It had been, I thought, a fairly simple request. I’d even been polite enough to send it to each person who should have been there on the day, had COVID not laid waste to the world. On pale grey cardstock matching the save the date cards — in letterpress, no less! — I’d tried to strike a note of optimism and inclusivity.

All change! We’re still getting married on October 24, 2020, but we want to greet you with open arms at the ceremony and COVID just won’t let us do that. We’re having a “cere-mini” in front of only our closest family — please understand that we are keeping it small so we can have the fun of doing it over again in our “cere-many” with you all. We’ll let you know once we set a date when we can all be together to celebrate!

This was, I thought, not a controversial plan, even if multiple people expressed their disapproval of the terms “cere-mini” and “cere-many” in terms that referenced saccharine-induced vomiting. (I’d seen it in the Financial Times, I stressed to Miranda, not in Cosmo. “Still awful, San,” she’d said at the time.) If Alex and I couldn’t have all our friends and further-flung relations with us, we’d keep it as small as possible. My parents, Rachel and Matt, and a visiting Fenn in person; Lucy, Cora and Andrew via Zoom. My Grandma Sullivan and Frederick St. Clair, Cora’s father, were offered a link but both refused, for very different reasons.

“Melissa, it’s just asking the universe to knock me out of the game early if I tune in,” my grandma told me when I’d gently nudged her again to think about it. “I have a lot more living to do, and not many years to do it in. If I’m going to see you marry the boy you should have chosen in the first place, I want to see it in the flesh. Don’t tempt fate.”

Frederick St. Clair declined, in a simple handwritten note to Al on the same Smythson stationery he’d used to let me know that a “Save the Date” was “not quite the done thing for my generation, dearest girl, but I do appreciate you letting me know well in advance.”

Alexander, he wrote in a spidery blue hand, I regret that I do not know how to Zoom and your mother’s instructions are unsurprisingly unhelpful. Little Prim informed me that I should bloody well figure it out for myself. Beastly girls. Send Little Prim photographs of the day and she will print them out for me.

Despite a valiant attempt at age 13 to be called by her middle name, Cora’s younger sister would forever be known as “Little Prim” to differentiate her from their now-deceased mother. The diminutive really wasn’t necessary to delineate Primrose mater from her daughter. The Dacre genes that had wound sinuously through Primrose Dacre St. Clair and passed nearly undiluted into Cora St. Clair Carr — dancer’s legs, full pout, masses of thick and tawny hair, and a rather relaxed attitude towards employment — had given Little Prim a wide berth.

“Unfortunate,” Fenn had said to me when I’d first spotted a framed picture of a very young Little Prim on the bashed-up spinet in Balcraigie’s music room. (Nobody knew how to play the thing, but the cost of removal was prohibitive. It functioned mostly as an occasional table that mice lived in.) “Little Prim is a St. Clair through and through. P.F. says Mummy got all the Dacre genes and there was nothing left to give Little Prim. Rubbish, of course, but you’d scarcely think they were sisters.” Fenn ran one long, tapered finger around Little Prim’s face in the frame, spiralling into the center to tap her on the nose.

Having since met both Little Prim and her father — known to Alex and Fenn as “P.F.” for “Papa Frederick” — I’d say that it wasn’t a bad look for either one of them. Little Prim and P.F. were broad and of middling height, with the kind of shoulders that had made both of them intimidating presences on the rugby field at university. Like they could have ploughed the turnip fields together with meat pies in their pocket and gone down the pub at the end of the day for several pints of strong ale. Cait’s built along similar lines, and describes her own strong, no-nonsense body as a mid-90s Ford Taurus: built for comfort, not for speed.

“Utter shock to Primrose,” P.F. had chuckled to me. “She was convinced there had been a mix up at the hospital, but the doctor assured us Little Prim had come out the same way as Cora five years prior. If the tables had been turned, I would have thought she’d had the milkman’s daughter. But it worked out well, one girl for either of us. She never did understand Little Prim. Cora, yes. Just like each other, those two, though neither would ever admit it.”

Alex had snookered me into meeting the Great Man (as Alex frequently referred to his grandfather) on one of my last visits to the UK before Alex moved to the Bay Area. The whole trip had been a bit of a trick. I’d thought we were on one of our “this isn’t going to really work, is it” dips in the sine wave of our relationship/not a relationship. Four weeks before I’d demanded he move to California, and he’d dutifully set the wheels in motion at work. I was here, he told me, to help him prepare for the visa interview. Complete rubbish. He’d lured me over to meet the St. Clairs, to shepherd me deeper within the family fold, convince me they weren’t all raving madwomen like Cora and Fenn.

Something odd was brewing , which was nearly the only thing I was certain of that Saturday morning. Al had been the one to suggest we might take the Tube down to South Ken and visit the V&A Museum. “There’s an exhibition I think you might like,” he’d announced, hustling me into the cheap IKEA kitchen from his rather bare double bedroom (double, yes, in that it fit a double bed and little else) in that dreadful Kentish Town divorce flat. “It’s, uh,” he looked at his phone briefly before throwing back his curls to meet me with a grin. “It’s about plywood.”

“Plywood,” I repeated, pouring water from the bubbling kettle into a French press where I’d tipped in a few spoons of ground coffee. I’d helped him partially kit out his kitchen the year before, during a flying visit Jules and I had made through London, en route to Paris. It was to be my present for getting pregnant at last with the Cranford heir. While Julian spent the day with his father in the office, Al took the morning off to zoom through the aisles of the John Lewis homewares department with me. Just enough gear that when I visited on my own (as I hoped I eventually would, with or without baby in tow), I could at least make myself a mug of some hot caffeinated beverage, and eat with a utensil that wasn’t plastic and obtained from Chicken Cottage in the Kentish Town Road.

We hadn’t kissed on that visit. Not anything more than a chaste hug, as neither of us could admit then that we were falling back in love with each other. If we denied it, perhaps it wouldn’t happen. It did anyway.

“Mmm, yes. Furniture, those Eames designers. And, uh.” He glanced down at his ageing iPhone again. “Skateboards.”

I swirled a spoon through the slurry in the press, and covered the glass vessel with the lid to let it brew. “Skateboards.”

“And a walk. Be good to stretch our legs, get a bit of exercise of the outdoor variety, sweetest.”

He reached down to chuck me under the chin, but I batted his hand away. I strained on tiptoes into the faux-oak cupboard to bring down two of Cora’s deep blue mugs, constants in every home I’d ever known him in. “Fetch the milk from the fridge and fix the coffee, will you.”

It came out as more of a snarl than I’d intended, but nothing seemed quite right about the morning. The plywood exhibition, the grungey flat, the garbagemen (sorry, binmen) whamming the wheelie bins against the side of their truck at 5 am so hard it jolted me from a dream in which I was luxuriating in an Ojai spa, as once I’d done without a thought as to price. Dinner with Miranda the night before hadn’t been exactly a treat either, as she’d refused to cop that she was the woman in the photo Alex was shoving in her face, a photo in which Bob was clearly visible, handing her a drink as she laughed uproariously. Last thing I needed was being reminded that I’d had to tell Alex my jetlagged body wasn’t up to a third round of tangling up the sheets in one evening.

“Aw, Mel. Don’t be like that,” Alex pouted, pressing the plunger hard into the grounds. The lush scent of the coffee rushed up and suffused the shabby kitchen momentarily with a whoosh of something far more opulent than it had any right to hope for. “It’s just been so lovely to have you here. Like I could imagine a life with you here, where I’d come home and there you’d be, like you were last night before we went to Ran’s, with a book in your lap and the sun in the room and everything would be right in the world at last.”

Around me was the evidence of his failure — the doors on his inexpensive cabinets hung at wonky angles; the fan hood over his cooker was caked with yellowy-grey grease of former occupants that might be removed only with a chisel; the ineluctable odor of chip fat drooped like an invisible suspended ceiling. He’d been at his new fund for a year now, making him eligible for a intracompany transfer visa, and he was making what in most other universes, fairer, less-flush worlds than the ones in which we dwelled, would be considered an excellent salary. But it simply wasn’t enough to fill the pot of every woman and child who depended on him. Minty and Lucy’s share was beyond question, court-ordered, and generous, as least as far as Minty was concerned. Alex lived in this grotty disaster-flat and snaffled the free sandwiches provided at meetings for later meals so he could keep the money flowing north to Fenn and Cora as well. Whatever I may think of Miranda being too chummy with Al at times, she had zero compunction about forcing herself into his flat in the evenings with a pan of lasagne and a bottle of Sangiovese, for which I shall remain grateful.

The transfer to San Francisco offered so much more of everything: more salary, more bonus, a subsidy for rent, more flexibility in dress code and hours, and (theoretically) more time with me. If I wanted it, which I wasn’t always sure I did, or deserved. If there was going to be him coming home to me like Travis’ “Flowers in the Window” come to life, a sliver of bland domesticity spun into the wonder of a man who never thought he’d be this lucky, it wouldn’t be to this flophouse. Of that one thing this uncertain morning I was sure.

On the other hand, I wasn’t sure why instead of getting off the Piccadilly Line at South Ken, Alex held me back until the next station. “Just a little errand to run first, lovely. Very near to the V&A, you’ll get your plywood soon,” he insisted as we jogged up the steps from the westbound platform to the lifts.

Nor had I a hint what lay on the other side of the great black door Alex had led me to, or what to expect when he pressed the worn pearly doorbell to a ground floor flat off Gloucester Road, though I’d not let up the questioning as he led me briskly past cafes and a bookshop and what felt like an unending parade of estate agents. No, we’re not stopping at that Caffe Nero. Yes, I know where I’m going. Yes, we’re almost there. Yes, there will be a chance to use the loo.

“Just someone I think you ought to meet,” he’d said, clutching my hand as we waited for the door to swing open across the marble threshold of the worn cream stone floor of the portico we waited in. “Someone who might give you a bit of a different spin. On me, that is.”

An ageing plastic intercom crackled to life with a woman’s voice. “You’re late,” it scolded, though I’d the sense there was no malice in the accusation.

“Northern Line,” Alex yelled, nearly directly into the box. I’d spent enough time in London over the years to understand that a journey necessarily involving the Northern Line nearly always provided cover for lateness, even when that lateness was more self-inflicted than transport-related.

There was the solid clink-clunk of the pins of a lock turning before a door nearly as thick as my hand and swollen with the humidity of a London summer day slowly unstuck itself. The voice through the box had come from this woman, who blinked her amber eyes at me twice in the sort of way I used to blink slowly at my cat Tibbs to calm him down. Her oat-brown hair was caught up with a bright green pencil in what might have been a bun or a rat’s nest of an attempt at a bun. Looking back, it was the eyes that should have given it away immediately, but I was more focused on what she was wearing: an oversized Chelsea FC replica shirt (home kit) over a pair of bleached out hot pink yoga pants. She gave off the nonchalant but no-nonsense vibe of a competent high school field hockey player who might take a discreet hit off a vape pen during halftime.

Al gave me a little push over the threshold, and caught me as I stumbled over that morning’s unread Telegraph. “See you dressed up,” Alex observed, reaching down to sweep up the paper and toss it to Lady Vape. She looked closer to fifty than forty (now that forty is the new twenty-nine), though I find it difficult to tell sometimes with British women of the generations above mine. I put it down to not getting the memo about sunscreen until it was too late, and the idea that getting a filler here or there was somehow “cheating.”

She shrugged and wiped her snub nose on the back of her forearm. “Jack’s in Toronto and it’s just Harry and me at home right now. We’re having a mummy and me slob out before he has to go back to school. Came over here to see what the fuss is all about.” Lady Vape looked me up and down like she was deciding whether a coat hanging off a mannequin was long enough to cover her shins. “This is the one, I take it.”

“The very one,” Alex grinned and patted my shoulder. I was too confused in the small hallway to feel very anxious, but I welcomed the comfort all the same. A long maroon runner of a Persian rug stretched from the sisal welcome mat (on which was printed in black ink, “IF YOU MUST”) down past celadon green walls to what must have been the kitchen, painted a bright daffodil yellow, in the distance. The walls were crowded with watercolors and charcoal drawings that had to be from Fenn’s hand, with no sense of unity to their framing — clasped inside rococo explosions of fruits and flowers in gold leaf, or gripped in simple steel frames, or merely stuck behind a pane of glass attached with a few clips. I bashed my hip into what I knew on sight to be a teak Arne Jacobsen sideboard; the nicks and chips at the corners and the foot-long gash on the cupboard made clear it was chosen for use as well as looks.

“BOY!” A man’s voice, a still-lush baritone crimped at the edges by the crackle of age boomed around the corner of an open door halfway down the hall. “YOU’RE LATE!”

Lady Vape sighed and clucked her tongue. “He’s in fine form this morning. Sent Dolores out to get him some of that cheap sherry he likes. Stick around long enough, you might be unlucky enough to have some. Get in there, I’ll bring in the tea.”

With Lady Vape jostling a fully-loaded silver tea set on a rackety drinks trolley (it retained a bottle of brandy on the bottom shelf) behind us, Alex led me into a high-ceilinged sitting room painted a pale pinky-beige, and bordered on its boards and chair-rails in a glossy ecru. Where I could see them, that is. Most of the wallspace was given over to bookcases exploding with lever arch files and beat up orange-and-cream covered Penguin paperbacks and fat hardcovers with notes and yellowing newspaper clippings peeking out of their top edges. A teak desk of similar provenance to the sideboard hugged one corner, above which hung a large flatscreen TV. My shoes sank into the deep pile of perhaps the only wall to wall carpeting I’ve ever truly tolerated, a muted crimson that felt even nicer later on under my bare feet.

And in front of me, leaning forward in a walnut brown leather wingback chair, an old man puffed rhythmically on a calabash pipe. He had most of his hair still, not bad for a man of his advanced age, though it was all a blinding white. (Violet shampoo, I came to learn, scrubbed into his scalp on Mondays and Thursdays by the aforementioned Dolores.) Paunchy in his burgundy sweater vest tugged over a blue dress shirt, impressively jowled, and liver-spotted on his crepey hands, a proud purple gin blossom illuminated his broad nose, towards which two snowy caterpillars standing in for eyebrows bent dramatically.

I looked to Alex, his earlier grin replaced by a mock-somber set to his lips into which a flicker of amusement twitched its way intermittently. “Northern Line,” he explained again.

“Likely story,” the old man grunted and favored us both with a glower that felt too personal for a man who’d never met me. “Well?”

“P.F., this is Melissa Cranford. My… can I call you my girlfriend, sweetest?”

I nodded without thinking, distracted by the realization I’d been brought to meet his grandfather, the Great Man himself, without a heads up. We’d had that discussion the night before, about how we label our status, that is, and come to no real conclusion. On my side, at least. And quite frankly, I was also distracted and slightly unsettled by P.F. on first sight — was this what Alex might look like in fifty years? I assumed I’d look more like Grandma Sullivan, still trim and sporting hair that was at least half its original color. My expectations for Alex had been the same — that he’d stay wiry, just a little dust of white threaded through his black curls. Regarding P.F. was like staring upon a memento mori of the man I’d eventually have to bury; it had never occurred to me Alex wouldn’t leave behind an exquisite corpse.

“And Mel, this is my grandfather, Frederick St. Clair. P.F., as you’ve heard me call him. I thought it was time for you to meet, before I leave for the States.”

“Hm.” P.F. puffed on his pipe and squinted at me. “Come closer, girl. Let me see you.”

It occurred to me that he sounded a bit like the Big Bad Wolf when he put it like that, but Al squeezed my hand. “Go on,” he whispered. “A lot more snarl than bite.”

“What’s that, boy?” P.F. barked.

“Nothing, just telling her how magnificent you are,” Alex piped up, stifling a smirk in his hand.

I followed the finger P.F. crooked at me and approached the Great Man until he raised a palm. “Stop there. Hmm.” The tobacco he smoked was a creamy vanilla scent, bitten with bright cherry. “Turn around.”

“I’m sorry, what?” I couldn’t remember anyone asking me this question, outside of my sister judging my date night outfits and the woman at the bridal shop where I’d gone for my wedding dress fittings.

“A twirl, girl. Let me see you.” P.F. spun his forefinger clockwise. “Humor an old man.”

Without thinking, the eternal good girl Melissa did as she was told. What does it cost to let P.F. have a look at my ass anyway? I assured myself, slowly turning in a circle.

“Not bad, Alexander. Quite a nice figure. Hm.” He puffed again at the calabash. I was unsure whether to let my indignation or slight preening at being found sexy by P.F. lead me in the moment.

“Glad you agree, P.F. I quite like her myself,” Alex crowed, taking a cup of tea from Lady Vape. No, Little Prim. This was obviously Cora’s younger sister, and the resemblance was stronger than Cora or Fenn would have had me believe. Genes express themselves in ways that show the variety of the human form, even within one family, even between siblings. Little Prim was stocky and looked like she could bench press far more than Alex could ever dream of. I can only imagine how horrified Cora must have been to see her sister grow into a far more womanly body than her own — underneath that Chelsea shirt strained a decent-sized bosom. Fenn had groused to me that she’d gotten the “Dacre tits” and now I understood.

“Do you smile, Melissa?” P.F. asked as I shifted my weight from foot to foot before him. I wasn’t quite clear if I should join Little Prim and Al on the green and white striped sofa across from his chair yet.

“Smile?” I repeated. How many times had a man asked me to smile? Smile, sweetheart. I bet you look gorgeous when you smile. Cheer up, love, it might never happen. Gimme a smile. Give us a smile, beautiful. Smile, Melissa, my little Scheherazade.

“Mm, yes. I had heard American girls smiled more than our English ones.” P.F. flashed me one of his own, and while his teeth were a touch yellow, there was a jolt of recognition: He has Alex’s smile. “See? Not hard, not hard at all.”

“Pay no attention to Dad,” Little Prim warned from the sofa. “He’s even more of a terror now than when he was 70.”

“Pah, Prim. Now, show me I’m right about the Americans.” P.F. tilted his head and quizzed at me with slightly rheumy eyes through a cherry vanilla cloud. “Unlike many of my countrymen, I quite like your people, Melissa.”

The corners of my mouth creaked upwards, but P.F. shook his head. “A real smile. Let me see your teeth.”

When I looked back to Alex, he brushed his hand forward a few times — go on, Mel — so I bent my lips up to give P.F. a further glimpse. I felt horribly uncomfortable — not that I was being made an object of derision or desire, but that there was some joke here that was opaque. To me at least, because Alex was snorting in between bites of custard cream biscuits.

“Hm. Good.” P.F. puffed again on the pipe and swept away the plume with his forearm. “Now a bit more of the teeth. Need to know what Alexander is getting for himself here.”

I was halfway into a rictus grin when Prim sprang into action from behind me in a clatter of silver and crockery. “Daddy, she isn’t a bloody horse,” she snapped, pulling me back onto the sofa while P.F. chuckled to himself.

“I’m so sorry.” I wasn’t sure to whom that was directed, but an apology somehow seemed appropriate.

“He’s an old coot who can’t help but be a bloody nuisance half the time. I’m Prim, by the way.” She pushed one of Cora’s mugs into my hand. “Cream?”

P.F. beamed, quite clearly delighted with the irritation he’d summoned from his younger daughter; I had the impression this was an ongoing game of many years’ provenance between Little Prim and her father. “Thankless child,” he laughed between puffs on his pipe.

“Sharper than a serpent’s tooth,” I replied, and gladly took the mug of too-milky tea from Prim.

“Lear? Yes, quite a good one that, especially when one has only daughters, even just two of them. A father of daughters can’t help but see himself as a Lear or Mr. Bennet.” P.F. beamed up at his daughter when she leaned down to kiss the crown of his head and gratefully accepted a mug of tea himself. “This one isn’t quite as good as a Lizzy but she’ll do.”

“Awful,” Prim clucked and settled down next to me, reaching behind herself to plump a cushion slightly. “I do hope you don’t think ill of us. He’s a consummate wind-up artist and can’t abide not getting a chance to display his artistic temperament to any unlucky sod who’s never had the distinct pleasure of being one of his subjects.”

“Some work in clay like Cora, and some in paints like Alexander’s sister. My gifts are more singular and far more rare.” He peered into the bowl of his pipe, tamped down the tobacco with a small brass piece. “Melissa –“

“Mel,” I corrected over the rim of my mug.

“All right then, Mel. I understand you’re Cranford’s wife.” Puff puff. “Great shock to Cora when she heard Alex stole you away from her second favorite boy.”

Beside me, Alex tensed as if to leap off the sofa, then caught himself when Prim shoved another biscuit in his open mouth. Like a sulky toddler, he crossed his arms before his chest and noisily chomped at the shortbread round.

“Temper, boy,” P.F. shot back, a little rougher than the lightness that had suffused the meeting until now. “Your mother may have let you and your sister behave like little savages up there in Deepest Darkest Scotland, but not here, and not now.”

Alex grumbled an apology, and for a moment I glimpsed the small, scared boy who must have arrived in Somerset with a steamer trunk of cheap clothes and a stash of graphic novels.

“Y-yes,” I stammered, keen to chug past this moment, to grasp the reins for myself. “We’re separated. Divorcing, actually.”

Prim patted my arm and poured a touch more tea in my mug from the silver pot. “Slug of brandy, if you like, Mel,” she offered, and added a full two fingers from the bottle without waiting for my reply. (I did like, as it turned out.)

“Done my daughter many kindnesses, as you must be well aware. Not much room to spare on a professor’s pension. I was very fond of your husband, Mel. We all were.”

Little Prim’s snort sounded much like her nephew’s. “Bollocks, Dad. You couldn’t stand the little shit. ‘That snivelling turd’ is what I think you called him. You liked his money. Family disease, I’m afraid,” she said, touching her hand to her chest in apology to me. How unlike Cora’s that hand was, the dirt of the garden beneath her nails. How unlike Cora she was, beyond that hand. No makeup, not even the “no-makeup makeup” look her sister preferred, and no wedding ring, not even the ghost of one. This close, I could tell her indulgence was Penhaligon Quercus soap — earthy, woodsy, a scent I knew from Fenn’s dressing table. Fenn keeps it now in the dark blue flagon, next to the jar in which she keeps my ring. Her ring. Her ring now.

“Hmph.” Puff puff puff. “Quite true. Cora spent hers on that blasted house of yours, Alexander. Little Prim bought a flat straight out of uni, clever girl. Takes after her father, you know.”

“He does miss Alex’s mum, you know,” Prim said; P.F. just harrumphed. “She kept us at arm’s length for such a long time. My sister’s an odd duck, I’m sure you’re aware. So beautiful and so strange and so sure of herself, like an exquisite space alien trying to be a human, never quite getting it right, but not really giving a toss.”

“Prim, that’s possibly the best description I’ve ever heard of Mum,” Alex laughed and kissed his aunt’s cheek. Predictably, he’d tugged the rush of fury at the mention of Julian back within himself, tucked it in the place in his chest where it hopped like a ragged imp, waiting for its eventual release.

“Have you any sisters, Mel?” Prim’s question was one to which I’m sure she and P.F. already knew the answer — this was merely my chance to fret and strut a bit in the St. Clair front parlor.

“Yes, one. Rachel.” I tried to turn down the petit fours Prim offered from a chipped Portmeirion botanical plate. “She’s about, oh, thank you, Prim, yes, I will have another one of those. She’s about two and a half years older than me. She’s a talent agent in Hollywood.”

“Hollywood, very glamorous,” P.F. marvelled. “Primrose wanted to be an actress but it wasn’t the done thing back then for girls of her class. Do you get on well with her?”

Reflexively, Alex spit a mouthful of tea and soggy biscuit into his hand.

“Ye-es,” I said, passing him a napkin to scrub the spots of slurry that had dripped onto his jeans. “Sometimes. She’s… a lot. I don’t mean that in a bad way. Just she’s… well, she’s good at keeping the world within her dominion. Kind of rolls through life taking whatever she wants. Shoots first and doesn’t even ask questions later half the time. I wish I were more like her, to be honest. I might have had the nerve to ask Alex out when I wanted to.”

There wasn’t anything in my mug to make me feel more comfortable about this prickly truth, no matter how hard I looked in its depths. But I felt no danger letting this truth out, not with these people, not with sensible Little Prim in her bare feet and rat’s nest hair, nor with P.F., who teased only to put me at ease: We are friends here, Melissa. This is play. This is safe.

We are a family. A somersault in the gut. We are your family.

When I looked up to P.F., he’d laid the calabash on its side atop the small marquetry-topped table to his left. A pretty thing, not at all like the sideboard and the desk, far more delicate. It must have been hers, Primrose’s. A wife gone over 15 years and he kept this close. He must touch it every day, feeling her love through his two fingers stroking the pattern of dark and light diamonds on its top.

“There, girl,” he said at last. “There’s nothing to be done for it now. And I recall Alexander when he was 21. Charming, but a tricky chap. You’d have thrown him over and then what? He wouldn’t have had the chance to steal you from that snivelling little turd.”

I looked P.F. in the eye; my gaze would not waver this time. “You’re wrong.”

P.F. took up the pipe once more and tamped at the tobacco. “Am I?” he asked, bringing the pipe to his ageing lips for another puff.

“Yes. You can’t steal something that wants to be taken in the first place.”

Puff, puff. Puff, and a broadening grin. “I like this one, Alexander. I suggest you keep her, if she’ll be kept.”

***

Fennella Carr, as it turns out, would be kept, and by my ex-husband no less. Once a secret Jules had paid me to keep quiet — a secret itself, and one Julian held tightly I knew, to use against me if needed — their relationship no longer had the power to shock me, to make me question whether he’d truly loved her all the time he’d been married to me. I no longer wondered, for the simple reason that while Julian is a master dissembler, capable of twisting reality into intricate Gordian knots, Fenn slices through each of his puzzles to give me the truth.

“We never did more than snog,” she promised me when I’d asked her bluntly if she and Jules had ever messed around during our regular visits to Balcraigie. “Twice. Once, that first time you came to visit us, and you weren’t even married then. And then in…” She trailed off, flipping through some mental calendar. “It was the year Minty left Al. You and Jules came to visit us, just Mummy and me. Al had his new job and couldn’t come, I remember.”

It was a banal revelation, one that confirmed much of what I suspected. On that second visit, I was at last pregnant, at last Julian would be a father, at last I could prove I was worth “every cost I’ve sunk in you,” as he told me on the night he eventually closed the door on our marriage. We were to fly to London to celebrate with the Cranfords, who’d abandoned their Westminster digs by then for a smarter address in Belgravia, then travel on for several days in Paris at the George V, where Julian had arranged for day after day of delights for me. Shopping for baby and me on the Champs-Elysées, mint and rose-flavored macarons on demand from Ladurée (my favorite), gossamer-light maternity massages to the strains of a live harpist. And the most gentle sex, so unaffected and tender, like we were those delicious, sublime lovers we’d once been. I hadn’t felt so in love, so cherished by Julian in years. Maybe this child would seal every fissure between us, maybe we’d be forever like this, like those two golden children, shoulder to shoulder in the back of a steamed-up taxi a decade before, woozily confessing to love at last in their warm winter clothes.

Balcraigie hadn’t been on the itinerary when I’d asked Rianne to pack our bags; it was another surprise engineered by my husband for my pleasure. “Four days where you’ll not lift a finger, darling. Just an early taste of autumn, and the fresh air will be good for you and baby before that long, long journey home.” He’d announced it on the second to last evening of our stay in Paris, and I’d had to scramble to have the concierge find us clothes suited for nights where we’d see our breath in feathery plumes, not deep in the soupy glunge of an August Paris evening where, if one was lucky, the humidity might permit dinner en plein air without needing a frigid shower afterwards.

Even without Alex, and even with the occasional end of summer swarm of midges that made outdoor exercise a bit dicey (I’d been banished inside, “for baby’s sake” after a mere 15 minutes walking down to the stream), I’d been surprised by enjoying myself for a change at Al’s home. With the Cranford bun slowly forming in my oven, Cora fussed over my comfort, rearranging and plumping the cushions behind my back, giving me full control of the remote, spending the afternoons passing on actually quite sensible tips about parenting newborns.

“If I could manage two tiny, wailing monsters with very little help from their father at the age of 19, you should never doubt your own ability to mother one on your own, darling.” Cora was showing me snaps of the infant Alexander and Fennella, swaddled tight in cowslip yellow wraps, nearly indistinguishable but for the scowl on the black-haired baby under whom the initials “ASCC” had been scrawled in blue ballpoint. “FDC,” for her part, raised one eyebrow, questioning even then why she’d been forced to submit to the humiliation of a photograph. “Six weeks old there. I was exhausted, and John was lecturing in Edinburgh that winter. Just me and our old housekeeper Mitch and John’s father, who was even more useless with infants than John was, as it turned out.”

She flipped the scrapbook page: Cora rocked a feathered Princess Diana crop and a hideous plaid sack of a Laura Ashley pinafore while she balanced a wailing toddler Fenn on one hip. “Wouldn’t you cry too if you’d been made to wear that?” Cora asked, and I could only agree; Fenn’s dress was a miniature version of her mother’s. By her side, John’s hair was slightly shorter than the wedding picture I remembered, and he stared fiercely at the lens, as if daring the person taking the picture to fuck around and find out. Alex straddled his neck, one pudgy leg on each shoulder while he pulled at his father’s black curls.

“Barnaby — Uncle B — took that one. John was fed up with B by then. He’d been fired from Noble & Co. a few months before for carrying on affairs with several of his clients’ wives. Nasty business, B wouldn’t apologize, which would have saved his skin, but I’m certain Alex has told you about B. Rarely has any principles but his private life was the hill he’d decided to die on. Had to give up the flat in Old Town, came back here and wouldn’t leave. John’s father was delighted to have both his boys home and Alex was happy to have a new playmate. I admit I was glad of the company — John was so, so difficult at times, so brilliant and so closed off you had to stick a chisel in and pry him open at times. Did you know B’s good with children? Quite amazing.”

I’m getting to know this Cora again now, the chatty, unguarded woman who fetched me cups of chamomile tea and reassured me that the nausea I’d been suffering wouldn’t be forever. “I read that Kate Middleton couldn’t stop puking, and yet she made it through two pregnancies. Of course it helps that you have Jules, who’s such a dear. He’ll make a fabulous father, darling.”

Not that I’d seen him much during the daytime. Like her brother, Fenn’s a decent shot and Jules can’t pass up an opportunity to prove his own skill. Two mornings in a row, he’d kissed my forehead as the sky unpurpled itself into the russety pink of the dawn, tugged his cap and jacket on and waved me a sprightly good-bye. “Off to shoot some snipe, wish us good aim, darling!” Both days they returned at teatime, ruddy-cheeked and jolly and stinking of gunpowder, nudging each other in the ribs at some new in-joke between them, Fenn snorting precisely as her brother does when taking the piss at someone’s expense.

I hadn’t been invited to tag along, though that was hardly a change from years past. For several years, I’d had Minty to keep me company when Jules and the Carr twins loaded their rifles in the back of the Range Rover we’d hired in Edinburgh and bumped up the road to Blair Atholl. And the absence of Alex didn’t send up a sonic ping to resonate in me: danger. Whatever I had suspected about Julian and Fenn had been so long ago, back in a time when I’d sliced through the wires he’d bound round my wrists and set myself free. The sticky film of his inconstancy, whatever little infidelities I’d uncovered through the years, had been scrubbed clean — surely he could be faithful, with the arrival of Cranford fils. (I knew it would be a boy, as if Julian could will a child’s sex into being.) Baby Cranford would be tow-headed and pudgy, with rippling rolls of baby fat to poke at and a chingling giggle that if I listened closely in the silence, I could by then already hear.

I don’t think too much about Baby C now. He might have been an asshole, anyway.

Fenn was drawing back in place the filthy veil of Julian’s lies. It was as if the harder he and I tried for a child, the greedier he’d sought sex with other women, too. When I’d finally delivered the goods and his cells and mine cleaved and split and multiplied again and again and again into something that looked almost human on the last scan, Jules had to think big. What would be more satisfying than the one he could never have, the one he never should have? The one whose kiss was made more sweet for being a temptation just out of reach for year upon year upon end, every trip to Balcraigie a reminder of the impossibility of their lust. Juicy and ripe to pluck if he could strain that far.

Alex’s sister and I had been busy that morning, shoulder to shoulder in my parents’ white and sage green kitchen. A fifteen-year-old Sean had painted the ivy leaf border just below the crown moulding; a thirty-four year old Sean had touched it up only last year. Fenn had pronounced an hour before that she needed to learn how to bake something if she was ever to make Julian much of a partner. Or a wife, god help all of us.

I’d suggested brownies; a favorite of Julian’s, and a recipe I’d mastered myself at the age of 9. Given the handicap of a life where she’d been told to steer clear of the kitchen lest she lose herself in a domestic prison quite beneath her station, I figured Fenn could just about swing it at the age of 35. With the same rapt attention her brother had given me when I’d taught him how to make an edible ham sandwich, she’d asked questions about nearly every step of the process. How “low” is low heat for melting the chocolate? Why is baking chocolate so bitter? Can I pound the walnuts with my rolling pin to chop them? Why do Americans store their eggs in the refrigerator? Will I be able to make these in the Aga at Balcraigie? I can’t? Then why are you showing me this? Oh, mmmm, is it all right to eat raw batter? How long is this baking thing going to take?

I pushed the canister of sugar to the back of my mother’s cabinet, and bounced down from the stepstool to the terracotta floor, cold and smooth beneath my bare feet. “Long enough for a cuppa.” One I needed after all those questions, and the dubious help she’d lent in measuring ingredients. “Put the kettle on again, will you?”

Delighted to perform one kitchen task she was actually familiar with, Fenn set to refreshing the kettle from the kitchen sink. This particular morning she’d made a perfectly competent carafe of Sumatra for the seven of us gathered for my wedding, surprising herself most of all that “it tastes precisely like your coffee, Mel.” (I hadn’t the heart to tell her she wasn’t quite there yet.) We’d been “bubbling” in my parents’ home since completing the obstacle course of ensuring we were all COVID-free: isolating, testing, waiting in yet more isolation for the all clear, and then rushing to Burbank with no pit stops for Snickers bars, no matter how piteously Alex pleaded.

Even Julian had played his part. As both Fenn’s host and my father’s prodigal (former) son(-in-law), he paid us all the respect of getting tested and then staying the fuck away after he’d dropped off Fenn. According to Rachel, my mother had returned the favor by letting Jules in for a brief chat and the manliest of hugs with my dad. “Mom said Jules had earned it, but Fenn told me their quarantine was all delivery from Petrossian and Vespertine, martinis on the balcony, catching up on The Crown, and fucking a lot. Sounds great, honestly. I told Matt to step up his quarantine game, and that includes dealing with his fat COVID bod. Jules looks great, still that firm ass. Mmmmm.” (I thought about slapping Rachel for that visual — Julian’s ass is particularly nice, and I didn’t need to be reminded of it — but I’m a bride. I need to have some decorum.)

The night before should have been the “Zoomerette party” Jen had insisted would be nearly as good as a real deal bachelorette, but I’d bailed. Only a few weeks before, I’d been one of 20 heads-and-upper-torsos onscreen for her own Zoom baby shower, and it had convinced me: the only thing nearly as tedious as attending a baby shower was attending one on Zoom. The last one I’d been to in person was for my college roommate Stevie, at her mom’s house in Petaluma. Three hours of cooing over organic, ungendered baby clothes emerging from box after box from Hanna Andersson while Stevie tried her best not to look like she wanted us all to fuck off so she could put her cankles up. Zoom shower pluses: you can mute yourself, send snarky notes to others and pretend your camera is busted. Zoom minuses: BYOB. Two weeks after we’d played “Who Knows Jen Best?” (Cait, as it happens) over the internet and raised our glasses and mugs for a safe delivery, Ethan Ichiro Fujima-Mackenzie popped into the world, all 10 pounds and six ounces of him. (“Ouch,” Jenn texted me when she heard the weight. “I just re-upped my BC, how bout you??”)

“You are a Tiffy, not a Miffy, right?” Fenn hovered over a Chewbacca mug with the kettle in one hand and a carton of milk in the other, her brows knit in concern. “I assumed you would be.”

“Yes, tea in first, please.” It was such a ridiculous request when I thought of it, one of the little class markers I’d learned from Jules, who presumably had it rubbed into him by his fearsome mother. Being a Miffy — milk in first — was an awful tell of being middle class (or worse), and not the American kind. The kind that Primrose Dacre St. Clair had feared her darling daughter might become if she insisted on mixing with young men from Croydon and Barnet. Shipping Cora off to a life of posh penury in Scotland was far preferable, even if P.F. had had his doubts about his son-in-law. (I now know them, all extremely reasonable, and a bit too much like my own father’s about Alex for my taste.)

Fenn fixed her own tea, and I didn’t miss that while I got Chewy, she’d selected Rachel’s Barbie pink “BHS Prom Court Princess 2001” mug for herself. “You should know it was Jules who made the pass the second time.”

Wisely, she kept the butcher block-topped island between us when she let that truth slip into the world. It emerged with a thud, nearly as gracefully as World’s Largest Baby Ethan had only a fortnight before. She fretted with the end of her long black braid, bringing it to her mouth several times, as though it might stop her from saying more.

“I don’t know that makes it any better.” I didn’t want this revelation on the eve of my wedding, but it had unpacked its bags in my parents’ home and was making itself quite comfortable. “You knew I was pregnant.”

“Shhhhh!” she scolded, looking over her shoulder to the dining room. Alex and Matt had been in there only half an hour before, playing poker over pints of IPA. As interlopers in the de Mornay family, they’d forged the bond outsiders sometimes do, one born perhaps at first from circumstance or the desperate flail for someone else who feels adrift in a sea of unfamiliar intimacy. Over time, circumstance flourished into their own familiarity, one where my nuclear family was the source of unending amusement, where Al and Matt had their own in-jokes and (I suspect) nicknames for each of us. (I knew my mom was “Beast Mode,” and while that was accurate, it meant I probably didn’t want to know my own.)

“I don’t think your brother cares, Fenn. He’d probably scold you only for not convincing Jules to leave me sooner. It matters to me. Do you know what Julian put me through to get pregnant in the first place? Huh?” The tea soured in my mouth; the sense-memory of the nausea I’d suffered in Scotland surged in my gut. I hadn’t even noticed I was clutching at my belly, where once Baby C had floated in his amniotic bliss.

She had always been so much less of a liar than I’d ever had a hope of being, no forced smiles or “I’m all right”‘s or gathering every scrap of loneliness and misery and forcing it to hide within the shape of her body. I’d known that from the first day I’d met her at Balcraigie. She was newly returned from three months at the Priory on Julian’s dime, raw and brittle and often half-cocked. I remember her haircut was crooked, like she’d thrust a pair of scissors in a mate’s hand and said, go on, have a bash at it. That terrible cut was the least perfect thing about her — reed-thin, wasp-waisted, plush-lipped. She slinked around corners like a cat, prowling from room to room with Jules and Alex and me as I got the full tour of the jumbled-up mess of a never-proud estate.

At first I’d thought her haughty and proud, that her sneers in my direction stemmed from my unshakeable bourgeois, New World crassness. Or that she resented having to share her bedroom with me during the visit, something I wondered about myself, given that there were at least six other unused bedrooms I’d poked my head into. (I didn’t know these rooms were off limits for being filthy or dank or “far too haunted for sleep.”) Slowly, the truth pulled its long lens into focus, and I did not like what had become razor sharp: she and Julian had been a couple. Or wanted to be a couple. Or… something, some passion, some hunger for each other throbbed in plain sight if you just stared at it a while, like one of those trippy Magic Eye pictures I’d made myself cross-eyed over as a kid.

“I suppose I knew,” she said, fixing me in the eye with the same brown gaze as her brother’s. “I just didn’t care.”

As I said, not a liar. When she crossed the kitchen to pass the bottle of cheap brandy she’d found at the back of the drinks cabinet yesterday, I didn’t push back. Glup glup in your cup, as Little Prim would half-sing when preparing a similar drink for her father, mother’s medicine, drink it up.

I should have felt worse about it, some deeper sting boring itself through my skin to deliver the venom of Julian’s infidelity. But like the days that followed the loss of Baby C back in Pasadena, I felt only vague disappointment and a sense of relief. “I’m not surprised,” I assured her, pouring a drizzle of the amber liquid in my tea. “At him, I mean. I thought it might have happened so many times we visited, and you two would disappear for hours at a time.”

Fenn paced between the oven and the beat up pine table my family and I had bickered and gossiped over for my entire life. Under two of the most recent layers of varnish was the name Rachel in a loopy script, and I still liked pulling a fingernail through the undulating, slightly sticky grooves. My sister had come home drunk one night from raging with a sugar daddy and carved her name in the kitchen table with the letter opener my mom hadn’t put away earlier. Since it was Rachel, my parents found it charming, and lacquered over it.

“I would have taken any amount of time with him, doing anything,” Fenn insisted. “Anything at all. He made me feel real again when I’d come back from the Priory and I seemed to be a heap of broken teacups stuck back together with glue and meds. And you both looked so happy, like you always looked so happy when you visited. I couldn’t bear it. He held your hand and kissed you in front of us all, you disappeared for hours to your room and we could all hear you. Part of me wanted to believe he really loved me better, and that he only stuck with you because of that stupid marital agreement where he had to pay you stacks of money if he left. That and the baby. I’m not that cruel.”

The kitchen timer buzzed, and broke the tension — work to do, brownies to tend to. Women’s work. Late October sunlight flooded the kitchen and picked out the slightly bluish tint to her jet black hair as she pulled the pan from the oven and turned to face me with a searching look of now what? Not nearly as frail as she’d been at 21, but still that long, lean body that ached for Julian’s more than mine had ever.

We worked quietly, shoulder to shoulder again. Let them cool. Not in the fridge. Do you want to make frosting? Let’s make frosting. Find me a saucepan. No, a saucepan. We use butter and cocoa and milk and confectioner’s sugar and a little vanilla. Yes, he likes them frosted. Yes, you can have a taste now.

“Do you think it’s worth it?” The brownies were cool, and I’d set Fenn the task of frosting. My mom had never let go of the harvest gold Tupperware spatula she’d received as a wedding present in 1978, and Fenn wielded it like a broadsword, two-handed, slicking the glossy milk chocolate glaze across our work. “Marriage, I mean. Not particularly to my brother, he’s shite.”

I stuck my tongue out and ran a finger in the bowl of frosting. “I think it can be. There’s something about knowing you’re in it together, no looking back, eyes forward, teamwork. You’re creating a family, after all. And it’s a lot of work, a lot of talking and balancing and sacrificing and not always getting what you want.” I popped a glob of slightly too-sweet chocolate in my mouth.

“Sounds dreadful.” Fenn was using the spatula to draw a zig-zag pattern through her work, a touch that never would have occurred to me. “You have to do so much of that anyway in any relationship, so why get married? When it all falls apart, you still have so much work to do. Jules told me how bad your divorce was, how it dragged on forever.”

“His fault,” I reminded her. “His father talked him into it, but he knew what he was doing. If they’d not tried to hide things from the court, it would have been over in a flash.”

“You said you had hundreds and thousands. Sprinkles,” she corrected herself in American. “Will you find them for me?”

“Don’t deflect.” I shoved the jar of chocolate sprinkles in her hand.

“Fine, yes,” she grumbled, and summoned her inner Salt Bae to toss the tiny candies high in the air across the pan of iced brownies. “It was his father’s fault and Jules paid dearly for it. But I just don’t see the point in marriage for a woman. Little Prim and Jack have been together for twenty years now and have Harry together, and they’re not married. Happy as larks, and Harry’s fairly well-behaved, for a St. Clair. And the flat’s in Little Prim’s name alone and Jack doesn’t care, doesn’t make her do anything she doesn’t want to. I wouldn’t mind something like that with Jules.”

“Not to burst your bubble, but Little Prim is Little Prim. And Jules is no Jack. You can’t have that kind of relationship with Jules, where everything is played by ear.”

“What do you know about my relationship with your ex-husband?” she bristled, drawing herself to her full five feet nine inches. It felt like being a serf brought to account by her Imperial Majesty the Tsarina before facing the firing squad for an accidental moment of insolence. “Just because he’s the same person, doesn’t mean I’m just like you. I’m still me. I’ve had an entire lifetime to build myself up and I have a decent idea of who I am and what I want. I’ve had a career, sort of, and I feel mostly like an adult. I don’t mean to be rude, Mel, but that simply wasn’t the case when you met him.”

Her words should have cut deeper for being so true, but I still walked away from her gaze. “Sorry, of course you’re your own self. I’m glad to hear Julian has reformed a little.” I tried to be breezy, but I knew I just sounded jealous. “What I should say is that people can make it work without marriage, but our worlds, yours and mine, here and there, are just set up to be easier for married people. Taxes and inheritance and stupid things like pensions. Property things. Money things. And you know how Julian is with making his money line up and march about exactly as he wishes.”

“He asked me again.” The water I was running to rinse the spatula nearly drowned out this confession, though I felt nearly nothing when the words bounced into my consciousness. “I told him I’d think about it.”

The tap turned off with a brisk twist of my wrist. “I thought it was a ‘no.'”

“I’ll probably say no. I don’t doubt he loves me. Do you?” She traced a lazy loop on the kitchen floor with the toe of her bright red sock, circling a chip in the terracotta tile my dad hadn’t gotten around to fixing, though the ding must be at least a decade old.

“I thought I wasn’t supposed to know anything about your relationship with my ex-husband.” It was meant to be a joke, but came out with much of the snap I was trying to repress. Under the heat of the same glare her brother favors when I’m being unnecessarily crabby, I wilted. “Sorry. I… I do. I used to think it was just another way to hurt Al, to hurt me, but Jules is just not that great of an actor.”

Fenn sighed into her tea and pulled her long black braid over her shoulder. “I think he does love me, for me. And I know how much he wants to be married, for very much the same reasons you said you wanted to marry Al. He says we’d be so much better as a team, that we’ve no good reason not to marry. That he could do so much more for me and mummy and Balcraigie. And he promised me he learned from being with you, that it just isn’t fair to force me to do things like go to his awful politics things, and I’d keep my own life, my own friends. I could even live in Scotland half the year if I want.”

“But Fenn,” I nudged gently. “You don’t want to live here at all.”

“I know, I know,” she grumbled, and hoisted herself onto one of the stools pulled up to the kitchen island, pulling along the pan of brownies. “But you know Jules, he can be terribly convincing. I almost think sometimes I could do it, the way he speaks of it. Be a wife, live here, live there. I don’t really think he wants me there.”

The simmering pot of my bitterness towards Julian should have no room for him to be happy, and I should have felt some pleasure that he’d never have Fenn just the way he wanted her, strong and wild and unbending and ensconced in a mansion in Malibu or Santa Barbara. Another castle to keep a bride in, another home that turned into a trap.

She’d pried a brownie free from the pan with a wooden spoon and poked at the thick layer of icing tentatively, before cramming half in her mouth. “I’m still not convinced,” she mumbled through the brownie. “Marriage still looks like a poor deal for women. For all Mummy talks about Daddy being a complete darling, just a little difficult at times, I know she had it hard. With us. With Balcraigie. And Daddy was so missing so much of the time, teaching in Edinburgh or Dundee, or not getting out of bed, or drunk and not really like Daddy at all. She won’t admit it to Al or me, but I’ve heard her tell Andrew. Daddy was a lot of hassle. It’s really for the best Alex can’t remember him much, or won’t. I remember enough for both of us.”

I hitched a leg over the seat next to hers and leaned my elbows on the butcher block top. “If I asked something, would you… would you take it in the way I’m asking?”

“S’pose it depends on the way you’re asking.” After a thorough lick of her fingers, she thrust the pan towards me and offered the spoon.

A brownie popped up from the pan under the slight pressure I tapped with the beat up wooden spoon. A spoon I’d used with my mom to make cookies and cakes and sheets of lasagne, a spoon she’d stolen from her own mother’s kitchen when she and my dad came west after college was over. “Does he really make you feel free? Do you not think he wouldn’t try to change you, too?”

It would, of course, be easier if Fennella Carr was trodding her heavy stomp in the very footprints I’d crushed into the ground years before, right on the path Julian had drawn carefully for me. Easier for me, that is. It would mean I had no role to play in being caught in the snares Julian set for me, that I hadn’t walked into each and every one of them knowing precisely the terms of my imprisonment. When I’d pushed back, made clear my desires, again and again he’d relented.

You can’t abandon me at a party like that, call me a slut and a whore and common and crass, and expect me to take you back.

I can’t live here, Julian. I love you, but this isn’t my home. I’m going back to America and you can come if you like.

I know who you are, Jocko. I know you think I’m a tiger you’ve tamed. Fuck you.

But Julian’s wily, a quick study. The Princess Melissa could be caught and contained if she just didn’t need to think so much. Build her a castle where she is a creature only of sensation, where there are no choices to be made. Cosseted and indulged, the princess need only speak of a passing fancy and her husband-jailer would conjure its reality. A candy floss prison, lighter than air, so light she might not even see there are bars on the windows and locks on every door.

But Fenn is no princess, and rarely waits for another to bring her what she desires. Her mother and brother tried to convince her there wasn’t a need to work with Alex’s money coming in, but she taught classes anyway. She pillaged the moldering trunks in the attic for the castoffs of Carrs and Dysarts and Winsteads and McTavishes, refashioning Liberty bodices and 20s tea gowns and patched-up Dior New Look gowns to suit her own tastes. When she knew she was too at sea, too alone in Glasgow to stay on to finish her training, she never dropped out of making her art.

She pointed at corner of her mouth and frowned. “You’ve some chocolate there. To be blunt, yes. I’m not backward in coming forward in telling him what I want. And when he pushes back, if he pushes back, I tell him there’s a door to the room, and he’s quite free to use it. He’s walked out once or twice, but he always comes back.”

Strength respects strength, he’d told me.

“That’s not to say there aren’t things about Jules that drive me mad. I despise how he gets so drawn into work, and how he’ll get out of bed in the middle of the night to take a call from his father. I hate how he’ll drop everything to go to some stupid meeting, and I’m left in London, with nothing to do. Your friends aren’t mine, you know, and he’s forever trying to make me go to lunch with Amanda. Honestly, it’s rather distasteful considering he was fucking her earlier this year.”

“Oh, is that over now?” I asked, knowing full well from Miranda it had ended in June when Amanda demanded Julian come back to Britain for the remainder of the pandemic, and present her with an engagement ring at least as big as my second one. He was to leave Fenn and Amanda would do her utmost to provide a Cranford heir within 18 months — she had the best fertility doctor in Harley Street waiting for her call. Unwilling to commit either to living in the UK for an indefinite period, or Amanda to the exclusion of Fenn, he took the route that suited him best. He sent her a whopper of a ring and told her to use it with a man who deserved her better. Nice bit of completely unwarranted and utterly false flattery on Jules’ part, I must say.

“Mmm, yes. Wasn’t my doing, you know. I told him I didn’t mind him seeing her. There’s some… things I take it she’ll do for him that he likes. I’m not a prude, but I know what I like, and what I don’t. Maybe you did them with him, I don’t know. I don’t do anything that –”

“FENN!” I half-swallowed a scream; this time it was me checking to see if Alex and Matt were back trading poker chips across the dining room table. “I didn’t do that for myself, it was only for him.”

A sneaky half-smile lit up her face. “We all have our things, Mel. No shame in it. But I’m clear about what I need from him. Time, mostly, and talking. He’s wickedly funny and has seen so much of the world. He loves to listen to me talk about my art, or just watch me paint or draw. Those days we had in Mexico were pure heaven, so little to do but lie in the sun and read to each other and sleep and dream and talk and talk. I don’t need much more than that, and the sex. You know.”

I did. Amanda was right — sex with Julian had gotten darker and more demanding over the years, but when we were new, green buds yet unfurled to the world, it had been mellow-sweet. Josh had always made it clear to me that our bodies were engines of chaos that needed to be controlled tightly lest they spin out of control. Julian? “Here, let me love you, darling. Why are you so tense? This is beautiful, and you are beautiful. Let go, darling. Show me how you let go.”

The mood had slipped and slid into a memory I did not wish to revisit, not with my wedding hours away. I remembered being where Fenn was now, the prize Julian had fought for and been awarded. But where I’d been bestowed upon Julian for besting Alex, Fenn was both prize and prize-giver.

Fenn pivoted forward on her stool and gently pushed back from where we sat, shoulder to shoulder, sister to sister. “These really are his favorites, these brownies? Don’t blame him. They’re gorgeous.” The stroke of her hand on my nape brought the fine blonde hairs there to bristling attention. “I’ll never be as good as you are at some things, Mel, but trust me that I’m fairly decent at making my own way by now.”

Before I could respond, the relative — if tense — peace of the kitchen was split by my sister’s piercing screech. “MOM! Alex stole my hairdryer and won’t give it back! My hair is going to dry all wrong and I’m going to look awful in all the pictures later!”

“Family, hm?” Fenn swiped her cup of tea and left me to think alone. A dangerous place to be.

***

I confess: before there was a Julian and Melissa, I’d thought at least twice about what my wedding day to Alexander St. Clair Carr might look like. Only a few years after wriggling out of Josh’s hands, I’d wanted nothing more than to be held tight by Alex’s, until the magic words contained in the marriage vows released us upon simultaneous deaths in our ripe old age. (I was 20, overly romantic, and tended towards the gothic, in my defense.)

The wedding would be in my parents’ backyard on one of the dazzling early days of April, when May Grey and June Gloom had yet to hang the skies with their blanket of drear, before the blistering scorch of summer, when there might be at least a chance of some green in the Valley, as long as it wasn’t a drought year. How many guests do we need? 100 will fit nicely, though we could squeeze in a few more if we covered the pool. Colors? Sage green and dove grey, I think. Jen and Jenn and Cait would be my co-maids of honor, and Alex could have that knob Julian along as his best man, I suppose. I’d be in ecru guipure lace, a simple sheath, nothing showy, my hair caught high in a simple bun, maybe a few orange blossoms wreathing the clean knot I’d pinned.

I’d walk from my childhood bedroom on my father’s arm, down the oak staircase I’d tumbled down as a grade schooler and up as a drunken college student home for summer vacation. Through to the front room with its soaring ceiling where once I’d helped my Uncle Seb guide down a pigeon that found the rafter there a suitable perch, and on to the kitchen, where more often than not it was my dad making dinner for Rachel and me while my mother did rounds at the hospital. We’d hold back for Cait and then Jenn and then Jen to kiss me on the cheek — you’re so radiant, Mel, so happy, so lucky, we love you we love you we love you. The chatter of a hundred guests (yes, a hundred will do nicely after all) would hush when Debussy’s “Clair de Lune” cut through their hum of expectation, then Cait and Jenn and Jen would glide down a runner of white jasmine petals to where Alex waited. He’d turn and see me, waiting on the threshold, ready to run down that aisle and take him in my arms and hang every bit of etiquette! So tall and slim and awkward and mine.

Of course Alex knew nothing of these plans, not the Debussy nor the jasmine nor the guipure lace. I’m not a complete idiot — the first time I’d swooned over this mise-en-scène, we still hadn’t even kissed. I had shared it quite drunkenly with Minty over pints at the White Bear, however, when we were playing a game of Fuck-Marry-Kill with the guys I’d met on campus so far. (F was Julian, M was Alex, K was definitely Tom Gregory, that wankstain.)

“Sounds heavenly,” she slurred over pint number three of Woodpecker. “That wedding doesn’t even have to have Alex involved to be perfect, though I’ve often wondered what it would be like to kiss him. He’s got those big fluffy lips.” Minty patted her own rather thin ones with her index finger. “Ran says he’s good in bed, too — have you seen the size of his hands? But you’d have to catch Al first and make him stay, and Ran hasn’t managed that in two whole years.”

I tried to catch him, again and again, but Alex was forever the fish squirming from my fingers. Before my first date with Julian, I put myself in his path, quite literally at times, whether it was on the way back from his Complex Function Theory seminar or blocking the fridge in the kitchen of the flat he shared with Julian. Be casual, but look interested in what he’s doing, even if it’s just Grand Theft Auto. But — and I have since confirmed with Al — he had no idea what I was trying to do by just being around all the time.

“I thought you came by to smoke fags and talk to Jules about market economies, how the fuck was I supposed to know? You were completely out of my league — gorgeous and funny and brilliant and everyone but Ran and Man loved you. Jules called you real top totty and he’d claimed you, so to speak, so I didn’t even bother. Why have this disaster when you could be with a golden boy like Jules?”

But finally the fish caught on the hook for good, after years of slipping from my grasp. We’d have our wedding, even if I never had my engagement ring. Even if the pandemic meant the guest list dropped from the 125 people to whom we’d sent the save the date cards, to five people. Even if there would be no bridesmaids or the chic refurbed warehouse in Culver City where I’d plunked down a deposit (non-refundable) or the galbi taco and artisan ice cream trucks or the explosions of hydrangeas and eucalyptus and ivy in the floral arrangements and bouquets.

In the end, it was not so unlike the dream I’d had fifteen years before, before I let Julian muscle past Alex and claim what he thought was his due. Maybe I’d wanted more than my parents and Matt and Rachel and Fenn with Alex and me to share what I’d fought nearly half my life to secure. Our families have looped and linked together over Zoom and messages and emails and phone calls at odd hours these past nine months, brought closer by tragedy and frustration. And love. So much love, bursting from all of us, for all of us, for St. Clairs and Carrs and de Mornays and Sullivans and one small Bosworth-Carr in the middle of Dorset. My greed demanded them all, but what we had, who we had was enough.

No bridesmaids, no groomsmen. The mother of the groom and her partner beamed in via Zoom, as did the little girl who would have held her father’s hand had the world not been so cruel. I’d had to banish Rachel from my bedroom — she’d insisted on doing my makeup so “you don’t look like a fucking Picasso” — to spend a few minutes on my own, thinking of how the trappings of a wedding are simply that: a trap. A trap into which money and stress and too many expectations of perfection drop, before you plunge in, too. I’d returned the mint green tulle and embroidery puffball of a dress — it made me look like a pastel St. Patrick’s-themed Hostess Snoball — I’d ordered on a whim, thinking I needed something bridal. Instead I’d chosen my go-to navy blue A-line dress with a boat neck, no flowers nor a stitch of guipure lace to be seen. Clean. Familiar. And its color picked up the dark blue in the Black Watch tartan trousers Alex had insisted on wearing. (When I asked why not the Carr tartan, he crooked an eyebrow and shivered. “Have you actually seen it?”)

Down the oak staircase on my father’s arm, though, that did happen. While Fenn and I had been fretting that Matt and Al were eavesdropping on our conversation the day before, they’d instead spent the afternoon sinking IPAs and hooking up the indoor sound system to play in the backyard. Now “Clair de Lune” piped gently through the house, as I passed beneath that high, high ceiling and its single rafter, through the kitchen that had borne witness to nearly every triumph and failure of my childhood shared across its old pine table.

On the threshold to the patio, my dad — Daddy! my first and forever protector, the one who’d understood me best of all — bent down and whispered, “It took me a while, baby, but I think I get now why it’s him for you, and not J — not anyone else.” (Nice save, Dad; I didn’t need to hear that name on this day.)

And beneath the limbs of the broad and ridged and proud Engelmann oak in which my treehouse has nestled for years, Alex waited for me, craned his neck, consulted with the officiant who’d saved the day by rearranging her schedule when the justice of the peace we’d booked months before tested positive for the virus. Fenn was the one to point me out to him; I am pretty certain she hadn’t meant to overshadow me (nearly) in that lambskin Narciso Rodriguez Jules had gifted her last year. My mom fussed with Rachel’s hair, which I’d done earlier to match my own: a simple bun, wreathed with orange blossoms.

And then I was there, beneath the oak tree, my hands in Alexander Carr’s, promising to love him and comfort him and never, ever let him go. It’s a promise I had been ready to make to him and our families and the world for so very, very long. And it’s the one I know I can never, will never break.

I love you and I love you and I love you, Alexander St. Clair Carr. My love is a promise and a vow and and brilliant-feathered bird in flight, a great starry sky and the deep blue sea, a little green boat drifting at last into its safe and longed-for harbor. We have slain some monsters but there are always more to take on. By your side, shoulder to shoulder. Keep me safe, as I shall you, forever.

We are a family now. A family at last.