Twelve: Bells!

Andy came across the floor with a glass he had not asked for and a hand that had stopped being entirely his own somewhere around the eightieth guest. A hundred and ten people had come through those doors. Every one of them had wanted the hand, a good third of them had wanted it twice, and the end of the line had only let go of him four minutes ago. He flexed it against his leg on the way over, low, where nobody would see him doing it.

The corner was the same corner. At his birthday the gifts had gone up in it in a crooked wall, box on box, until Sam made everybody stop; today it held three chairs and a low table dragged over from under the windows, and nothing else at all. Laura Black had the seat that let her wings hang free off the back of it. Mark had built himself into the one beside her, knees up, elbows tucked in at his sides. The third chair stood empty at an angle to the other two. It had plainly been standing that way for a while.

Laura saw him coming and lifted her chin at him. “There he is. We had money on whether you’d get across before the food.”

“I had you at never.” Mark tipped his head back to look up at him, which he had to do even sitting down. “How many handshakes have you got left in you?”

“Two.” Andy dropped into the open chair and set his drink on the table. “Ask me again after we eat.”

Laura already had a bottle up out of somewhere beside her chair. It was slim and dark and carried no label anywhere on it, and the cork sat loose in the neck, as if somebody had already tested it once.

“This is a special Irish whiskey,” she said. “It is not for the room. Frankly, it’d kill most of the room. It’s dosed for people like us, which in this building is the three of us and maybe four other guests, and if you hand it to anybody else today I’ll deny I brought it in.” She poured three fingers into three glasses without hurrying and without spilling any of it. “It was made for people who have had worse than a hangover happen to them and lived to complain about it after.”

“You said something like that at my birthday,” Andy said. “About Shar’s mead.”

“I did.” She did not look up from the pour. When she was done she lifted her glass an inch off the table and held it angled at him, and let it stay there.

Andy looked at three full glasses and did the arithmetic that apparently nobody else in the corner was doing.

“Nobody’s eaten,” he said. “They haven’t even called us to the tables. We’re an hour into a reception with a hundred and ten people in it, and you’ve opened the industrial one.”

“That depends what we’re measuring.” Mark turned his glass a quarter turn on the table, thought about it, and then did not look at Andy at all. He looked at Laura. “If you’re still telling people you’re a statistical anomaly, the hour has nothing to do with anything. Prove it. Both of you. Against me. Glass for glass.”

Something crossed Laura’s face that Andy had last seen on a volcanic spur.

“Him,” she said, delighted, to Andy. “You heard him.”

“I heard him.” Andy set his own glass down out of the way.

“You’re pouring. And keeping score.” She was already forward in the chair, wings shifting to let her come. “Because he cheats.”

“I talked you up a wall once with no powers,” Mark said. “You said yes inside four seconds.”

Laura’s wing shifted once behind her. “You threw me off it.”

“You have wings,” Mark pointed out.

Andy took the bottle out of her hand—somebody was going to have to—and sat back with it. The two of them had stopped needing him for this about nine seconds ago.

Mark did not drink. He held his glass and turned it again, and what came off him by degrees was not nerves but preparation.

“Before we do this,” Mark said. “At the breakfast. The ambush, or whatever we’re calling it now. I asked you something and you gave me half of an answer, and I said the rest could wait for whiskey instead of eggs.”

“You did.” Andy turned his glass a quarter turn.

“So. Whiskey.” Every bit of the humor had gone out of him. “Has anybody actually pressed you on it? What happens to the ones you don’t marry.”

Laura stopped moving. She didn’t put her glass down, but she stopped.

“They’re deciding for themselves,” Andy said. “Same answer I gave you over the eggs. It isn’t mine to decide, and the ones who want something other than this get to say so, and I’ll hold to whatever they say.”

Mark looked at him for long enough to be sure of something. Then he nodded, once, and that was apparently that.

“First round.” Laura had her glass up before anybody could get heavier. “On three. And if either of you sips it I’m going home.”

They drank. Andy felt it go down warm and stop there. Mark set his glass down and frowned at it.

“Nothing.” He turned it upside down on the table, as if the evidence might be in there. “That’s nothing. That’s a glass of nothing.”

“Your tolerance is going to go.” Laura Black waved that away with two fingers. “It happens. You get married, you stop practicing.”

Mark put his glass down with some care. “I have practiced.”

“Clearly.” She reached over, took the bottle back off Andy without asking, and poured again, deeper this time. “This one won’t be as polite.”

They drank again. Mark blinked twice, slowly, and a faint color came up along his cheekbones.

“That’s the room,” Mark said. “That’s not the whiskey. It’s been getting warmer in here since the doors shut and I appear to be the only person willing to say so.”

Andy poured the third round himself, because the bottle had come back to his side of the table and because Laura had begun to gesture with her hands while she talked. Mark got that one down and sat back and let out a long breath through his nose, and the warmth finally got hold of him somewhere behind the face, and he pointed at Laura Black with the hand still holding the glass.

“You’re about to lose.” Mark got it out half a beat slower than he had meant to.

“I have never caved first in my life. Not once, and I'm not going to start with you.” She had the bottle again before he could answer and was pouring a fourth. “Ask my sisters.”

That one landed on both of them at the same time.

Laura started laughing before her glass was back on the table, a loose, delighted, far-too-loud laugh that tipped her sideways into Mark’s shoulder and stayed there, as if she had been waiting all afternoon for somewhere to put her weight. Mark’s whole face came apart in slow motion, every careful, measured thing about him sliding gently off—the kind of collapse that only happens to people who hold themselves very straight the rest of the time—and he turned to Andy with the enormous sincerity of a man who has just discovered something urgent.

“I need to tell you,” Mark said, “what it has meant. Knowing you. Because I don’t say it, and you should hear it, and I’m going to say it now while I can.”

He said it. He took some time about it. Andy set his own glass down after the fourth round exactly as steadily as he had set it down after the first. Neither of them noticed, because they were busy blaming each other.

Laura squinted at him. Then at her own glass. Then back. “You’re not drinking it properly,” Laura accused.

“This isn’t fair,” Mark agreed, blinking hard, like a man trying to physically focus his eyes by force. “Not even a little bit fair.”

Andy was enjoying this more than a married man of one hour probably should. He decided they had not actually finished anything yet. “Nobody’s won anything,” he said, and put his hand out over the table, palm up, and thought about a green bottle.

It arrived in his hand. Squat, heavy, glass the color of a wine bottle left in a river, the stopper already loose in it and the level down by half from a party this same room had held for him months ago. Sam had made it herself with her own transformation, and handed it to him with a book about harem management as a joke, and they had opened it that night, and what was left of it had been sitting in his Inventory ever since, waiting like a small green mistake.

Laura’s eyes went enormous.

“Is that the gin.” It was not a question. Laura had her hand out for it already.

“It's the gin.” Andy thumbed the stopper the rest of the way out.

“Oh, no,” Mark said, with feeling, and reached for his glass anyway.

Andy poured straight from the open bottle, three fingers each, and the three of them put their glasses together over the middle of the table. Laura and Mark were signing up, on purpose and both at once, for a morning they would spend in a dark room hating the sound of cutlery. Andy was signing up to keep them company.

He drank his. It did nothing to him at all.

---

Matt Hawkins came across the floor with Sarah on his arm. A small woman in a red leather jacket trailed half a step behind them, flipping an oversized orange quill over the backs of two fingers, as if she could not be trusted to hold still without something in her hand.

Andy’s face did the thing it had started doing around Matt since the bonfire, without being asked to, and Matt’s grin came back just as fast. One of Matt’s hands was already going up to flag a passing tray before either of them had said a word.

“So,” Matt said. “You’ve shaken every hand in this building today and I’m going to make it worse. This is our Host—”

“Oh, no,” said the woman in the jacket. “No, no, no, we are not doing it like that.”

She had Matt’s arm looped through her own before he finished the sentence. “Matty,” she said, in a long-suffering voice. “Matty, Matty, Matty. You bring me to a wedding and you introduce me like a plumber.”

Andy glanced over his own shoulder, on reflex, to see what she was performing to. There was nothing behind him but the dome coming down to meet the wall and the blue dusk it kept in place of a sky.

“Scarlet,” she announced, to nobody Andy could see. “Host, of this one and of his lovely wife and of a young woman named Poppy who is currently three blinks into a conversation about horses. And this—” the quill came around and pointed at Andy without her eyes ever arriving on him “—is the most important thing that will happen to any of you all season. Well, outside of our own season. Look at him. Look at his little crown.”

“Circlet,” Andy said.

“He says circlet.” Scarlet pressed a hand flat against her own chest. “Sevens, my darling, my sweetheart, the man of the actual hour, I have read a great many people get married and you have ruined the numbers for everyone who comes after you. Seven. Seven! One is difficult. Do you have any idea how long the vows took? I timed them.”

“Was it good television?” Andy asked.

“Sevens.” She said it the second time with enormous satisfaction, as if she had invented him that minute and was pleased with the work. “It was better than television, it was literary gold.”

Andy let her have it. Nobody was expected to interrupt a performance like this one. The sheer size of it was funny to him in a way he suspected she had counted on.

Guests kept going past them the whole time, close enough to hear every word, and not one of them turned a head. The quill went on moving through her fingers while she talked, over and back, over and back. Matt stood inside the loop of her arm with the patience of a man who has been introduced this way in four separate countries.

A few steps off, Sarah Hawkins had found a stretch of wall between the drinks table and the windows. She was making herself smaller against it by degrees.

The room they had shared yesterday was a breakfast room with maybe thirty women in it. That had been plenty. This same room somehow now held a hundred and ten people, a ceiling she could not see the top of, a nine-foot-tall naked lilac woman laughing on the moulding, and a noise that arrived in layers. She had been holding the same glass for twenty minutes and had drunk about an inch of it.

Emily came out of the crowd toward her without making a thing of it, straight across rather than around, the way she had at the breakfast. Her hair swung heavy and gold-and-pink over everything it was in the habit of covering.

“Hey,” Emily said. “Have you found anybody yet who isn’t making you explain a staring contest?”

Sarah’s laugh came out too fast and a beat too loud, and she brought a hand up over it, as if it had got away from her and could still be caught.

“No. Mostly I’ve been finding corners.” Sarah tipped her glass an inch toward the wall she had been holding up. “This place has very good corners. That’s—sorry. That’s a sad sentence, isn’t it.”

“It’s an honest sentence.” Emily waved the apology off before it got any further. Then she stood there in a way that asked nothing else of Sarah at all, and let the quiet sit between them for as long as it wanted to.

Sarah’s hands found each other in front of her and twisted, once, the same habit as the other morning. Over Emily’s shoulder the room went on doing what it had been doing: a naked green woman balancing three plates she had not been asked to carry, somebody’s grandfather asleep in a chair by the windows, a blue woman with green hair showing a young woman how her own hair moved. Yesterday morning, any one of those would have taken Sarah the whole morning to get used to.

Emily tipped her head a little. “How are you doing with all of it?”

Sarah took a beat longer over it than the question needed. Ordinarily this was where she said she was fine. She heard herself not say it.

“I keep doing the maths,” Sarah said. “On how many women in this room could put me through a wall without putting their drink down. It’s most of them. I’ve counted twice.” She turned the glass around in her hands. “It doesn’t help, knowing they’re all lovely. Same number either way.”

Emily nodded slowly, taking that seriously, which was worse and better at the same time.

“It doesn’t go away.” Emily put her shoulder against the wall beside Sarah’s. “It just stops being the first thing you think when you walk in.”

Sarah caught herself, then, and heard how long she had been the one talking, and did something she had been meaning to do since the breakfast.

“Can I ask you one?” Sarah said. “Is today actually as much yours as it looks from outside? Because from over here it looks like—I don’t know. Like eight people got married and one of them got married the most.”

Emily laughed at that, and then she took her time answering it properly.

“I spent months thinking I was the one being fitted into somebody else’s life,” Emily said. “The arrangement never changed. I did.” She pushed the weight of her hair back off one shoulder and let it fall again where it had been. “I walked a bridge today in front of my mother with nothing on at all, and I didn’t think about it once. Not for a second of it. That’s me. And the decision to get married, that’s me too.”

Something in Sarah’s shoulders came down half an inch, and stayed down. Half of that was the answer. The rest was having been asked something back at all.

Across the floor, Andy waited for a gap, and then he said to Scarlet the thing he would have said to anyone who knew her.

“Arabella’s had a long year.” Andy turned his glass a quarter turn on the flat of his hand. “Whatever else happens. She built this for us and she’s been standing at the back of it all day letting other people take up the room. Somebody should tell her it worked.”

Scarlet’s performance caught on it the way fabric catches on a nail. Everything went out of her voice at once. Not the volume only—the pitch dropped out of it, and the shape, and whatever it was that had been aiming every syllable over his shoulder.

“I got one night back last night,” Scarlet said. “One. Out of who the hell knows how many I still don’t have. She sat me down and she gave it to me herself and she told me it was going to hurt, and she was right about that.” The quill had gone still in her hand. “So I came to have a look at what she spent the last of it on.”

Her face, for that one line, was not performing anything whatsoever.

Andy stood there with nothing to put against it. He had opened his mouth on the front end of a question when her expression shifted, the performance draining from her face as her eyes—really looking at him now—tracked from his hands to his shoulders to the faint scar above his eyebrow.

“You,” Scarlet said, the word quiet, almost lost in the hum of the party. Her gaze held his for three full seconds, weighing something ancient in the set of his jaw. “I can see it now. Why she picked you.” The leather of her jacket creaked softly as she shrugged, a gesture that seemed to cost her. “Fine. You get your second chance. All of you. With my blessing.”

Matt’s grin flattened for about half a second. He went still with it—the kind of stillness that arrives in a man who has just watched something happen and decided, in the same instant, not to be the one who mentions it. Then he took two glasses off the tray he had flagged down a minute ago and put one of them into Scarlet’s free hand.

“Drink that,” Matt said. “You’ve earned it. Somehow.”

Scarlet raised the glass, not to the room this time, but directly toward Andy—a brief, sharp tilt of crystal that felt more like a salute than a toast. Then she let Matt steer her off toward the next knot of guests, Sarah gathered up on his other side, still putting herself back into company.

“Sevens!” she called back over her shoulder, without turning around. “If any of them cries at the speeches, that’s on you!”

Three people near her laughed. Andy watched them go and lost the red jacket somewhere around the fourth or fifth group.

---

Claire stood with Andy at the edge of the cocktail-hour crowd, one hand loose around a glass she had not touched. Overhead the dome put its blue down across the blackwood in a pool that shifted whenever the light above it shifted.

Andy had just picked the woman out of the far side of the room. She was easy to find. Everything she had on was divided cleanly down the middle, black on one side and white on the other. Bone, ash, a smoke-colored gray. The clasps at her shoulder were doing something more than holding cloth together.

He was still looking at her when Adrien Moore crossed toward the two of them instead, unhurried, at exactly the pace Andy remembered from the bachelor breakfast.

Claire had no word ready for him. Her hand stopped on the glass. Her tail stopped mid-flick and stayed stopped. Both ears came forward and settled on his face, polite and waiting, the way they settled on anything Andy had not got around to explaining yet.

Adrien did not make her go first.

“Adrien Moore,” he said. “Which is the newest of them, and the one that would be on a place card. The one you had me by was Andronikos of Pella.”

Claire’s pen came out of nowhere and stopped an inch above the page. Her ears went flat and then came forward again — not surprise, exactly, but a fact arriving in the wrong order. She looked at his face the way she looked at a date in a margin that had just stopped being a typo.

“It has been two thousand years and a little more for me,” Adrien said, “since that afternoon in the Library. For you it has been, I think, a matter of days.”

He inclined his head, the smallest fraction. “Also—forgive me, this may be the wrong order—whatever was meant to keep your ears and your tail from every eye in that room never worked on me. I saw them the whole time.”

Her hand was less steady than her handwriting was. You have lived two thousand years since ten days ago. It wasn’t a question. She paused, and then quickly added, Don’t give me the number. Give me the century you liked.

She turned it around and held it up between them, and waited, ears still forward.

Adrien laughed, which Andy had not heard him do before.

“The tenth,” Adrien said. “Not for any of the reasons people expect of it. The bread was good, the roads were worse, and there was nobody alive in it who had ever heard my name.”

He gave her the century after that as well, and the one he had spent mostly underground, and his reasons for both. Somewhere in there he stopped editing himself in the careful way he did with everybody else at this wedding, and began listening back at her with the kind of attention that makes a person feel, briefly, like the only item on anybody’s agenda. Claire wrote fast. Her pen came up off the page twice to let him finish a thought, and went straight back down, as if the page were the only place the conversation was really happening.

Andy watched her settle into it, the way she settled into a book when the first page turned out to be better than she had expected. Then he caught the woman in black and white looking over at him across the room. He said something about coming back. Neither of them heard him.

He went over.

He had never met her. Nothing about her standing there should have raised a hair on him. She was a guest at a reception. She had a drink she was not drinking. She shifted her weight to one hip while she waited for him, and breathed, and resettled the fall of the cloth at her shoulder with two fingers.

What raised the hair on him was not the woman. It was the arithmetic. This woman became Arabella. Arabella was in this building right now, although Andy couldn’t see her right now. Arabella had stood on the mound this morning with her hands out over his and told seven women and over a hundred guests that it was done. Both of those were true at the same time. Neither would give way to the other, and the room went very slightly unreal around the place where she was standing.

“Andrew Cooper,” Amabilis said, when he was close enough. Her voice was low and even and entirely unremarkable. Her eyes were a pale green-gold and were not. “Congratulations. It was well made.”

Andy had a question and no good end to pick it up by. He lifted one hand instead and moved it in a loose half-circle that took in her, and the room, and the fact of her being in it.

Amabilis answered him as if he had asked it in plain words.

“My being here settles nothing about how my own season ends,” Amabilis said. “The Athanor is still burning. Until it is finished, what I become is mine to arrive at. It is not a thing that has already happened to me somewhere and is waiting for me to catch up with it.”

“That doesn’t work.” It came out before he could dress it. “Sorry. I mean—Arabella built my season. All of it, from nothing, before I ever got here. If she’s already doing that, then the choosing is over. It has to be. You can’t still go the other way.”

Amabilis set her glass down on the ledge of the window beside her, where the real sky had gone a shade it had no business going.

“A season is not a room in one house,” she said. “Two of them do not share a clock. Presence and outcome owe each other nothing across worlds that do not run at the same speed. I can stand in the hall of a finished thing and still be holding the retort over my own fire. Neither of those is a lie about the other.”

She said it in the same even cadence she had used to congratulate him. She was not making a point, or winning anything, or asking him to agree.

It left him no closer than he had been. It did not sound like nonsense either, which was worse, because nonsense he could have set down and walked away from. He stood there with it and got nowhere, and the light off the dome went on moving on the floor between them, and after a while he stopped trying.

Amabilis held his eyes a moment. Then she turned, without being asked to, to what she had watched from the back of the crowd that morning.

“Seven elements,” Amabilis said. “Each one incomplete before you touched it. Brought together under enough pressure, for long enough, they will not easily come apart again. People hear a cage in that. Structure is what keeps the Work from boiling off the moment the heat rises—the mercy in the process, not the constraint on it.”

“You’d get on with Claire,” Andy said.

“My own vessel presently holds seven,” Amabilis said, as though he had not spoken, though she did not seem to mind that he had. “Reactants. The Audience voted for more than seven. They are not wrong about the appetite. They are wrong about what the working will bear.”

Andy had spent every month of this season in a building where the Audience got what it voted for.

“How do you pick them?” he said.

“For what the Work still needs.” She turned the untouched glass a quarter turn in her hand, the first fidget he had got out of her. “Not for who volunteers. Not for who is owed a place, though a great many are owed one. A thing already saturated takes nothing more. One asks what is absent, and then one goes and finds it.”

“And it’s that simple.”

“It is that simple and it is not at all easy.” Then, unprompted, and with no change in her voice whatsoever: “More than one of the faces I still mean to bring in will not be entirely new to my Catalyst, or my Reactants. That is all I will say about it today, and it is more than I usually say.”

The blue light came down off the dome onto her white shoulder and did not show up on the black one at all. Across the room somebody laughed at something, and a tray went past, and a hundred and nine other people went on having an ordinary afternoon at a wedding.

Andy thought about the seven elements and the pressure. He thought about Arabella saying a version of the same thing to him months ago, on a terrace, with the sea going, in completely different words. He kept that where it was. He answered for himself only, because himself was the one thing in this conversation he was allowed to spend.

“It made me slower,” he said. “The pressure. Everybody keeps telling me I got bigger today. I got slower. I check things now. I used to just go.”

Amabilis considered him a moment with those pale eyes. It was the way a woman looks at a line of figures she has already added up and is adding again for the pleasure of it.

“Yes,” she murmured. “I thought that might be it.”

She gave him one small, considering incline of the head, said something gracious about the room and the hour, and excused herself to go and find the next name on her list. The half-black, half-white of her went into the crowd and was gone before he had decided whether he had been complimented.

Andy stood where he was for a second longer.

Across the floor, Claire and Adrien were still bent together over the notebook, her pen going, his head tilted down to the page. Somebody had left a second chair beside them. Neither of them had noticed it.

Andy turned back into his own party.

---

The lunch was deep into the part of itself where nothing further is going to be eaten. The plates had gone, mostly. The bread had been picked over down to the ends. Somewhere along the tables a child belonging to somebody’s cousin had been asleep for twenty minutes with her head on a folded jacket. The wine had been going around for the better part of two hours and had done its work on the volume of the room. Mildred had put a coffee in front of Andy without being asked, as if somebody in the building were keeping a running estimate of how much of him was left. He had got a third of the way down it. Sitting still was the hardest physical work he had done since the crossing.

Sam picked up a knife and hit the side of her glass with it, hard enough to be heard. She was up on her chair before anybody at her own table could talk her out of it.

The room came down by degrees rather than all at once—the nearest tables first, then the middle of the floor, then the far end by the windows, glasses going down, chairs turning, as if the quiet were something being passed along by hand. Over in the corner where the dome’s light did not reach properly, Laura Black and Mark Garret had spent half an hour re-litigating the whiskey. It had stopped being a private conversation somewhere around the time the plates were cleared. Even that went quiet, or quiet enough. Laura Black had one wing half out over the back of her chair, and Mark was holding the table with one hand as if it might leave.

Sam looked down at Andy first, and pointed the knife at him.

“Look at my friend,” Sam said. “Look at the state of him. He has been sweating through that jacket since ten this morning, and I want the room to understand that this is a man who once made me sit in a car outside a party for eleven minutes because he wasn’t sure his shirt was the right shirt.”

The laugh came up off the tables. Andy raised his glass to her in surrender before she had finished. Then, because years of this had taught him exactly one useful reflex, he took a piece of the room back.

“It was the wrong shirt,” Andy said.

Sam pointed the knife at him again. “It was a great shirt.”

Andy turned in his chair to take in the tables behind him. “You told me it was the wrong shirt. In the car. At minute nine.”

“I was building character.” Sam took the room off him with one hand, the way you take a tray off somebody before they drop it, and let the laugh run itself out before she went on. “Fine. Fine. Here’s the thing about Andy Cooper, and then I’ll stop. He tried to keep people at arm’s length. He has done it since he was nineteen and he is very, very good at it, and it looks like generosity from the outside, which is the trick of it.” She turned as she said it, taking in the whole long shape of the room, the tables and the families and the far end by the windows. “So. Anybody. Anybody in this room. Name me one single person that man has successfully kept out there.”

Somebody at the Rahman table started to answer and thought better of it. The laugh built on its own. Sam stood up there and let it, with the kind of patience that only comes of having run a hundred of these and knowing the difference between a laugh that is finishing and a laugh that is still climbing.

“I need a drink before this gets sentimental,” Mark announced from the dark corner, at the exact volume of a man who believes he is being discreet.

“Shh,” said Laura Black, with her whole chest.

The shush reached the far wall. Half the room heard it and not one word of what it was shushing. That got a considerably bigger laugh than either of them had been going for, and Mark put both hands up in surrender and knocked over a glass that was fortunately empty.

Sam waited it out, grinning, her thumb going along the edge of the knife the way it went along the edge of things when she was counting. Then she turned square on the chair, away from the room and away from Andy, and faced the seven of them at the long table. Myra, Emily, Dawn, Erin, Claire, Emi. Laura in three places along the row.

The toast belonged to them from that turn on. Everybody in the building understood, in the ordinary way people understand a thing like that, that the room was being spoken to through the seven of them.

“I have watched every one of you get chosen,” Sam said. “Not asked. Chosen, by a man who has never once in his life done anything by halves and would not know how to start. And I have had a front-row seat to the entire embarrassing business since before several of you knew his last name, and I want it on the record that I called it. Not all of it. But some of it. I want a proportionate amount of credit.”

What came back off the seven of them was the noise women make when they are laughing and going at the same time and have decided not to be embarrassed about either one. Emi got three hands up to her face and left the other three where they were. Claire’s ears went flat. Her tail came up over the back of her chair and stayed there. Dawn knocked her glass against Erin’s without either of them looking at the other. The seven of them had their glasses up before Sam got to the end of it.

Sam let them have that. Then she turned back, and she looked down at Andy, and something went out of her face.

Sam looked down at him. “And you.”

Andy put the coffee down. “Me.”

“Whatever happens after today,” Sam said. “Whatever comes. If anybody’s keeping score at the end of it, I've got your back—that’s the job. That’s my whole job. Always has been.”

The room heard exactly what it was meant to hear. A woman had told her oldest friend she loved him, at his own wedding, in front of his family. It gave her the loudest noise of the afternoon for it. Somebody at the back whistled. Kathleen Allen was already crying and did not appear to have noticed.

Andy sat in the middle of a hundred and ten people applauding and heard the other thing.

That morning, on the mound, with nobody else inside forty yards of them, he had asked her to carry the harem bond if the day took him out of it. She had said yes before he finished the sentence. Then she had said those exact words in that exact order, flat, with her hands in her pockets. Nobody had heard it. Nobody in this room knew there was anything to hear. She had just said it again in front of every single one of them, at a volume that turned it into a joke about friendship. Not one person clapping had any idea what they were clapping for. Andy had no way to answer it from a chair, and she had not left him one.

Liesa saved him, from four feet away, without looking up.

“Is a very long toast,” Liesa called up at her wife, comfortably. “The dessert is dying.”

“The dessert can wait,” Sam said, not breaking stride. “The dessert is not the one with the microphone.”

Liesa spread both hands. “There is no microphone.”

“Structurally, there is.”

She got the room back. But her voice had caught somewhere in the last few words of it, a fraction, on a word that did not deserve it. Andy watched her hear it happen. She hauled herself back up out of it by main force, blinking hard and fast at a ceiling that had nothing on it worth blinking at.

“I am not crying,” Sam announced to the room. “I want that in the minutes. I am not crying at my best friend’s wedding, I have a reputation, I have—”

“I LOVE EVERY SINGLE PERSON IN THIS ROOM,” Mark Garret bellowed from the corner.

He meant it. He meant it with the total, unguarded, three-drinks-past-sincere conviction of a man who has arrived at the truth and wants a hundred and ten strangers to have it immediately. Laura Black got about half a shush out and then lost the whole thing laughing, hard, sideways, one hand flat on the table. The moment broke clean across the middle, exactly where it needed to break.

Sam laughed too, wrecked and grateful for it, and pointed her glass down the room at Mark like a woman marking a debt.

“Drink.” Sam swung her glass out over the whole room. “All of you. Drink now, before I sober up and finish this properly.”

The glasses went up across the whole floor, the seven of them first and then everybody behind them, family by family, the far tables lifting because the near ones had. The sound of it ran up into the dome and came back down changed.

Sam got off the chair.

Andy was already on his feet to meet her. She came into him hard, one arm and then both, and for a second and a half she held on at what was, for Sam, full strength. It was the same grip she had used on the mound that morning, when there had been nobody there to see her use it. He let her.

Then Liesa took Sam’s hand from her seat and pulled her the rest of the way down into her chair, and put the abandoned dessert spoon into her fist.

After that the room came apart the way rooms do once the speeches are finished. Chairs went back. People got up to go and find other people, coffee started making its way around from the far end, and the noise rebuilt itself out of a hundred conversations at once. Somebody near the doors let the garden in, and the air that came through with it was colder than the hour had any business being.

Andy stayed where he was and let it happen around him.

---

Emi had taken the chair at the end of the table nearest the windows, where the lunch thinned out into empty place settings and other people’s folded coats. The speeches were over. Behind her the room had gone back to its own business, loud again in the shapeless way a room is loud once it has stopped listening to one person, and she had four hands in her lap and two on the stem of a glass she had put down twice already.

It was the first hour all day with nothing in it. She had not known what to do with it.

“There she is,” Carol Cooper said, arriving with a plate. “Here. I have watched you eat about nine bites all day, so don’t argue with me.”

The plate went down in front of Emi. A fork went into one of her lower hands a second later, put there without Carol breaking off or looking down to find which hand was free—the kind of small, unremarked accuracy that takes a stranger about a week to manage and had apparently taken Carol Cooper the length of one receiving line. Carol went into the empty chair beside her with the unhurried certainty of a woman who has never in her life waited to be invited to sit. Jim came a step behind, took the seat on Emi’s other side, and said nothing at all, which Emi remembered about him since she had known him.

“Mrs. Cooper—”

Carol waved that off with the flat of her hand. “Carol. My goodness. You married my son this morning, honey. We’ve known you since you were this tall. We’re past Mrs. Cooper.”

Two of Emi’s hands came up and pressed flat together in front of her mouth, and she laughed into them. The other four did not know what to do with themselves and ended up folded, which was its own kind of answer.

“I keep thinking about you at my kitchen table.” Carol got her own chair around at an angle so she could see Emi properly. “You and Laura both, in and out of that back door like it was a turnstile. And those birthday cakes. I never once got one of them right, did I.”

“The purple one,” Emi said.

“The purple one was structurally unsound.” Jim did not look up from his coffee.

Carol swatted at his arm without looking at him.

“It was. You put the knife in and it went.”

Emi had forgotten the knife going in. She had not forgotten the kitchen, which was yellow, and the window over the sink, and Andy’s mother saying oh, for Pete’s sake into a cake pan. The memory came back with the smell attached, sugar and scorch, and she sat in it for a second with a napkin turning slowly under one of her lower hands.

Carol’s voice came down a register.

“I saw what you did out there,” she said. “During the vows. When you stepped out of the line and took Laura’s hand.” She let a second go by. “I knew what it was the moment it happened.”

Emi looked at the tablecloth.

Jim had got his elbows onto the table by then, both hands around the coffee. “Every summer. In our yard, breakfast until somebody’s mother called.” His voice came out rougher than he seemed to want it. “Never two of them. Always three.”

Carol turned to Jim and started on the saying the three of them used to shout out of the driveway on their way somewhere they had no business going, and got as far as remembering that Laura had probably started it.

Emi did not look up. “Three kids and a bad idea.”

Carol put her hand flat on the table. “That’s the one.”

“I know what it meant,” Jim said. “It meant the screen door.”

The two of them went on with it for a minute, one memory handing off to the next, and Emi sat between them and let it happen: the bikes in the side yard, the garage hose, the year the three of them dug something in the flowerbed and would not say what, and Emi at nine with two arms and a bowl haircut, standing in the middle of somebody else’s family and not once being told to go home.

She had spent a great many years deciding she had been the third one at that back door, the one who came along behind the other two. It had not occurred to her, in all that time, that the people who owned the door had been keeping their own count, and that their count came to three.

Carol turned in her chair and gave her the whole of her attention. “Now. How are you doing, honey? Really.”

Behind them the room was at its loosest hour: chairs pushed back at angles, somebody’s child asleep across two of them, Mildred going down the line collecting glasses nobody had finished. Three tables over, Laura Black had her head on Mark Garret’s shoulder and both of them looked asleep.

Nobody had asked Emi that today. Not once, all day, in a building full of people who loved her.

“I’m happy.” It came out plainer than she expected it to. “I thought I’d be waiting for it to get taken back. I keep checking for that, and it isn’t there.” She turned the glass around. “I didn’t know it would be so quiet.”

Carol’s face did something complicated and then settled. Her hand came out and closed on the nearest of Emi’s forearms. “Good. Good.”

“And we won’t wait long,” Emi said. “For a baby, I mean. It’ll be sooner than anybody thinks. Before the year’s out.”

Jim made a noise into his glass, as if a figure had come in slightly over estimate.

“Well,” Carol said, delighted. “Somebody’s been thinking ahead.”

“I already have the name,” Emi said, as if this followed. “For the first girl. Anaïs.”

She said it the way you say a fact you have had for a while and have simply not had occasion to use.

“Anaïs.” Carol tried it out. “Where on earth did that come from?”

Emi opened her mouth and found she had nothing to put after it. The name had not come out of a book, or off a list, or out of any conversation she could point at. It had simply been there, the same as her own address. One of her upper hands lifted and turned over, empty.

“It feels right,” Emi said, giving up on it. “That’s all. It feels like it’s already hers.”

“That’s how it works,” Carol said comfortably, and refilled Emi’s water without being asked. “I had Andy’s name six years before I had Andy.”

“And I’m going to be an aunt,” Emi went on, the whole thing gathering speed in her now. “There are going to be so many babies in this family, all of them practically at once. I’ll be the one holding whichever one is crying.”

“Slow down,” Jim said. “We haven’t finished the cake.”

Carol laughed at that. Then her hands went quiet around her own glass, and the shape of the next thing changed before she got to it, as if she had been carrying it in with her since she sat down.

“I want to tell you something,” Carol said. “About that phone call.”

The napkin stopped turning under Emi’s hand.

“You won’t remember what a lift it was. Out of nowhere, on a Friday, and there’s a voice on the line, and it’s little Emi from down the street, grown, with a job, in California.” Carol was smiling at the tablecloth, somewhere well behind the afternoon they were sitting in. “I told Jim about it while I was making dinner. That you’d called at all, after all that time.”

Emi’s two lower hands found each other under the table. “I remember calling.”

“You sounded so far away,” Carol said. “And I told you about Andy—that he’d finished school and gone up to Chicago, and that he was living with somebody — and you were lovely about it, you said that was wonderful, and we said goodbye, and I went back to the potatoes and I didn’t think another thing about it for—”

Carol stopped.

Emi had not moved. All six of her hands had gone still at once, folded and set, which was the thing they did when she was giving something her whole attention, and she was looking at the tablecloth again.

“Emi,” Carol said, much quieter. “Was that a hard thing to hear? Back then?”

The honest answer had been sitting somewhere behind Emi’s teeth for most of a decade. She had carried it through four years of not calling back, through the Hotel, through a garden made of glass where a dead girl forgave her for something else entirely, and in all that time nobody had ever asked her the question in a way that made answering it possible.

It turned out to be short. “Yes. It was. For a long time.” Emi made herself look up. “I hung up and I sat down on the floor of my apartment and decided that was the end of it. That I’d missed it, and it was my own fault for waiting. I never told anybody. Not Andy. Not for years.”

Carol’s face folded. “Oh, honey.”

“It’s all right.” Emi said it steadily, and watched Carol hear that she meant it. “It was hard, and then it was over, and everything went exactly where it was supposed to go. I’m not sorry about any of it. If that call had gone differently maybe I wouldn’t be in this chair.”

Carol reached over and took the nearest of Emi’s hands in both of her own and did not let go of it. Her chin had gone unsteady and she was not doing anything about that either. “I’m so glad. I don’t know how to say it better than that.”

Jim let that sit exactly as long as it needed to sit. Emi watched him decide to end it, which he did the way he did everything, by picking up an object and using it. He got his glass up and held it out over the corner of the table, at nobody in particular.

“Second chances.” Jim held it there until both of them looked at it. “Worth the wait.”

Carol laughed, wetly, and got her own glass up. Emi got two up, because two was funnier, and Jim’s eyebrows went a quarter inch and he tapped both of them.

Out past the long windows the afternoon had gone the wrong color for the hour.