On the morning after the last final exam of my sophomore year (on Rubens, Rembrandt and Titian, if you were interested, which you’re probably not), my to-do list did not seem to be shrinking. I had two more days before I had to be out of the suite I shared with Stevie and Liv, two days to clear out the detritus of another year cramming facts I might find useful at some point into a brain that often wanted to just peace out, smoke a bowl and listen to The Shins. (It was 2005. I get a pass.)

Stevie wasn’t taking my impending departure for Bristol very well, but Stevie hadn’t been taking anything terribly well since April, when Daniel Glickman had dumped her for someone he met at Au Bon Pain. Someone named Nathan. What made it worse was that we all agreed Nathan was basically Stevie, if she’d been a gay man. It followed then that we all adored Nathan nearly as much as we loved Stevie. Even Stevie loved Nathan as much as she loved herself, which is to say, completely. It was only Dan who needed to stop existing, preferably after a tactical nuclear strike that turned him into a smouldering flesh-fire.

Before that could happen though, she and I needed to pack up and start the long drive back west. “You really are a heartless bitch, Mel,” she sulked, riffling through a stack of her notes on Althusser’s “Reading Capital” before tossing them all in the blue recycling bin. “First you try to make me feel empathy for Dan, which you know is just impossible. Poor Nathan, caught up in our drama.”

I wiped sweat from my forehead with one of the extra-long twin sheets I’d be tossing in the trash once we were done with the cleanout. “Dan is gay, Stevie,” I said, sitting back on my haunches to survey the mess we still had to tackle together.

Liv had (perhaps wisely) packed up and left in the early morning hours of Sunday without a word to either of us, not even an email. It wasn’t a complete surprise, given that she’d stopped speaking to both of us at the beginning of May. We went too far this time, she said in a terrifically passive-aggressive note left in permanent marker on the whiteboard hanging in the common room. I swear, when Stevie and I drunkenly told Liv’s new super-leftie boyfriend Kevin that Liv thought Dubya was dreamy, we totally didn’t know he was that Kevin. Or at least I didn’t. I think.

Stevie pouted. “It’s not polite to erase bisexual people like that.”

“Dan told you he’s gay. Since when is he bisexual?” I wasn’t sure how I’d acquired quite so many identical white Fruit of the Loom men’s undershirts, but I was trashing them all. Fresh slate for the UK, I’d decided, since Rachel could hook me up with some plain white tees from J Crew. A lateral move from Abercrombie as assistant manager, but definitely a move up in mall world cachet.

Her steel grey eyes welled up with might have been real tears, but it was hard to tell sometimes with Stevie. “We were in love.”

“You told me yourself that most of the time Liv and I were tiptoeing around the common room when your door was closed, you and Dan were just lying in bed, reading Derrida and Lacan together and making fart noises with your armpits.”

She ignored me, and turned back to tossing index cards and beer mats in the trash. “And now you’re not even going to be around next year while I rise like a phoenix from the ashes to exact my revenge upon the men of Providence. You’re going to be off being fanceh in Brrrrrritain,” she sighed, veering into a very poor facsimile of a posh English accent.

“It’s not that fancy, you know,” I grumbled. “You came with me to that Mike Leigh film fest. It didn’t look very glamorous in Naked.”

“That girl who’s going to be your roommate sounded pretty la-di-da when she called here and I picked up the phone. Mandy? Who’s called Mandy?”

“Mandy Moore,” I snapped. “And her name is Minty. Araminta Bosworth.”

“I don’t know how you’ve made it sound even worse, but you have. I mean, come on. I was named after Stevie Nicks. She was probably named after some duchess in her family.”

(It was at least partially true — her full name was Stevie Rhiannon Meadowlark Dreyfus, which was a compromise between her Fleetwood Mac uber-fan mom and her dad, who could not get his fill of the Harlem Globetrotters.)

“Stop being such a reverse snob. Minty seems really nice, and my Uncle Steve knows her mom. Just because someone’s got a lot of money doesn’t mean they’re an asshole.”

Stevie blew at the strands of her dark blonde hair that hadn’t been scooped up into a high ponytail. “Doesn’t mean they’re not. Just be careful, Mel.” With a soft oof, she dragged our threadbare brown couch from the wall and ducked behind it. Seconds later, her hand popped up to flourish the Victoria’s Secret water bra Liv swore one of her revolving cast of boyfriends must have stolen.

“Trash it,” I yelled. “And be careful of what?”

Stevie’s head popped around the side of the couch. “People who aren’t who they say they are.”

My roommate’s fears about Minty probably came more from her fear of being left behind by her two best friends. I mean, it’s not like Liv was going anywhere, but after the Kevin incident there had been some discreet room reassignments, and Stevie, for the first time in her life, would be living alone.

“I like to think I’m an okay judge of character,” I said, sliding the dustpan and handbroom across the hardwood floor of the suite to her beckoning hand.

“Demonstrably untrue. You willingly had sex with Stuart Harris for an entire week.”

Perhaps Stevie was right after all about my powers of discernment.

***

Unlike Stevie, who’d had to share a bedroom with her younger sister Christine, I’d had my own room at home since kindergarten. Technically my own. Rachel didn’t quite get the memo that the room with the light blue paint job was mine, and had always treated my bedroom as hers, or at least as an extension of her own. Coming home from afterschool oboe lessons to find Rachel sprawled on my bed, eating a bag of Doritos and leafing through Cosmo, was a regular occurrence of my junior high years. (So were the Dorito crumbs she’d get between my sheets.) Her own lilac and lavender bedroom fantasia was strictly off-limits for a loser like me, but Rachel never saw a closed door as a “no entry” sign, just a temporary impediment.

As such, I’d never felt like I had a room of my own until I was 16, when my parents made me the present of a lock for my bedroom door. For someone who had resigned herself to enforced communal living with a nosy older sister, it was an even better birthday present than the $200 savings bond I got that year from Uncle Dan. At last, the four walls delineated me-Melissa from her-Rachel, a boundary Rachel stepped over whenever she fancied.

“Just remember, that door only locks from the inside, dum-dum,” she reminded me with a self-satisfied grin over the breakfast table three days after Dad and Uncle Guy spent a Sunday afternoon installing the hardware. Even though Rachel hated mornings, she hated paying for things herself even more; free food was one of the great attractions of not moving out during her supposed gap year.

I grabbed the box of Rice Krispies out of her hand and poured a small mound in my cereal bowl. “Nuh-uh,” I said, dousing the puffs in milk. “What’s that keyhole for then? What’s this for?” I brandished the brass key I kept on a long green velvet ribbon around my neck.

“Good question,” Rachel said, and bit into a slice of toast, never breaking eye contact as she chewed her way through the slice of rye (low glycemic index).

When I came back from my summer job later that day, the door to my room was as secure as I’d left it at 9 a.m. Nothing was out of place. My hairbrush contained no bright blonde hairs, and my small collection of cosmetics was lined up alphabetically by brand name, from Almay to Wet ‘n Wild, as always. No fingerprints on the mirrored sliding doors to the closet, either. Though she burst out of my tops, Rachel and I were roughly the same size in jeans and skirts and despite calling my clothes a child’s wardrobe straight out of Kids R Us she regularly stole my pink pedal pushers. I’d paid twenty of my own dollars to buy those from Delia’s and I didn’t feel much like sharing with someone who was technically an adult.

Still, something felt off in the room, like someone had been telling ghost stories in there earlier and the spirits summoned hadn’t quite dissipated into the ether. Speaking of which, it didn’t smell like CK One in there, so I knew it was unlikely Rach had found her way to the other side of the door. Still unconvinced there hadn’t been some kind of security breach, I slowly pulled open my desk drawer. Scented gel pens, check, in their case. Notepad headed with “From the Desk of MLD” (a gift from Aunt Jane), check. The copy of The Yellow Wallpaper I’d marked up prodigiously for a term paper a scant three weeks before, check. Envelope tucked into that same copy of The Yellow Wallpaper… missing?

My pulse beat hard while I frantically tore tattered notebooks, old diaries, Snoopy pencil cases and protractors from the drawer. I shook the notepad and an atlas of the 50 states but nothing tumbled out, except a Red Robin receipt from a road trip with Dad four years before. Nothing.

It was with the steel grip of impending doom clutching my shoulders that I felt a disturbance in the Force, so to speak, behind me.

“Your loser boyfriend writes some pretty hot stories,” drawled Rachel from the doorway, wearing the teal skirt from the Limited I’d given up as lost two weeks before.

“How…” My eyes darted from the empty desk to my sister’s hand, which was clutching the missing envelope.

“I totally underestimated him,” she continued, stalking from the door to my bed, where she threw herself onto the five white eyelet lace pillows I lined up with military precision each morning. “I mean, he is Teddy’s brother. Now, I never fooled around with the Tedster, but word is that he gives the best oral. You are fucking Josh, right?”

My mouth wouldn’t move, like it was gummed up with the kind of toffee that seems like a good idea until you bite into it and think: shit, this is going to require a dentist or I’ll be eating through a tube in my side for the rest of my life. My neck wasn’t frozen though, and I gently shook it.

Sitting cross-legged on my bed, she spread the letters across the white and pink sprigged comforter. Rachel drummed her fingers on the pale blue paper I knew from across the room to be the filthiest of the three brief pieces of erotica Josh had shoved through the vents of my locker before the end of the school year. “For real?” She cocked her head to one side and her bright blonde ponytail bounced over her shoulder. “He’s fucking someone, that’s for sure.”

My mouth finally unstuck. “Gimme those back!” I screamed, and launched myself towards my sister, who deftly rolled out of the way with the stack of papers before I could pin her against the bed.

“Nice belly flop.”

“I’m still a virgin,” I mumbled into a mouthful of cotton bedspread. “But he’s kissed me down there.”

Rachel rolled me onto my back and loomed over me. “Really? When?” I thought my sister’s head would crack open from the 10,000-watt smile she was beaming down to me.

“I don’t have to tell you.”

Rachel rolled her eyes and helped me sit up next to her, even propping one of the lace bolsters behind me. “I know, dum-dum,” she said softly.

My sister’s always been good at breaking me down, caving in to her wheedling demands. To be fair, she’s pretty talented in that skill with nearly everyone (even Julian), but having known me nearly every minute of my life, she knows precisely where to slam the sledgehammer into my kneecaps or apply a tender touch that turns out to be a Vulcan death grip in disguise. All it took this time was for her to place her perfectly moisturized hand on mine.

Just as he’d promised, Josh had not done much more than kiss me until I drifted over from one square in the calendar to the next where I was now 16. It had been only a week since I’d let him push the kiss where he’d teased before. As far as I knew, I was the only one of my friends — even Caitlin — who’d gone this far, and I was hugging this secret tight.

I folded quicker than my dad in Vegas. “It was… okay, I guess.”

“You guess?” Rachel pulled my hand up to inspect my nails. “Ugh, you need a manicure, by the way. Go to the place on Hollywood Way near Petco.”

I nodded and looked down at the tiny tears of skin around my cuticles. “Yeah. I thought I knew what to expect, you know? It… was weird.”

“Weird bad or just…” Rachel trailed off.

I didn’t want to look her in the eye. “It’s embarrassing.”

“Was he mean to you?” My sister’s voice had dropped, low and dangerous in a way I was unfamiliar with.

“No.”

Josh had been anything but mean to me that afternoon in his bedroom, when we were both playing hooky from jobs our dads had given us to earn a little summer money. After the incident the week before when he’d almost lost control of his passion, when he’d held my arms taut against the deep blue of his cotton sheets and called me a whore, Josh made a point of letting me direct his hands, his fingers, his mouth, where they could go, where they should go.

You see how much I love you, Melissa? I will change for you. I would never change for any other girl.

Rachel reached for the neglected emery board on my bedside table and started slowly filing at the ragged edges of my nibbled nails. “I promise you it’s his fault, not yours,” she murmured.

The steady flit-flit-flit of the board on my nails hung between us. Occasionally she’d turn back to a nail she’d worked on before, but I said nothing.

“I didn’t mean to piss you off, you know,” she said, holding my right hand up to admire her work. “When I said his stories meant he knew what he was doing.”

“I know.” Whatever this moment was passing between us, it was so fragile. It could break under the weight of one wrong word. I would hold it as long as I could before it flew away, its brilliant tail a memory before it had even left the room.

“Just because a guy says he knows what he’s doing, or even if he seems to know what he should be doing to make you feel good, even if he says it’s all about you, they’re all fucking morons.” Flit-flit-flit. “Gimme your other hand.”

While Rachel worked on my left hand, I thought on that afternoon, about what went wrong. No, not “wrong.” Josh had done everything right, as far as Our Bodies, Ourselves and Cosmo could tell me.

He’d asked me if I wanted him to touch me there (yes), if I wanted to take off my underwear or let him run his hand under the elastic trim (the latter), if that felt good the way he was touching me (yes, oh yes).

“You’re so soft,” he murmured in my ear, stroking the edges of my labia so gently. “So soft and wet and…. Jesus, Melissa. I want all of you.”

I knew he couldn’t go further, or wouldn’t. I was too young, not ready — he was giving me the summer to grow into all of my sixteen years, to shrug it on like a new coat. One of the few truly gracious things Josh ever did for me was keeping his fly zipped a few months longer. I also knew I always wanted more of him, or as much as I could ask for without getting called a whore again.

“You could always kiss it,” I whispered while he traced one finger along the lips, barely parting them. “If you think I’m ready. If it’s too much –“

Josh pulled his hand away so quickly the elastic on my underwear snapped on my upper thigh. The image of the fearsome vagina dentata Jenn and I had cackled over in a graphic novel felt suddenly possible. I don’t bite. Hard. (Do I?)

“I’m sorry,” I whispered, tugging down on the kelly green tank top that was to be my favorite that summer. “Sometimes I… I just want to know what things feel like.”

Specifically, I wanted to know exactly how the girl in the story he’d slipped in my locker felt when her lover slicked and dipped his tongue down and around and in the mythical down there that lay just beneath her silky French knickers. Mine were humble pink cotton briefs, but I hoped that wouldn’t make too much of a difference.

Josh had placed a word in those three blue pages covered in lines of the small, tight caps he favored, a word that was a succulent lure that flashed an urgent light for me, a word he knew I could not resist:

release

I’d told him something of the trap of my mind, of how Yeats’ turning and turning in the widening gyre had resounded like an echo of the storm within the first time I’d read it. Of how I wanted to just stop the incessant whirring and speed of thought inside and be only in my body, conscious only of the buzz and fuzz of being, and not of thinking.

“So what was wrong with it?” Rachel asked, holding up both my hands to check the nails, then starting on my right again. “I mean, if you didn’t come, you can just show him next time what he’s doing wrong.”

“It’s not that it’s just… it was kind of boring.”

That perked Rachel up. “Boring?” she quizzed, taking her eyes away from my terminal case of hangnails. “Getting oral sex shouldn’t be boring. But that can be fixed.”

“I don’t think ‘boring’ is the right word.” It really wasn’t, though I had been a little bored. “It felt nice but kind of… calming. Not sexy. Like…”

“Like what?” she asked sharply.

I cast around for an analogy and finding none, I said the first thing that came in my mind. “Like washing yourself down there with a very soft cloth.”

I knew immediately from Rachel’s blank stare that — for the eleventy bajillionth time in my life — I wasn’t normal.

“Or — or like how your hand feels when you’re petting a cat’s back,” I stammered. “Or when you’re peeling zucchini ribbons.”

My sister blinked. Twice.

Maybe I could save this with something less bizarre, though my mind was completely blank. “Or –“

Rachel held a hand up. “Stop. You’re just making this worse.”

This was quite possibly the most embarrassing conversation I’d ever had, even more so than my mom asking a twelve-year-old me if I could please rinse out period stains before putting my underwear in the hamper.

“Sorry,” I mumbled. “I said it was weird.”

“Nooooooo kidding.” Rachel cocked her head and reached forward to pick some fluff from my blouse. “If you don’t want to try again, don’t let him talk you into it.”

My sister’s words didn’t make a dent, though. In deference to Josh as he drew my sexuality from me that summer like a ribbon unfurling from its reel, if he asked, I let him, whenever he asked. I much preferred his fingers stroking over me, tentatively slipping in me, his pupils dilating with desire that he would not act on, or at least not in the way he said I wasn’t ready for anyway. With his head between my thighs, I drifted in thought: Should I try out for the school play next year? When are those library books due? Legally Blonde was so good — maybe I should go to law school. Is there really such a thing as a negative calorie food — I should ask Mom. Why am I thinking about my mom when my boyfriend is giving me oral sex?

What is wrong with me?

That last question I still don’t really know the answer to twenty years later.

***

In time, I learned Rachel had been right in her first estimation of Josh’s technique. Even at 17, he knew his way around a clitoris far better than the men who followed, all of whom were convinced they could break me of my reticence to receive, as well as give.

“Thanks, I’m cool,” I told Kenny Park, my almost-a-boyfriend sophomore year, when he offered to give me “amazing head.” (I should have known from that phrase alone that it was almost certain to be shitty, and it was.)

“Not really my thing, up to you,” I told Jon, whose last name I never remembered, not even back then.

Julian, for what it’s worth, did believe me when I told him I wasn’t against oral sex per se, but it was something I would only do to make him happy. “It’s a neutral thing for me,” I explained the first time he asked if I wanted him to return the favor I’d bestowed on him the evening before.

“Don’t say that if you’re just trying to please me,” he insisted, running his hand further up my leg. I was down to my bra and panties in his sitting room, and my attempts to move to the bedroom were being ignored. I see this now more clearly as the power move he surely intended — if Alex were to mope in a little early from class, there would be no mistaking whose girl I was, not with Julian between my thighs. “Some men like it, too.”

“I’ve heard,” I replied. I’d learned already Julian hated to remember any other man had ever slid inside me, best not to tell him I knew.

“I thought girls were supposed to adore it. Do you want to see if it’s just a… mismatch? Maybe I could try some time. If you want to, of course.”

In Julian’s defense, when I didn’t bring it up, he never asked again. I was grateful not to be pestered for “access,” as Kenny called it. One time I was unlucky enough to hear him bragging about my dislike of oral sex to Jamie, how refreshing it was to find a woman who thought as equally tedious as he did.

“Don’t get me wrong, James. She might not be keen on me going down on her, but she tells me she never has been, not with anyone,” Jules was saying as I started to round the corner into Jamie’s dining room. I’d tagged along with Jules on a business trip to London, and we were gathering for dinner that evening to cheer up Jamie, who’d been dumped two weeks before with less ceremony than the opening of a new Whole Foods.

Amanda was late, no surprise, and Sasha was on a run to the off license for another bottle of Chianti after she’d managed to mangle the cork on its way out of the bottle. I paused mid-step.

Julian was in full flow about our sex life, a topic which I’d always had the impression was strictly verboten to share with others. I’d certainly never talked about giving Julian a blow job to anyone in my friend group.

“She’s still up for the main event, so to speak. All the time. Got a bit worried when we married the bloom might rub off the rose.”

“You and Al seem to be the only ones of us able to make it last more than a few months,” Jamie said with a more bitter tone than I was used to from him. “How many years has it been now?”

“Married four. But she’s been mine for nine solid years now.”

I couldn’t miss the brag in Julian’s tone, and it wasn’t lost on Jamie either.

“Bollocks,” Jamie laughed. “I was in the pub with you when she tore you a new one and called your engagement off.”

“A simple misunderstanding between us,” Julian sniffed. “I gave her the space to realize we were better as a team.”

“Six months, wasn’t it? Ouch.”

“Not wasted.” Julian’s voice was firm.

“I should say not, from what Will mentioned.”

“Will should bloody well keep his promises,” Julian snapped.

Mentioned what? I thought. I’d have to get Miranda on the case to wheedle that secret out.

“Keep your shirt on, Jules,” Jamie replied, dropping his tone. “He hasn’t told anyone else. Well, except Charlie, of course.”

“Never told Sash, have you?”

“Not my story to tell.”

“Appreciate it. I don’t regret it, but it’s not exactly the sort of thing Mel needs to know. Or Alex for that matter.”

Note to self: definitely ask Miranda to stick pins in Will until he coughs up what he knows.

“Speaking of, what about that time you dumped her for a month and she started shagging Al?”

I had to choke back a giggle. I’d almost thought that was forgotten by everyone but Miranda, who made sure to point out to Julian every so often that I was her fellow member in the Alexander Carr Appreciation Club (Retired).

“What, Mel? I didn’t end it. She misinterpreted a… a disagreement as a break,” Julian balked.

“Al moved in pretty fast, if I recall.”

From where I remained hidden, I could easily imagine the sour scowl on Jules’ face, his soft lips dragging down at the corners.

“Errr, sorry if I overstepped a line there, Jules.”

At the end of the hallway, the jangle of a key fitting in the front door and the jostle of a doorknob preceded new arrivals.

Amanda’s plummy voice boomed down the sparsely furnished hall. “And then I had to hear all about how his father had tried to leave him the house but it was tied up in a trust. I don’t believe a word of it.”

“Sounds dreadful,” Sasha deadpanned as she shimmied out of a dark blue Barbour.

“You’ve no idea. I’m so done with men,” Amanda grumbled, hanging her own cream cashmere jacket on one of the pegs on the wall. “Is it difficult to become a lesbian when you’re almost 30, do you think?”

Sasha snorted. “You never know until you try. Oh dear God, Mel! You scared me.”

“Oh, her,” Amanda said dismissively with a toss of her long red mane. “Lurking in the hallway like some little troll.”

“Good to see you, too,” I snipped.

Jamie’s face poked around the doorway. “I thought the invite I sent round was for dinner, not a soiree in the hall. Has it changed?”

Before Sasha could quip back to her best friend, Julian sailed out from the dining room. If he had any suspicion I’d heard a word of the cryptic conversation he’d just shared with Jamie, I saw none writ on his handsome face. Even then, as the gentle cracks in our marriage had grown into worrisome fissures, I loved him so fiercely I could feel it whip through my body when I’d catch sight of him.

“Amanda!” Julian stepped forward to drop a peck on both of her (overblushed) cheeks, but she was having none of it.

“I’m cross with you,” she hissed, dodging his greeting.

Amanda was frequently cross with nearly everyone, so this came as little surprise to me. Nor did it to Sasha, who groaned and rolled her eyes before pushing past us all into the dining room, wine bottle tucked under her arm. Amanda trailed, her head held high in disdain.

“Wh-what have I done?” Julian stuttered, dragging me into the pale peach dining room. Only twenty minutes before, I’d helped Jamie set the massive mahogany table, carefully lining up each piece of Georgian silver and sliding gold-trimmed white damask napkins through vintage Bakelite rings as if we were welcoming Noel Coward and a couple of louche diplomats to dinner.

“You were supposed to ask me to lunch yesterday, you twit,” Amanda groused and flounced into the chair Jamie held out for her.

Never one to be outdone in terms of chivalry, Julian guided me into the chair next to where Sasha had already set shop. With care for the bottle this time, she tipped a small measure of wine into her glass and held it to the candlelight.

“Christ,” Julian muttered sotto voce.

“Hm, what’s that?” Sasha said brightly to my left before sipping from her glass. Her modelling days were, she claimed, firmly behind her (“too old now I’m 30”), but in the soft, muzzy orange candlelight she was incandescent in her beauty. Those grey, almond-shaped eyes gave little away.

Unlike Miranda or especially Will, she was Sphinx-like, screwed-down and inscrutable to everyone but Jamie. She didn’t scream and stomp when displeased, like Amanda or Alex. Nor did she burst in rapture like an overflowing jug when delighted, like Minty, or grandstand when she was the expert on a topic, like Julian or Charlie. (Yes, even saintly Charlie has his faults.) She was more English than the English-born she mixed with, which is often enough the way of the immigrant. I had always wanted her to love me, to see our commonalities as women in but not of this country, but on this late November evening, I’d not yet grabbed that brass ring.

“I heard that, Julian,” Amanda ground out. The candlelight that had thrown Sasha’s ethereal beauty into even starker relief was doing little for Amanda, freshly back and sunburnt from two weeks faffing about in silk chiffon kaftans on the deck of a yacht anchored off Eleuthera. She looked pinker than an Easter Peep.

It was in the middle of an otherwise pleasant dinner of roast chicken and parsnips that Jamie saw fit to stir the pot. I didn’t know Jamie even knew where to locate that sort of cooking spoon in the first place.

“Amanda,” he said, helping himself to another three slices of breast from the platter, “I had lunch with your brother last week.”

“Davey?” Amanda sneered. “Why ever would you do something as silly as that?”

Two years before, Davey had orchestrated his father’s marriage to Amanda’s childhood nemesis, the Other Woman. Since then the two surviving Harrington children had barely exchanged a word, not that they were terribly close to begin with. Ten years older than Amanda, and ten times less sour than his sister, Davey had decided that the horrible Other Woman who had had her talons in Robert Harrington since before Amanda was born had shown herself to be sufficiently deserving of at least some family cash. I tended to agree — Amanda got her personality honest from her father, and anyone willing to stick around for that kind of emotional abuse for over 30 years deserved a little something.

“He’s thinking about buying an office block in Belgravia my father wants to get rid of.” Jamie swirled a parsnip in the small lake of gravy on his Meissen plate.

Amanda continued to poke inquisitively at the single slice of chicken before her. It was a rare occasion when I saw anything that wasn’t a liquid pass between her beestung lips, and this evening was no exception. “And where does he think he’s going to get the cash to do that?”

“Your father,” Jamie said smoothly. “Sash, can you pass the parsnips?”

“My FATHER?” Amanda growled. “Impossible. Tell your father not to take a single penny from Davey. It’s likely stolen, or he’s got it on loan from some shark.”

“Not likely,” Jamie continued, and carefully spooned several slender parsnips from the serving tray. (More beautiful Georgian silver. Ruth Fairleigh may be a horrible snob, but she has excellent taste in tableware.) “It was your father who suggested it in the first place.”

“Jamie, darling, you are an absolute dear but you can be a bit naive at times,” Amanda insisted. “Unless you heard it from my father’s mouth –“

“He did,” Julian broke in. “Jamie had me round to look at the place yesterday with Davey and Robert. If I didn’t know better, I would swear Jamie’s trying to get me in a bidding war with the Harrington clan. But that is a battle I wouldn’t pick.”

Julian and Jamie’s shared chuckle served only to make Amanda flush even more puce. “So that’s why you didn’t ask me to lunch! What did you know about this?” she barked at me with a flourish of her unused knife.

“Me?” I looked over my shoulder, as if I expected some deus ex machina to have descended from the 12-foot chamfered ceiling in a chariot, flanked by cherubim.

The knife veered wildly towards Sasha. “Or you, Sash. You’re quiet.”

“For fuck’s sake, Man,” Sasha sighed. “I’m sorry your stepmother’s a bitch, but I’m not really interested in your domestic dramas. No more than I think you want to know how little I like my own father.”

“Well, your brother isn’t trying to chip away at your inheritance in whatever way he can. Your brother at least likes you.” If I didn’t know better, I might have thought the tears wobbling in the corners of Amanda’s blue eyes were real.

“Man.” Jamie’s voice was naturally low — so much space in that giant body to kick around in — and toffee-smooth, but even more so in this moment. “It’s a very good investment. No one’s trying to steal anything from anyone, least of all you. I’d never let that happen. Never.”

“Really?” Amanda squeaked, and fluttered her lashes at Jamie. Even I had to admit, sunburn notwithstanding, Amanda Harrington really knows how to carry off a pretty-cry. While the tiny lip-bite at the end was perhaps a bit excessive, the effect was outstanding.

“Nor I,” Julian added, never to be outdone in the Big Strong Protector Man stakes.

Amanda dismissed Jules with an airy triple-flick of her wrist. “That ship sailed long ago, Jules. I should think you have enough to do with your wife to think about me.”

From the corner of my eye, I watched Julian furrow his brow and saw viciously at his dinner. I had to stifle the guffaw that threatened to blurp out of me. My mental to-do list grew by one more item:

Note to self — as of 1 November 2014, remember your husband’s ex-girlfriend is no longer a threat, even if she remains an asshole.

“Don’t look so pleased,” Julian scolded softly, quite ruining the moment. “That wasn’t meant as a compliment.”

Even so, it was a delicious morsel to savor, much nicer than the rather bland custard tart we had for pudding.

In the many years Julian and I had coupled and uncoupled and recoupled ourselves, Amanda had rarely missed a chance to remind my husband that when he was ready to recast his Mrs. Cranford — which surely he would have to do given my complete unsuitability for that role — she was an understudy prepared to walk onstage. Her slide into matrimony with him would be frictionless. She wanted little more in her life than what Julian was willing to give me: a life without difficult choices, with the understanding that his wife would not be difficult herself.

Post-disappointment pudding, Jamie suggested we bring our drinks up to his small roof deck and take advantage of the unseasonably mild November evening.

“I’ve one of those gas heaters up there now, you know,” he announced proudly as I helped him carry the dishes to the kitchen. “And rather a lot of wool jumpers.”

Sasha blew a raspberry behind me. “Don’t take one. They all smell of that awful girl. What was her name? Xanadu?”

“Xandra,” Jamie sighed. “And she wasn’t awful. I was awful.”

A complete untruth, if Miranda’s reporting was to be believed. 24 years old, whip-thin and long-legged, freshly down from Ross-on-Wye and crackling with the electric juice of being young and out in the world at last (at last!), Xandra had not been awful. Nor had Jamie, who’d thought he’d found his match at last in the new face at the Harbour Club who’d handed him water and a towel after a not particularly gruelling half hour on the treadmill.

“I’d like to say these things just happen,” Miranda had told me over a bottle of merlot at the recently reopened ICA Bar. Uncle Geoffrey had set her up with a membership years before, only for the bar (“really the most dependably good part of the place”) to close in 2008. “But Sasha eventually dispatched the poor thing. I’m not convinced Xandra was the one for Jamie, but she did seem to make him happy. Whatever that means for Jamie these days.”

The tanniny merlot made my teeth squeak. “This isn’t the first time, is it?”

“Hardly. Sash is convinced she knows what’s best for Jamie. I think that means that Jamie needs to be precisely as miserable as she is at any given time.” Miranda whipped out her compact and checked her pink lip gloss. “Xandra happened to come along at a time Sash was particularly miserable.”

“Poor Jamie,” I sighed, taking the compact from Miranda’s hand. My teeth were already lavender from the wine.

“The meddling works both ways, you know. Not a boundary between them. Quite surprising, if you didn’t know the personalities involved. Even Min’s better at keeping me out when I try to push my way in. Ever since she married Al, she won’t share anything fun.”

Having been on the pushed end of Miranda’s boundary-testing a few times, I had only respect for Minty in drawing a line and enforcing it.

But Jamie and Sasha were forever bleeding into each other, like a wash of watercolors that seamlessly merge on the page. Their murkiness made them hard to peer into, even for those who had loved them far longer than I had. What lines were drawn were between themselves as one and the world. And while Jamie freely admitted he’d drift without Sasha’s ballast, she would not own up to scrambling when Jamie wasn’t there to help guide her own ship of self through the waters.

Up on the rooftop of Jamie’s building that evening, I saw no ripple in the calm, singular sea of their friendship. Sasha and Jamie finished each other’s sentences, as they always did, burst into song simultaneously, as they often did. Xandra was not mentioned again, even if her fondness for Gucci Guilty lingered in the black pullover I borrowed to keep out the chill.

Amanda’s outburst at the table was forgotten, at least by me, as the cold crept in beneath the wool and Jamie switched on the heaters. Miniature Edison bulbs were strung along the lengths of trellis that marked his roof from those of the terraced houses on either side; they glowed a dark yellowy-pink against the plush evening sky. Sasha and Amanda traded stories about their respective Hallowe’ens; Jamie and Julian picked up with talk about that Belgravia office block once more. Dinner at Jamie’s usually felt low-stakes like this. No one was likely to raise an old grievance or gossip savagely. Even Miranda and Will were lulled by the tranquil bonhomie chez Fairleigh when invited.

Julian was in a mood though. A casual listener might have missed the signs; Jamie certainly did. In nine years I had learned how to read Julian without even seeing him tense his shoulders, without hearing any tightness in his voice, without his hand about my wrist or his face glowering in mine. There was a shift, paperlight, in how he moved that I could hear rather than see. Like a dog coiled in anticipation for its person to throw a stick, he emanated an elastic energy ready to spring into movement.

“Anyone like a coffee?” Jamie asked to a chorus of murmured yeses. I offered to lend a hand, mostly so I could warm up in the kitchen. While everyone else praised the weather as deliciously mild, my Southern California bones begged to differ. Given her earlier dig at Julian over the main course, leaving Amanda on the rooftop to needle my husband felt like an appropriate punishment for the scolding I’d received from him the day before. How was I to know that reheating a cup of tea in the microwave would cause Jocasta Cranford to collapse like a peeked-upon souffle? What was worse, I’d done the reheating myself, without even thinking to ask Trudy the housekeeper to handle it.

Jamie set me to work measuring coffee grounds into the great silver pot that matched the rest of his service while he reached into the far heights of his cabinets for the cups that matched the Meissen plates that were soaking in the sink.

“Hullo, you two.”

Sasha’s voice startled me and I gave thanks that I wasn’t pouring hot water into the pot just yet. Jamie ruffled the crown of her honey blonde hair as she passed him, en route to joining me by the kettle.

“You’re jumpy, Mel,” she said, snaking one of her slender arms around my shoulders. “And that is not how you make coffee in that sort of pot.”

“Of course,” I muttered.

“It doesn’t really matter what you make it in, you know. Jim’s such a show off with his lovely stuff, but we’ll all drink just as nicely from a French press.” Sasha briskly flicked open the top hinge of the pot and dumped the contents into an oversized press, topping it up with another scoop of grounds.

“S’pose you’re right, Sash,” Jamie said with a wry smile. He jabbed a finger at the ceiling. “Are those two all right up there on their own?”

“Is Man going to push Jules over the crenellation? Doubt it,” Sasha called out from the small larder to the left of the fridge. “D’you still have some of those Toffolossus biccies from Fortnums?”

To her dismay, there were no more Toffolossus biscuits, but there was a large tin of cherry Florentines, which I spread in a fan on a plate to take upstairs. Sasha assured me she had the coffee situation under control with Jamie, and I carefully edged my way up the winding stairs in the passage from Jamie’s study to the rooftop. Knowing my luck over the past few days in coffee, tea and related faux pas, I was likely to topple over in a flurry of Florentines if I didn’t watch my step.

Jules’ voice drifted down through the attic door — Sasha must have left it propped open to make bustling in with a tray of coffee easier. I paused five steps below the threshold where the cool night air rushed through.

“I don’t know how I can make it clearer to you,” he bit out. “I don’t care who you are or how long I’ve known you.”

This Julian I knew well. The Julian who slammed the door to the study, as if to shrink the house or the world to the drama within. The Julian who was a master of dynamics in sound — start out low and slow, building up to a crescendo of searing, seething accusations. The Julian who did not, would not strike a blow, a physical one at least. After four years married to my English prince, my forever love, I was already beginning to bend under the mental strain of failing to be the woman he said he needed.

“Do you hear me, Amanda? Never, ever speak to me like that again.”

Fuck — the expletive floated softly from my lips like a balloon escaping from a child’s grasp. I didn’t worry about being overheard, not with Amanda sobbing like that.

“Yes, Jules,” she snuffled between breathy sobs. “But sometimes I can’t… I want to like her, I do. But she’s just not like us.”

“You know nothing about her!” Julian spat out.

This has to be about me, I reassured myself. It was a secret pleasure, being defended like this, even if it was at Amanda’s expense. Doubly, sickly pleasurable to know I was not the only one to be whipped raw by his words.

“I know, you’re right.” Amanda was barely audible over the roar of a sports car tearing down the street below. “But after August, I assumed…”

“You know what I said. And I suggest you keep this to yourself.”

The air brakes of a London bus sputtered and squealed from down the road. If I’d wanted, I could walk to Al’s old flat in Limerston Street in fifteen minutes. But it had been more than two years since he’d moved to Cadogan Square, more than a year since baby Lucy slid headfirst into the world.

“It isn’t fair.” Amanda’s sobbing had quieted but her voice warbled down the stairs. “It isn’t fair!”

“Sometimes life isn’t fair, poppet.”

Into the silence that followed, I poured an image of my husband nuzzling Amanda’s brow, as he often did to me when I felt the iniquities of the world raining down. He would push back that thick red hair of hers and touch his lips to her widow’s peak, then fill her ears with promises that he would fix it all, whatever he could, however he could. I did not want to know know what Amanda needed fixing, or how Jules might supply a remedy.

***

Every therapist I’ve seen as an adult has asked me the same question in the first thirty minutes of our opening session: “Melissa, do you know the term ‘codependency’?”

They said it like it was a bad thing, like losing oneself in one’s beloved was a sin, rather than a piquant temptation. I liked being fuzzy around the edges sometimes, liked the sizzle of spreading into another’s being, where I wasn’t quite sure where the Mel-ness of me faded into the You-ness of you. As long as I kept one foot on the shore of myself, I could wade into the shallow banks of another’s happiness, or grief, or anger.

I always thought I was too clever to lose my footing, until I was drowning, yet again. I could see Mel on the distant shore when my head bobbed above the swallowing waters of my beloved’s pain. All I had to do was reach for her hand and be drawn out, wet with the self of another, panting onto the shore. But sometimes she kept her hands behind her back; sometimes she didn’t see me thrashing about in the shallows. Days and months would pass, years with Julian, and I would ebb away until Mel could land me back on the banks, with a stern warning about straying too far.

As with so many things in my life, the first time I lost sight of myself I’d been lured away by Joshua K. Brookes. I suppose I was primed, to some extent, by my family. Rachel had always been cavalier in treating those spaces that should have been mine alone as ones she could trod in. And when my father told me he and I were “cut from the same cloth,” I looked for every sign of his body woven into mine, even when I learned what metaphors were.

Josh saw a girl who found being frazzled at her contours and planes allowed more of the world in, so she could sip in more and more through painless osmosis. It was fairly easy for him to slip inside of me and take up as much space as he needed. After all, I’d never needed to shut the gate firmly.

Years before, Daddy taught me the word “empathy,” and said it was a good thing, said it was a sign we shared the same great and glorious heart that pumped and pulsed with love for humanity, and especially those humans we loved so much. With a big brain and a big heart, we were different, him and me, than the rest of those poor souls who wouldn’t ever have so much to ponder and stretch and tug at.

But Josh was a parasite, a vine curling around my heart and brain, driving in his tendrils in until there was very little of Melissa left inside this body. Like many a weed, he’d been difficult to dig out. I kept finding outbreaks of him in me, in the way I told myself I was stupidstupidstupid, or that being a girl meant I needed the security of a man, preferably a man who could help me tame the ever-spinning mess inside.

I have tried to keep him away, you know. It’s been over five months since I’d heard his luscious voice over the phone, begging me to bleed into him again so he could finish his overdue novel. I’d not returned any of the voicemails he left, nor the text messages to my second line. Yet I consumed each one as if it were a peach I knew was likely to pour its juices over my hand once I bit in, but was just too lush to resist. I’d rarely had him as a supplicant after it all went wrong in Palo Alto, and time had only sweetened the taste.

It was Cait who ripped open my seams again to him, quite by accident. Call me, the calm white letters of the text message suggested. You will NEVER guess what happened at the Target on Balboa!

Knee deep in writing up her Ph.D., sick of paying Bay Area rents (even during the pandemic, each payment required opening several veins until one spurted enough money), and newly flush with an inheritance from her great aunt Mimi Jorgensen, Caitlin had bought a fixer-upper in a decidedly unfashionable part of Northridge with the intent of planting roots in the Valley again. (I say decidedly unfashionable, as if there were a fashionable part of Northridge.) Every time we spoke, it seemed, she was Zooming me from Lowes, asking for my opinion on paint swatches or click-in-place laminate flooring.

Which Target on Balboa? This is actually a relevant question, as nearly anyone in the SFV can tell you.

Callllll meeeeeeeee

Glancing down the hall, I noted Alex’s study door was firmly closed. Ever since Fenn had told him two days prior that she knew about Julian spawning with Kayla, he’d been luxuriating in a deep funk and wrapping himself in his little grey cloud. He’d expected, not without complete reason, that this news would be the shroud in which he could wrap the transatlantic Cranford-Carr relationship.

Instead, Fenn had whooped with delight at being freed from the expectation to bear him a child. “It’s bloody fantastic, is what it is!” she’d told us both on what was for her a very late night Zoom. “Now if all I have to do is swan about over there in beautiful frocks at the occasional party, and I never have to raise this child, that changes everything. I may very well take Jules up on that marriage proposal.”

The last was said purely for effect, she said, just to see Al turn green and then crimson. “Oh, keep the heid, Allie. I’m not convinced.”

“Oh thank goodness,” I breathed, clapping a hand to my chest. Alex’s labored breathing slowed.

Fenn wrinkled her nose and a sneaky smile spread on her lips. “Yet. He can be rather convincing, though.”

Sneaking past the office towards the living room, I heard the low, jagged rumble of Alex’s snores. Excellent. Everything seemed to be setting him off since that call, from the garbage trucks rumbling into the basement garage at 5 am to Matt inviting us to join him and Rachel for KBBQ on Friday night.

“I don’t think I want to be pleasant for a while,” was the only excuse he had.

Stopping only to reheat my cup of Sumatra, I settled in to the big leather sofa to call Caitlin. (Ever since I accepted that the thing was a fake, I’ve been far more fond of the damn thing.)

“Hey you!” she trilled. I could hear the unmistakable beep of the backup camera on her new Civic. Part of the bounty from Great Aunt Mimi’s generosity had been spent on Cait’s very first car assembled in the 21st century. “Oh, fuck you, too!”

“Me?” Microwaving the coffee had done nothing for the flavor of the coffee, but I continued to suck it down.

“No, no. This ASSWIPE who walked behind my car while I was backing out of this… yeah! I said fuck you!”

Yes, Cait was settling back into the Valley just fine.

“Cait,” I said with what I hoped was a clear tone of “more responsible friend” in my voice, “you can’t just tell people ‘fuck you.’ You never know who has a weapon.” This is what my dad had driven into me from the time I was old enough to start driver’s ed: if you’re going to curse, keep your windows closed and never, ever make a rude gesture.

“Even ten-year-olds?” she asked. “I don’t put this brat any older than fifth grade. Yeah, well, you’re a bitch, too!”

Jesus.

“Ugh, out of there. It’s the one in Granada Hills, by the way.”

“What are you doing in Granada Hills?”

“Jeremy. Remember he lives in Porter Ranch now? I’m running an errand for Mr. ‘I Have a Real Job.’ Stuff for that party he’s throwing this Saturday. Which you and Al are totally invited to, of course.”

“Ummm.” I tried to think of a way to explain that Alex was too far up his own fundament at the moment to accept, but could only come up with, “Al’s a little under the weather.”

Only the tick-tick-tick of her turn signal indicator broke the silence that followed. “You mean he’s being a man about something.”

“Sort of,” I grumbled. I didn’t want to tell Cait that number three on her personal shit list, Julian Cranford, was on the way to procreating. Jenn had wanted to do the honors, in person, but that would probably have to wait for Jeremy’s party.

“Okay, well, I’ll shoot you an invite if Alex gets over himself but good luck on that one unless he’s thinking about transitioning. Anyway, that is not why I’m calling. Guess what happened at Target?”

“The Pizza Hut was reopened?”

“Better.“

“You finally found a dupe for the Charlotte Tilbury Pillow Talk lip liner.”

“Nuh-uh. I ran into Josh Brookes.”

The name thudded hard across the phone line, like a Sunday newspaper hitting the front door mat. My lungs squeezed and I choked out a rough cough. “What?”

“He recognized me, which I never would have guessed. He said I looked exactly the same, which is bullshit, but he always was a great flatterer.”

Josh’s flattery had always been deployed with surgical precision, ladled on in portions commensurate with the receiving party. He paid close attention to what worked and what didn’t. With my dad, it was how he could keep me safe from the nastiness and cruelties of the world. Mom got reports on what a great writer I was, maybe even better than him, and about how I’d taught him to be a better feminist. (Yuck.) Shooting the shit with Mack about the Dodgers and whether the Kings would ever do anything but suck. He appealed to hopeless romantic Jen by talking up how I’d shown him that love can redeem even teenage curmudgeons like him; shot hoops with Cait occasionally (her mom’s house was only a block and a half away from the Brookes family home); and slipped lightly-thumbed copies of this month’s Vogue to Jenn from his mother’s bedside table. He never could crack Rach and Sean, but not for want of trying.

“Jesus, Mel.” Caitlin barged into my light fugue state. “You should see him. Rrrrrrowrrrrr! He is hot. H-O-T.”

“That’s nice,” I replied, unconsciously sucking in my lips like I’d just licked a wedge of lemon.

“But his wife was there, so I didn’t tell him.”

“What restraint.”

I let Cait rattle on — at some later date I’ll tell her she’s becoming precisely like her mother, Barrie, who rarely interrupts her own Joycean stream of consciousness monologues for something as silly as letting another speak.

“… and he has two daughters. Eight and six. He showed me a ton of pictures, really pretty girls. The older one looks a little like you which is crazy. He was asking me about my kids and I was like, ‘Really. You think they would allow me to have kids?’ I mean, I wasn’t going to mention Anneliese because you don’t exactly speak to someone for the first time in almost 20 years and say, oh hey, yeah, I had a baby but she was stillborn. So I showed him pictures of Vlad the Impaler and Cybill Shepherd, who by the way really love the new house.”

Vlad and Cybill are Catilin’s Siamese and English springer spaniel, respectively. Both are prone to dribbling and fond of chicken livers, almost as much as Jen and Mack’s son Ethan, if Jenn is to be believed. (What kind of baby insists on Jacque Pépin’s chicken liver pâté recipe? That one.)

“I don’t know if I’d have even recognized him without masks off inside now. So yeah, he asked if I’d seen you recently, how you were doing, yadda yadda. I guess someone told him you married Alex, and he was asking me what I thought of Al.”

“W-what did you say?” I could hear the wobble in my voice, but since Cait was in full flow, I hoped she’d missed it.

Not that I had much reason to think her take on Alex would be particularly hot. Of all my American friends, Alex had immediately taken to plain-talking, take-no-prisoners Caitlin Moynihan. He’d met her at my wedding to Julian, where she’d drunk Will under the table at the reception.

“Never seen a woman pack away that much Jameson in my life! Is — is she single?” I’d overheard him ask Julian with a distinct note of awe.

He did try it on with her that night, but she gave him the brush-off. “Too skinny,” she shouted to me over the wedding band belting out Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance.” (Should have recognized this for the omen it clearly was.) “I’d probably flatten him in bed and then what good would he be?”

Notwithstanding their physical incompatibility, they struck up a casual friendship that grew over Facebook and deepened when Alex moved to SF. As a familiar face in a new city, a new country, and with me still deciding “what next?” down in Burbank, Caitlin tethered Alex and kept him from drifting away in his little grey cloud.

“Told him you met a grouchy old Scotsman who keeps you locked up tight in a dungeon in Santa Monica so your old boyfriends can’t steal you away, of course,” Caitlin chuckled.

“You did not!”

“I did too! You should have seen the look on his face, totally confused. Like I’d pulled up my shirt and flashed him right there in the small appliances aisle.”

I could easily imagine the look of bafflement roll across Josh’s face in front of a backdrop of SodaStreams, K-cups and Braun hand mixers.

“Don’t get worked up, I told him Al’s the best and we’re all happy for you.” Cait paused again to cuss out someone for stepping off the curb with only five seconds left on the walk signal. “Listen, he mentioned that he’s been trying to get in touch with you. Do you know about this?”

“I…” Alex’s study door remained firmly shut. “Yes.”

Caitlin sighed. “Guess I got that wrong.”

“It’s complicated,” I said. Understatement of my life.

“I figured you were done being angry with him. For cheating on you.”

Sometimes I forget that was the justification I came up with for dumping Josh. Well, it was Rachel’s idea, much like it was Rachel’s idea to seal Josh into my past, to wall him up and never once remove a brick to see how the prisoner was faring.

“I promise, this’ll work,” my sister assured me the afternoon I drew the boundary at last between Josh and me. “He’s there at Yale with all those women, living in the same buildings with them. Staying up late at night with them, reading Shakespeare and whatever. Maybe someone needs a massage, a glass of red wine, a bong hit, whatever.”

“He would never!” I suspected Josh could, everything but the bong hit. I’d had wine more than a few times at the Brookes dinner table — just a small glass with dinner, part of Prof. Brookes’ plan to educate our palates, make us a little more worldly. I liked these evenings, where the tingle of alcohol sped and tripped through my blood vessels and my cheeks flushed blossom pink. Josh was less prone to inflict his rage at the world upon my body and psyche those nights Prof. Brookes opened a bottle of cabernet sauvignon and asked us to describe the bouquet.

“Trust me,” Rachel insisted. “It’s way more believable that your perfect boyfriend went to college and hooked up with someone a little more grown up than the truth.”

My sister was right, again. Everyone bought it; everyone took my side. “Too painful for Mel, Dad,” Rachel would say if my father suggested maybe trying to reconcile over Thanksgiving, or Christmas. Or Spring Break. Eventually we did not speak of Josh again at home. It was like a Stalin-era eradication of a troublesome pest in a photograph; where Josh once sat, there was nothing to speak of. His voice and his body struck few echoes.

The one remaining sticky note was his infidelity. Even Caitlin hadn’t forgotten, it seemed. “And if you can believe it, I didn’t ask him why he cheated on you and why I shouldn’t punch him in the dick.”

“Impressive,” I mumbled.

“So… I should tell you that I kind of invited him and his wife to Jeremy’s party.”

“Yes, Cait,” I snapped. “You should tell me exactly that sort of thing.”

“Whoa! Whoa! Hey, hey. I… I just thought it was so long ago it wasn’t going to be a thing.”

“You thought wrong, but…” I knew there was no malice in it, and stopped up the words that tried to barge their way out of my mouth. “But I’ll pass this time.”

“His wife is going to come,” she whined. “And she said she could get me into her book club when it starts back up in July, and I really need friends close by. You and Jenn are in Santa Monica, and now Jen and Mack are moving to Culver City, and it’s just going to be me here, rotting in the Valley.”

“Caitlin.” A brief glance down the hallway to the study — still closed up tight. “I don’t get to tell you who to invite. But please, please, no guilt trip on this. You and I can do something else, just us. Brunch on Sunday?”

The soft rattle of her car’s interior had stopped. I could picture my fine, brave friend clutching the steering wheel, her Civic parked in front of the beat up tan vinyl garage door, not ready to walk inside her tumbledown mid-century ranch. In the small space, it was just us, my voice and hers.

“I crossed a line, didn’t I?”

“Look, I don’t really want to get into it now. I’m sure his wife is a nice person, and book club and more friends sound just like what you need.”

“Mel. Don’t –“

“Brunch then? I’ll come to you. It’s no hassle. It’ll be nicer with just you and me anyway.”

Cait eventually accepted defeat in the form of bottomless mimosas in NoHo. “I can still tell you all about it after, right?” she asked. “I mean, you’ll want to know how it went, right? What he says about you?”

Oh yes, that I do want to know. Josh Brookes will try to breach my boundaries again, that is clear to me. But I’m no longer his little Scheherazade, no longer his Good Girl. I’m Melissa entirely now and I know how to lock the gate.

***

So this is my last biggish post for a while. September, I think. My fiction writing course has started this week and will run all summer long. It does not look like a doddle, and I intend to put as much into it as I can because I intend to get as much out of it as I can. If I’m going to start writing the story of Duncan and Kitty Carr later this year, I must really give it a decent amount of my concentration. (I have a working title for the thing already, by the way, which Alex has said is surprisingly Goth for a Regency romance novel, but I can’t help myself sometimes.)

But I will be posting some of my work at the end of each week to give a taste of what I’m doing, and to keep myself accountable here. After (checks notes) two years, one month and two days of scribbling, I’ve sketched out over 400,000 words; at least some of them are (I think) tolerably amusing or affecting or trueish to life. I intend to keep going.

Who knows what the summer will bring? Jeremy’s party is only two days away, and I can’t deny my curiosity. Minty and Lucy are decamping from Dorset at last, moving in with Tom Gregory next month to some swish flat in Hampstead. (“Fantastic schools,” Minty assures me. They better be, for the tuition money Al is going to be paying.) Sasha’s already packed up and returned to her flat in Marylebone, where any number of strays and waifs and Alexes found themselves quarantining over the winter and spring.

Fenn is itching to get on a plane here to join what sounds something like a sister-wife scenario chez Jules et Kayla — that pair are on some bananas diet and exercise regime to increase their fertility and get knocked up by September. (Julian wants a baby no later than June — “the weather is still tolerable here” is his rationale.) Purely to irritate her children (I presume), Cora says she’ll be coming as well; purely to irritate me, she’s claimed Alex’s study as her sleeping quarters.

Oh! And I must not forget the story about Will and his divine Miss K, who has surprised us all by making our thirtysomething Peter Pan grow up a little. (Just a little.) Or how Jamie nearly lost Bex, through no fault of his own, but ended up… I must stop. It’s a decent story, really, and worth telling rather than sketching.

But I will still be me, and Alex still his loving, stomping, perfectly imperfect self. I will be scribbling in the corner still, as I hope I shall always be.

Love,

Mel.