of our house, looking for more souvenirs like the black lace thong. In the three months following my miscarriage, I’d found a pair of women’s aviator sunglasses in the library, tucked behind the collected works of Freud, a tragically awful leopard print Marc Jacobs scarf shoved under the cushions of the gold chaise longue, and a Kat von D Lolita II lipstick that had rolled beneath the refrigerator. It may have been pure conjecture, but I somehow doubted they all belonged to the Lady of the Lace.

“To the OMAMAs!” we crowed, five as one before tipping back streams of the tawny spirit in our mouths in unison and gasping at the welcoming bite of the alcohol.

I’d known the four women with me since we were girls, nominally women, but undeniably girls (even including Amanda and her massive bosom). Oleksandra, distant and cautious, she’d carefully built stone by stone a fortress of seeming bonhomie to protect some emptiness within her. Miranda, hot-tempered and cold-blooded, who tricked us all into thinking she was all head and little heart. Amanda, greedy and mercenary, but the only one who has sailed a course she charted with no assistance, detained by neither love nor family. Araminta, who served everyone else but herself until there was nothing left to give.

And me, Melissa. What do you think of me?