Toll, Toll the Wedding Bells!!!!!!!!

The veil hung on its stand by the window like a small, patient ghost, and nobody in the room had touched it yet.

Chloe had been looking at it on and off for twenty minutes. She stood at the low dresser the two of them shared, knotting and re-knotting the belt of her robe, and every time she glanced up it was still there, a fall of white netting catching the early light, waiting for Myra. She smoothed the robe flat across her stomach without thinking about it. There was nothing to show yet. Her hand went there anyway, the way it did a dozen times a day now, as if checking that something small was still where she’d left it.

Beside her, Myra was pinning her braid. She did it by feel, head tipped a little to one side, fingers walking up the plait and tucking each pin in with a small, precise push. Both of her tails were curled around her ankles. They hadn’t uncurled since Chloe woke up.

“Hand me another one, Chloe?”

Chloe found a pin in the dish and set it in Myra’s open palm. “That’s eleven.”

“It needs twelve.”

“Says who?”

“Says the veil.” Myra slid the pin home. “It’s heavier than it looks. I tried it on yesterday and it pulled half my head off.”

Chloe laughed and reached for the dish again, then stopped, because Myra had gone still.

Myra’s ears had turned. Not toward Chloe, but toward the window, where Katherine was standing.

Katherine had been up before either of them. She had stayed in their room last night. She stood in the bar of light by the glass with nothing on, the way she always was, her arms loose at her sides, looking out at the water. Chloe had stopped noticing that part long ago. What she noticed now was the hand. Katherine’s right hand had come up and pressed itself flat against her own sternum, fingers spread, and it was staying there. Her other hand hung at her side, opening and closing.

Myra set the last pin down and crossed the room slowly, the way she moved when she was reading a space rather than just walking through it, and stopped an arm’s length from Katherine. For a moment she simply stood there with her face turned a little away, the way she always did when she was listening to something nobody else could hear.

“Oh,” Myra said softly. “Oh, Katherine.”

Katherine didn’t turn around. Her hand stayed where it was.

“She’s scared,” Myra said, to Chloe, without looking back. Her voice had gone low and careful. “Really scared. I can see it from here, it’s all…” She searched for it. “Not a storm, exactly. More like the air before one. It’s the worst I’ve felt on her since she got out of the painting.”

Chloe put the pin dish down.

She could feel what came next arriving in her body before she’d decided anything at all: the three quick steps across the rug, the hand on Katherine’s arm, the voice she used for five-year-olds who’d skinned a knee. It’s okay. You’re okay. Let’s get you something warm. It was the kind of move she could have made in her sleep, and had, for most of her life. She was already on the second step.

She stopped on it.

Her foot came down on the rug and stayed there. Katherine hadn’t asked for anything. Katherine was standing at a window with her hand on her heart, being afraid, and the thing Chloe had been about to do was not comfort, but a way of making the fear go somewhere quieter so that Chloe wouldn’t have to stand in the room with it.

She turned instead and looked at Myra.

“How bad is mine?” Chloe asked.

Myra’s head came around. “What?”

“Mine. My outline. Whatever it is you get off me.” Chloe’s voice came out thinner than she wanted. “You can tell me. I’d rather know than guess.”

Myra was quiet for a second. Her tails loosened a little, then tightened again.

“About the same as hers,” she said. “Maybe a little louder. You’ve been humming it all morning. Since before you got up.”

“Yeah.” Chloe let out a breath that shook on the way. “Yeah, that sounds right.”

“I thought you were fine.”

“I thought I was fine too. I was doing the thing.” She made a small, helpless gesture at the dresser, the robe, the pin dish, the whole tidy morning. “Getting everyone ready. It’s easier when there’s something to fix.”

“I know that one,” Myra said.

“And yours?”

Myra sat down on the edge of the nearest bed, hands folded between her knees. “I’m not doing better than either of you. I’m just quieter about it. I’ve been pinning the same braid for half an hour.”

“You have.”

“I know. I counted.”

Chloe sat down beside her, and the mattress dipped them toward each other until their shoulders touched. For a moment neither of them said anything, and it wasn’t the good kind of quiet—it was the kind that hums, like a fridge in an empty house at night, so steady you only notice it when you try to think over it. The room around them looked exactly the way a room should look on a wedding morning: two dresses hanging on the wardrobe door, shoes paired under the window, a hairbrush and a scatter of pins and a glass of water nobody had touched. None of it looked frightened. Over at the window, Katherine’s shoulders rose and fell once, slowly, as if she were counting her own breaths and had lost her place.

“I’m not steadier than she is,” Chloe said finally. She kept her eyes on Katherine’s back. “I want to walk over there and tell her it’s going to be fine, and I don’t know that. I’m pregnant, and I can’t fight, and I’m scared out of my mind, and I was about to go pat her hand like I had it all handled.” She let out a short, unhappy laugh. “Is that awful?”

“No,” Myra said. “It’s just your kindness at work.”

She was quiet for a moment. Then she took Chloe’s hand, the way she sometimes did when she needed to anchor a sentence to something before she said it, and Chloe felt her fingers tighten.

“There’s something I should tell you,” Myra said. “Before today starts. I’d rather you heard it from me.”

Chloe’s stomach dropped. “Okay.”

“You know I’m with Sam and Norah. On the plan. When the time comes, I do the illusions, keep him looking the wrong way, buy Sam her opening.” Myra’s thumb moved over Chloe’s knuckles. “That part’s what everybody knows.”

“Yes.”

“Riley and I have something else.” Myra’s voice didn’t waver, though her ears had gone flat against her hair. “Just the two of us. If it gets bad. If it gets to the point where he’s reaching for Laura and nothing else is working…” She took a breath. “Then we step forward. Both of us. We offer ourselves instead. We make ourselves the thing he has to consider, for as long as we can, and we stall him until somebody gets there.”

Chloe didn’t answer right away. She couldn’t. She sat there with Myra’s hand in hers, and the room went very far away, as if someone had pulled it down a long hallway, and then came back all at once, sharp at every edge.

“Myra,” she said. “Myra, that’s—he could take you.”

“I know.”

“He could take both of you.”

“I know that too.”

“And Riley agreed to this? Riley? With JJ?” It came out too fast and too high, and Chloe heard it the way you hear your own voice on a recording—thin, unfamiliar, someone else’s panic in her mouth.

“I know,” Myra said, a third time, very gently. “You don’t have to stop being scared. I’m not asking you to.”

“Then why tell me?”

“Because if something happens, I didn’t want you finding out from somebody else. In a hallway. Afterward.” Myra’s voice caught, just slightly, and she pushed through it. “You’d have spent the rest of your life wondering why Riley didn’t say. I know what that does to a person. I’m not doing it to you.”

Chloe squeezed her hand hard enough to hurt. Myra let her. Chloe thought, distantly, that it was the first time in her life she had heard someone say a thing like that and not immediately started planning what she could do to fix it. There was nothing to fix. There was only Myra’s hand, and the plan, and the fact of both, and she held on to the one she could reach.

At the window, Katherine’s hand slid up off her sternum until her fingers lay spread across her own collarbone, and then she turned, at last, and faced them. Her eyes were very bright. She lifted her free hand a little way from her sides, palm up and empty, and held it there. Then she pointed at Myra. Then at Chloe. Then back at her own chest, and her empty hands opened again.

Myra’s head tilted, the way it did when she was listening past the room.

“I think… she wants to know what she’s supposed to do,” Myra said quietly. “Today. I have a plan. You have…” She hesitated. “She thinks everybody in here has a job but her. She can’t fight. She doesn’t know what she’s for.”

Chloe was already standing.

This time she didn’t stop herself, because this time it was a question, and questions deserved an answer, and she was the one who had it. She crossed the rug and took both of Katherine’s hands in hers. Katherine’s fingers were cold.

“You don’t have to fight anybody,” Chloe said. “Not today. That’s not your job and it’s not mine, either. So stay with me. Right next to me, the whole time. I can’t fight, and you can’t fight, and that means the two of us are the ones who can keep an eye on everybody else while they do. Whoever gets hurt. Whoever needs pulling out of the way. Whoever just needs somebody to hold on to.” She swallowed. “We can do that. The two of us. Is that okay?”

Katherine looked at her for a long moment.

Then she nodded, once, a clean, deliberate dip of the chin, and her fingers closed around Chloe’s and held.

Chloe let out a breath she felt all the way to her knees.

Behind her, the bed creaked as Myra stood. She came up on Chloe’s other side, and Chloe freed one hand to find hers, and for a while the three of them just stood there in the light by the window, not saying anything, holding on. The water outside was very blue. Far down the corridor, someone laughed.

“It’s nearly time,” Myra said eventually. “They’ll be filling up the terrace without us.”

“Your braid’s still one pin short,” Chloe said.

“I’ll live. I’m sure Perran or Melisande will have spares in the Sunroom.”

The three of them went out together, Katherine between them with the veil, and none of them looked back at the empty room.

---

Emily stood in the middle of the room with nothing on but her own hair, and had stopped to feel it anyway.

It was the strangest part of the whole morning, stranger than the flowers, stranger than the fact of the day itself: how ordinary it felt. No fabric to smooth into place, no clasp to check twice in the mirror. Her hair lay the way it always lay, gold and pink and heavy, draped over her breasts and pooled at the small of her back and fallen forward again to cover her, the same modest, improbable cascade it had been every day for longer than she liked to count.

She had wanted a wedding dress once, badly enough to drape a pillowcase over her head as a girl and walk the length of her parents' hallway, humming. She had let that particular want go a long time before she ever set foot on this island, along with most of what she used to think a wedding was supposed to look like. She has almost picked one, at Melisande's shop, before changing her mind.

She smoothed a hand down over her own bare hip, feeling nothing but her own skin under it, and didn't move, because moving would mean the moment was over. No dress. Not today.

Marissa was across the room at the mirror, doing something careful to her earrings. Her dress was deep green and cut the only way anything Marissa wore could be cut, low in front, and she'd long since stopped apologizing for that. She had been quiet since they woke up. Emily had been quiet too. The room had been full of that kind of quiet for an hour, the kind that isn't peaceful at all, only two people each waiting for the other to go first.

Marissa's eyes found her in the mirror. “You're sure,” she said. It wasn't really a question. “About the dress. I'd have helped you into one. It wouldn't have been any trouble.”

“I know.” Emily met her eyes in the glass. “I'm sure.”

“You don't have to explain it to me.”

“I'm not explaining it.” Emily let her hand fall from her hip. “I'm just telling you, so you've heard it. This is what I actually look like. I decided that a while ago, and today's not the day I start pretending otherwise.”

Marissa held her gaze a moment longer in the glass, then nodded, once, and went back to her earring. Emily wrapped her arms around herself instead.

“I'm scared,” she said, suddenly. Marissa’s hands stopped on the earring.

“So am I,” Marissa said. Her voice was low, the way it always was, barely above a whisper. “I’ve been trying to find a way to say that since six.”

“You could’ve just said it.”

“I know. I’m out of practice.”

Emily laughed, a short wet sound, and looked down at her hands. They were shaking. She hadn't noticed until now. She pressed them flat against her own stomach, and that didn't help, and she felt her throat start to close up, and she thought, very clearly, oh no, not already, not before we even leave the room—

And then Marissa was there.

Emily didn’t see her cross the room. One second Marissa was at the mirror, and the next Emily’s face was in Marissa’s boobs and Marissa’s arms were around her, firm and warm and completely sure of themselves, one hand spread between Emily’s shoulder blades and the other cupping the back of her head. It was the kind of hug that seemed to know exactly how much Emily needed before Emily did. Her breath went out of her. Her shoulders came down. Something in her chest that had been clenched since she opened her eyes began, slowly, to let go.

It felt wonderful. It also felt strange, because Marissa’s body was doing all of it and Marissa’s face, when Emily tipped her head back far enough to see it, looked completely calm, as if she were still standing at the mirror.

Emily went still in her arms. “Marissa,” she said gently. “Did you mean to do this?”

Marissa blinked. “Do what?”

“This.” Emily patted the arm across her back. “You were doing your earrings.”

Marissa looked down at herself, at her own arms wrapped around Emily, and Emily watched it land. Her eyebrows went up. Her mouth opened a little. For a second she looked less like a doctor than a woman who has just caught her own hand in a cookie jar.

“Oh,” Marissa said. “Oh. It’s the… God. I didn’t even feel myself move.”

“I know. It’s okay.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. It’s working.” Emily let her forehead drop back against Marissa’s cleavage. “Just, you know. So you know.”

She felt Marissa’s breath go in and out. Emily waited for the joke. There was usually a joke, or the other thing, the quiet professional voice that said something wise and settled everybody down. Neither came.

“I used to laugh at it,” Marissa said instead, slowly. “When somebody pointed it out. I’d make it into a funny story about my own body, so nobody had to look at why it was happening.” She was quiet a moment. “I don’t want to do that this morning. It went for you because you’re scared, and it had an easy time of it because I’m just as scared as you are. I’m not the one holding this room up. I just have arms that don’t ask permission.”

Emily pulled back far enough to look at her.

Marissa’s eyes were wet—she didn’t wipe them, didn’t even seem to consider it, as if tears were simply one more thing her body was allowed to do this morning without asking.

“Okay,” Emily said. “Good. I mean, not good. But good that you said it.”

“Yeah.”

They didn’t let go. Marissa’s arms had loosened, but they stayed, and Emily found she didn’t want them to go anywhere. After a while she turned so they were standing side by side, Marissa’s arm still around her waist, both of them facing the mirror, one in green silk and the other in nothing but her own hair, and neither of them looking like the kind of people who ought to be this frightened on a morning this pretty.

Emily looked at Marissa's reflection. Then she looked at her own, at her bare skin and her hair falling exactly the way it always fell, and the veil still waiting on the bed, and a thought came up in her that she'd been holding for weeks.

“Can I ask you something weird?”

Marissa’s mouth twitched. “You always ask that.”

“This one’s actually weird.” Emily took a breath. “Do you still want to be one? A bride?”

Marissa didn’t move, but Emily felt it, through the arm at her waist.

“You said it,” Emily went on, before she could lose her nerve. “A while back. That you wanted it. Then you said ‘not just yet,’ and after that you never said it again.” She met Marissa’s eyes in the mirror.

“Why?” Marissa asked quietly.

It wasn’t hostile. Emily knew what hostile sounded like from Marissa—or rather, she knew what Marissa sounded like when she was closing a door, all courtesy and no handle, the kind of politeness that leaves you standing in the hallway without quite knowing how you got there. This wasn’t that. This was a real question, asked by someone who wanted the answer and was a little afraid of it, and Emily felt the weight of it settle on her like a hand on the shoulder.

“Because I was you.” Emily smoothed a hand over her own hip. “I wanted this for so long I stopped letting myself say it. I just kept being useful and hoping somebody would notice. And then one night I got tired of waiting and I asked him myself.” She shrugged, a little helplessly. “I asked, and now I'm the one getting married today. So I figured maybe i could help you do the same, if you needed it.”

Marissa was quiet for a long time. In the mirror her face had gone very still, the plain, unguarded kind, as if she’d set something down to look at it and found it heavier than she remembered. Her thumb moved once over Emily’s buttock, absently, back and forth. When she spoke, her voice had gone even softer.

“I don’t know,” she said. “That’s the honest answer. I did want it. I think I still do. And every time I get close to saying so, there’s somebody else in the room who needs something more, and it’s so easy to hand it to them instead.” She laughed, very softly, not happily. “Sarah. The other women. Laura. It’s always someone. It’s been someone for as long as I can remember. I’ve gotten very good at deciding my turn can wait.”

“Is it waiting? Or is it gone?”

“Waiting,” Marissa said. Then, after a moment: “I think. I’m not deciding anything today.”

“You don’t have to. I mean it.” Emily turned in the circle of her arm and took both of Marissa’s hands. “It’s still there. It’s not a line you missed. Whenever you’re ready to say it again, the door’s still open, and nobody’s going to shut it on you. Especially not him.”

Marissa squeezed her hands. Emily looked away first.

She hadn’t meant to. It just happened, her eyes sliding off Marissa’s face and down to the floor, to her own bare feet on the rug, and she felt her throat go tight again. When she spoke, the wedding was nowhere in it. “Do you want to know what I’m actually scared of?”

“Yes,” Marissa said.

“It’s not dying. I thought it would be. It isn’t.” Emily’s voice came out thin. “It’s that whatever happens today, it goes wrong in some way nobody sees coming, and none of us ever get to go home. Not to our families. Not anywhere. And I end up back in that room.”

Marissa’s hands tightened.

“The white one,” Emily said. “The first one. When they pulled me out of my old season and just… put everything on hold and dropped me here, somewhere inside the Hotel. There weren’t any windows. There wasn’t a door I could find. I didn’t know where I was, or how long I’d been there, or whether anybody knew I was gone. I just sat on the floor.” She swallowed hard. “I’m not scared of the fight. Not really. I’m scared of everything falling apart again, the way it did before. And I’m scared that when it does, I’ll be the one who gets left behind. Again. In a white room. Waiting for somebody who doesn’t come.”

She was crying now, quietly. She let it happen.

Marissa didn’t say it would be fine. She didn’t say anything wise at all. She just pulled Emily in again, and this time Marissa knew exactly what her arms were doing and let them. The two of them sat down together on the edge of the bed with Emily’s head on Marissa’s breasts and Marissa’s cheek resting on her hair, and they stayed there. Neither of them was holding the other one up. It was not comfort handed from one to the other, but two people leaning, each one only standing because the other one is.

The light moved a little way across the floor.

“We should go,” Marissa said at last. “Or we’ll be late.”

Emily sniffed. “Yeah.”

“Unless you want another minute.”

“No.” Emily wiped her face with the heel of her hand and laughed. “I want to go. With you.”

“With me,” Marissa agreed.

Marissa smoothed a last lock of Emily’s hair back into place. Emily fixed the clasp on Marissa's bracelet. They took turns in the mirror, dabbing at each other's eyes. Marissa lifted the veil off the bed and laid it over her arm, and then they walked out of the room side by side, the door swinging shut behind them on an empty bed.

---

The Suite kitchen smelled of butter and burnt bread, and Laura was running all of it.

She had been at it for twenty minutes, all three of her, and Andy had given up offering to help somewhere around minute four. One of her stood at the stove cracking eggs one-handed into the pan, tap and split and drop, without once looking down. One moved along the counter laying out plates and forks in a line so neat it could have been measured. The third body had nothing to do at all, so Laura had decided that her job was to lean against the fridge with her arms folded and look at Andy.

He knew that look. He’d known it since he was seven. He knew moving her bodies like this, not in sync, was an effort for her, but she was doing it anyway, and he loved her for it.

“So,” said the one by the fridge. “About this morning.”

“No,” Andy said.

“About the noise you made,” she went on.

“There was no noise,” said Andy.

“There was a noise, Andy.” All three of her said it together, the one at the stove not even turning around. “It was high. It had a little wobble at the end.”

“It was a grunt.” Andy pointed his coffee at her. “A startled grunt. A manly, startled grunt, not a scream. There’s a difference.”

Laura’s body at the stove flipped an egg. The one laying out plates set a fork down, straightened, and said, “Three separate witnesses—” and the one at the fridge finished it without a breath between, “—beg to differ.”

Emi, who was sitting next to Andy on the bench with one of her arms looped through his and a second stealing his toast, snorted into her tea.

“Don’t you start,” Andy told her.

“I didn’t say anything,” said Emi.

“You were there,” Andy said. “You were the loudest person in the room.”

“I was the most justified person in the room.” Emi took a bite of his toast, chewed, and swallowed with great dignity. “Also I’m on her side. I’m always on her side. You know this. You married into it.”

“I’m not married to you yet,” Andy pointed out.

“Details,” said Emi, and her third right hand patted his arm consolingly while the first one kept hold of it.

Andy picked a bit of scrambled egg off the edge of his plate and flicked it at the nearest Laura. It hit the one by the fridge square on the collarbone.

She looked down at it. She looked up at him. Her face was perfectly, dangerously solemn.

“Assaulting a bride,” she said, “on the morning of her wedding. With egg.” She peeled the bit off her skin between two fingers. “That’s grounds for a very short marriage, Andy Cooper.”

She flicked it back. It landed in his coffee.

Emi laughed so hard she had to put the toast down.

Andy looked into his mug. The egg was floating there, pale and small and entirely unrepentant. He considered fishing it out. He considered, briefly, retaliating again, and then he looked across the kitchen at three identical faces waiting, all of them, with the same bright interest, and decided the odds were not in his favor.

“Fine,” he said. “Truce.”

“Truce,” said Laura, from all three places, in the tone of someone accepting a surrender.

It went on like that. More eggs came off the heat and onto the plates, and Laura sat down across from them, one of her on the bench and two on the stools, and the argument moved on without anybody deciding to move it.

The toast had been burnt, and Laura said it was Andy’s fault because he’d been standing nearest the toaster, and Andy said standing near a thing wasn’t the same as being responsible for it, and Emi said that was exactly what a man who’d burnt the toast would say. The yolks were runny, which Andy liked and Emi pretended to hate, and Laura said runny was correct and firm was a crime, from whichever of her mouths happened to be empty at the time. Nobody won. Nobody tried very hard to.

Andy ate his eggs and watched them—three of Laura and six arms of Emi, all of it moving at once—and felt the morning settle on him the way a cat settles on a lap, slowly, and then all at once, and then with no intention of leaving.

It was Laura, he suspected. It usually was. Lethe's Forgetfulness. Whatever small worries a person carried into a room with her, they had a way of going quiet around the edges, like voices in the next room once a door has been closed, and he could see it on Emi too, the easy slope of her shoulders, the way four of her hands had settled on the table as if they had nowhere better to be. He let it work on him. It was not peace, exactly, but a loan against it, and he meant to spend every minute of it.

Emi finished her tea and looked at the empty cup.

“I have to go soon,” she said. “Hair and nails.”

“When?” Andy asked.

“Half an hour?” Emi said. “They said not to be late.” She wrinkled her nose. “Apparently six arms makes it a whole project. The dress may take a while. Somebody has to hold things.”

Laura glanced up at the clock over the stove. All three of her heads turned to it at the same instant, then back. “Mine’s right after yours,” she said. “So I’m not far behind.”

“Do you want to go first?” Emi asked.

“No, you go,” said Laura. “You’ll take longer.”

“That’s slander,” said Emi.

“That’s arithmetic,” said Laura.

Emi threw a napkin at her. “There’s three of you now!” Laura caught it, one-handed, with the body nearest the window, and folded it neatly in half without looking.

“I’ll be fast,” Emi promised.

“You won’t,” said Laura.

“I’ll be medium,” said Emi.

They kept going. Who was doing whose hair after the ceremony, whether the pins would hold in the wind off the water, what time the family guests were supposed to arrive and whether anyone had actually confirmed it. Ordinary things. The kind of talk that fills a kitchen on any morning of any week, and Andy sat and listened to it and drank his egg-flecked coffee, and felt, for no reason he could put a finger on, the weight start to lift.

He set the mug down.

“Do either of you actually want to go?” he asked. “Yet?”

He hadn’t meant to say it so quietly. It came out lower than the rest of the conversation had been, and the kitchen heard the difference.

Nobody answered him right away.

Emi’s hands had all gone still on the table, as if someone had pressed pause on every one of them at once. Across from him, every one of Laura had stopped moving in the same instant, the mug halfway through its circle. The clock over the stove ticked. Somewhere outside a gull cried and went quiet.

It was Emi who spoke first.

“No,” she said. “Not really.” She looked down at the crumbs on her plate. “I wish breakfast could just keep going. A little longer than it’s going to. That’s all. Just a little longer. If I could activate Velvet Hours at will, I would.”

“Me too,” Laura said. It was one voice, very nearly, all three of her landing on it so close together that the edges blurred. She was looking at the table, not at either of them. “I wish today was just the wedding. Only that. Nothing else attached to it. Just a stupid, normal, loud wedding with bad speeches and a cake that falls over.”

“The cake’s not going to fall over,” Emi said.

“You don’t know that,” Laura said.

“I know the cake,” said Emi.

Laura laughed, and it cracked a little in the middle.

Andy didn’t say anything. There was something sitting behind his teeth that he wasn’t going to let out, not here, not to them, and he felt Laura feel it anyway, the way she always did. The one nearest him lifted her eyes to his face. She looked at him for a long moment. Then she looked back down at her mug, and didn’t ask, and Emi didn’t ask either, and he was grateful to both of them in a way he couldn’t have explained.

“I’m going to miss this,” Emi said after a while. “Mornings like this. You know? After. When everything’s different.”

“Different how?” Andy asked.

“I don’t know,” Emi said. “Bigger. More people at breakfast.” She smiled a little. “I like more people. But this one was ours first.”

“It was,” Laura said. “It still is.”

“Burnt toast and all,” Emi said.

“Burnt toast,” said Laura, “was Andy.”

“It was the toaster,” Andy said.

“You were standing next to the toaster,” said all three of her.

They let that one go on for a minute, softer than before, not really arguing anymore. Emi said she wanted a standing rule that whoever woke up first had to make the coffee, and Laura said that would always be Dawn, and Emi said that was the point, and Andy said he’d sign anything as long as nobody let him near the toaster again. It wasn’t about coffee. None of it was, not really, and all three of them knew it and kept talking anyway, as if the talking were a rope they could hold on to for a few more minutes. The air around the table had warmed a little, the way it always did when Emi was happy and close to people she loved, a faint sweetness in it that had no business being in a kitchen that smelled of butter. Nobody mentioned it. Andy breathed it in and held it.

Then Emi stood up.

She gathered her plate and her cup and his, with three different hands, and put them in the sink. She came back around the table, bent, and kissed Andy on the top of the head. Then she went around to Laura and kissed each of her in turn, one, two, three, quick and certain.

“I love you,” Emi said, to both of them. “Both of you. All of you. I’ll see you out there.”

“Love you,” Andy said.

“Love you,” said Laura, from three places.

Emi went to the door, and stopped there, and waited.

Laura’s bodies stood up together.

She came around the table the way she’d come to breakfast, all at once and in order, and each of her bent to kiss him. The first on his mouth. The second on his cheek. The third on his forehead, lingering there a moment longer than the others, her hand on the back of his neck.

“See you at the aisle,” said all three of her.

“I’ll be there,” Andy said.

Then Laura and Emi went out through the bedroom together, Emi’s hand in one of Laura’s, and the door swung shut behind them, and the Suite was quiet.

Andy sat alone at the table for a long time, looking at the three plates, and the coffee going cold, and the bit of egg still floating in it.

---

Andy took the long way to Arabella’s terrace, and didn’t pretend to himself about why.

The Hotel was already awake around him. Somewhere below, doors kept opening and closing, and there were voices in the gardens, and twice he passed Mildred carrying something white and folded with the particular speed of a maid who had a great deal still to carry. Nobody stopped him. He was the groom, and grooms were apparently allowed to wander. He walked with his hands in his pockets and let the noise fall away behind him one corridor at a time, until the only sound left was his own footsteps and, eventually, the wind.

He had tried, on the way, to put together what he meant to say. It kept coming apart in his hands. Every version sounded like a speech, and he didn’t want a speech. He wanted the kind of conversation you have with someone across a kitchen table at two in the morning, when neither of you is pretending anymore, and he had no idea how to start one of those on purpose. Somewhere under all of it sat the plain fact he’d been carrying for months: that she was finishing. Today, maybe. The season was ending, and she was ending with it, and whatever happened in the next twelve hours, there might not be another morning like this one with her in it.

He didn’t know what to do with that. He kept walking.

She was there. He’d known she would be.

Arabella stood at the rail with her back to him, looking out at the water. She was already dressed for the day, something long and pale that moved when the wind did, her hair pinned up in a way that looked effortless and almost certainly wasn’t. The terrace still held a little of the previous day’s festivities: two chairs pulled closer together than they needed to be, a glass someone had forgotten on the low wall, a scatter of pale petals caught in the corner of a planter and stirring there. Irrationally, Andy wondered if she had had a party of her own, last night.

“Andy,” she said, without turning around.

“Hey.”

“You’re early.”

“I’m not anything yet. I’ve got hours.” He came up beside her and leaned on the rail. “I’m hiding, mostly.”

“From whom?”

“Everybody. Me.” He shrugged. “Nobody’s looking for me for a while.”

Arabella glanced at him sidelong, and the corner of her mouth lifted. “Then you’re welcome to hide here. It’s a very good terrace for it. I’d know.”

He didn’t answer that, and she didn’t seem to need him to.

For a while they just stood there. The sea below was very calm, the kind of flat, bright blue that looked painted on, and far out the closest of the eleven islands stood black and lonely against the sky. Arabella’s hand rested on the rail near his. Neither of them said anything that mattered. She pointed out a heron on the rocks. He asked whether it had been there all week. She said she’d stopped keeping track of the herons somewhere around her three thousandth season, and they both laughed, not very much, and went quiet again.

It was the easiest silence he’d had all morning, and he let it go on longer than he meant to, because he knew what came after it.

When he finally spoke, he kept his eyes on the island.

“There’s something,” he said. “Something I never said, because there was always going to be a later. And I don’t know that there is one, so.” He cleared his throat. “I forgave you. For taking me. For all of it, the whole start. I got there a long time ago, and it’s done, and I should have told you properly instead of letting you guess.”

Arabella’s hand tightened on the rail.

“And I’m grateful,” Andy went on, and now that he’d started he found it didn’t want to stop. “Not in a polite way. I mean it. You made me into somebody I wouldn’t have been. I was a guy who’d stopped living, Arabella. I was carrying a dead girl around everywhere I went and calling it a life. And you picked me up and put me here and made me look at things, and I resented you for it for a while, and you were right.” He swallowed. “You gave me Laura back. You gave her back to herself, too, which isn’t the same thing. And everyone else… Erin, Claire, all of them. Every one of those women has a life now that she wouldn’t have had. They have a family. Some of them have kids coming. That happened because you ran this place the way you ran it. And I’m grateful. For me. For Laura. For every one of them.”

He stopped because he’d run out of breath, not out of things to say. His hands were shaking a little on the rail—not from nerves, exactly, but from the strangeness of saying out loud a thing he had only ever carried. It had lived in him for so long as a private fact, like a stone in a pocket worn smooth by his thumb, that setting it down in the open air felt almost indecent.

Arabella didn’t answer.

He looked at her, finally, and saw that she couldn’t. Her face had come open in a way he had seen maybe twice before, the composure that was nearly always in perfect working order simply gone, as if someone had unpinned it. Her eyes were bright. Her mouth had pressed itself into a line, and the line was not holding. She turned her face a little away from him, toward the sea, and he let her, and for a long moment the only sound on the terrace was the wind worrying at the petals in the planter.

“I didn’t expect,” Arabella said at last, and her voice was not quite her own, “that you would lead with that. Today, of all days. I thought… I don’t know what I thought. That we might talk about the weather. That you might be angry with me.” She let out a breath that shook. “I had prepared for you to be angry with me, Andy. I had not prepared for this at all.”

“I’m not angry.”

“No. I can see that you aren’t.”

He waited until her hand had loosened on the rail. Then he went on, because there was one more thing, and he wasn’t going to fold it in where it didn’t belong.

“That doesn’t mean all of it was good,” he said quietly. “I’m not going to pretend it was. Some of your rules left marks that didn’t heal. Erin can’t wear clothes. Not a robe, not a towel, nothing, ever again. Marissa can’t walk into a room without her chest on display, whatever she’s been asked to wear, wherever she is. Liesa…” He hesitated. “Liesa takes off the last of her clothes and turns into something else. Something closer to an animal in heat. Every time. None of that’s gone. And it’s not really going to change, is it.”

Arabella didn’t flinch. She turned back from the sea and looked at him, and waited.

“I’m not thanking you for that,” Andy said. “Not for any of it. And I’m not forgiving you for it, either.” He saw her start to take that in, and pushed on before she could land it wrong. “But I understand that you didn’t really choose it. You were building inside a show that was made to be about sex, and whatever you handed out had to come out shaped like sex, whether you’d have picked that shape or not. That wasn’t a choice. It was a rule.”

He was quiet for a second, looking for the rest of it. Below them, the tide had started to turn; the flat blue was breaking up into small, bright creases along the rocks, and the heron had gone, as if it had heard enough.

“What I’ve actually watched,” he said, “is Erin, and Marissa, and Liesa, each of them, taking that and making it hers. Erin walks around like the sun owes her money. Marissa stopped apologizing for her own body somewhere along the way, and I don’t think she even noticed when. And Liesa married the woman she wanted and doesn’t hide from any of it anymore.” He looked at his hands. “It still costs them. It’ll always cost them. But it isn’t just something that was done to them now. It’s theirs. That’s the part I mean. That’s what I understand.”

Arabella held his eyes the whole time.

She didn’t argue with any of it. She didn’t reach for an apology, and she didn’t reach for thanks, and he understood, watching her, why she didn’t. There was nothing in what he’d described that she had done on her own. To thank him for not blaming her would have been to claim it, and she wouldn’t. She only stood there with the wind moving the pale fabric around her and let every word of it land, one at a time, as if each one were a stone she meant to keep.

“That’s fair,” she said finally. Her voice was steady again. “All of it.”

“Yeah?”

“Yes. It is fair, and it is true.” She looked out at the water. “The format was not mine. What they made of it is entirely theirs. I did what I could, but there were constraints I couldn’t budge. I still deserve the blame. But I appreciate the intent.”

He nodded. Arabella reached over and picked the forgotten glass off the low wall, turned it once in her fingers, and set it back down exactly where it had been, as if putting it anywhere else would have meant something. Neither of them said anything for a while.

It was the glass that brought it back to him, in the end. Or not the glass, exactly, but the way she had put it down: carefully, precisely, as if the world might notice if she got it wrong. He had watched her set down a teacup that way once, a long time ago, past midnight in his Suite.

“There’s something I’ve never asked you,” Andy said.

Arabella’s eyebrow went up a fraction. “Only one thing? I’m flattered.”

“One big one.” He rubbed his thumb along the rail. “The first night. After the First Challenge.”

She went very still.

“You came to the Suite,” Andy said. “Past midnight. You weren’t the Host. You took all of that off at the door, and you sat down and told me how many seasons you’d run on Earth, and I remember thinking the number couldn’t be real. Three thousand, seven hundred. You let the gown go, and you told me you never did this, not in all your years. And then you asked me to hold you.” He kept his voice even. “So I did. You fell asleep. You were turned away from me, facing the wall, and I lay there most of the night, and I didn’t know what any of it meant.”

Arabella said nothing. Her hands had gone flat on the rail.

“And the next morning Herman showed up with new voting hardware,” he went on. “Out of nowhere. Nobody had said anything about it. He installed it, and he left, and about ten seconds later the whole system glitched and started leaking the real Audience rankings. Just sitting there on the screen. I worked out what they meant, and I flipped my vote, and it deadlocked, and nobody went home. All eight of them stayed.” He shook his head slowly.

The wind moved her hair. She didn’t move at all.

“I’ve wondered about it for months,” Andy said. “Quietly. I never had a way to ask. It didn’t seem like the kind of thing one gets to ask the Host, and then later it didn’t seem like the kind of thing a friend asks, either, because what if the answer was something I’d have to carry. So I didn’t. Not even after the vote, when I knew exactly whose help I’d had.” He turned, finally, and looked at her. “But I’m asking now. Was that connected? Herman, the hardware, the leak. Was that connected to the night before? Was that you?”

He didn’t say anything else. He watched her face.

He had spent a long time learning to read the people around him, and most of what he’d learned was useless on Arabella; she had spent a great deal longer learning not to be read. But she wasn’t hiding now. He saw the question reach her. He saw her mouth open very slightly and close again, and something move behind her eyes that was not surprise, but the look of a person who has been holding a door shut for a long time and has just felt the handle turn from the other side. Her chin dipped. Her breath went out of her slowly. She didn’t look away from him.

He knew, then. He waited anyway, because he wanted to hear it.

“Yes,” Arabella said.

Just that, first. Then, after a moment: “Yes. It was me. I had summoned Herman before the First Challenge even started, and that morning, I called in a favor, and he did that for me.” Her voice was very quiet and very clear. “You are right, Andy. It happened exactly the way you have just begun to guess.”

Andy’s hands had closed around the rail at some point. He made them open.

“Why?”

“Because you held me,” she said simply. “And asked for nothing. And I had not been held like that by anyone in a very long time, and I did not know what to do with it, except that I could not stand to watch you lose anyone the next day.” She looked down at her hands. “It was not a bargain. I want you to understand that. I did not come to you that night meaning to trade anything for anything. I only woke up afterward so relieved that there was still someone like you left in the world that I would have done almost anything to keep you in it a little longer.”

He thought of that morning—the screen flickering, the numbers spilling out of it that shouldn’t have been there, and the cold, sick lurch of understanding what they meant, and then the other lurch, bigger, of understanding what he could do with them. He had thought, at the time, that he’d been lucky. He had thought, for a while, that the island had simply blinked at the right moment.

It hadn’t blinked. Somebody had held its eyes shut for him.

He didn’t say anything for a while. He didn’t try to name what he was feeling. It was large and quiet and sat somewhere under his ribs, and it didn’t need a name.

“Thank you,” he said finally.

“You’re welcome.” Her mouth moved, not quite a smile. “Three months late.”

“Better than never.”

“Much better,” Arabella said.

After that, something in the conversation let go. It was as if they’d both set down something heavy at the same time and only then noticed how long they’d been carrying it. They leaned on the rail side by side and talked about nothing much. Small things. The kind of moments neither of them had thought to mark while they were happening: an afternoon that had gone better than it should have, a joke that had landed in the wrong room, a morning when she’d caught him at something ridiculous and pretended not to.

“You were terrible at pretending not to see,” Andy told her at one point.

“I was excellent at it. You were simply worse at hiding.”

“That’s the same thing.”

“It is not remotely the same thing,” said Arabella, with enormous dignity, and he laughed.

Andy found himself laughing more than he’d expected to. Arabella laughed too, low, the real one, not the one she used for cameras. None of it was important. Neither of them tried to make it important.

The sun was higher. Andy knew, without checking, that somewhere in the building someone was starting to look for him.

He didn’t move yet. He thought about the list of things he’d walked up here meaning to say, and found that almost all of it had been said, and that the rest didn’t need saying after all. It was not an emptiness, but the other thing, the lightness of a pack set down at the end of a long climb. He wondered how long it would last once he went back inside. Probably not long.

“Andy,” Arabella said.

“Yeah.”

“I would like to say something, before one of us has to go.”

He turned toward her.

“You, and your women, have felt as family to me,” Arabella said. She said it without any softness to hide behind, the way she said the gravest things, every word set down separately. “It would have been easy to consider this season a project I took on to make amends for something. But you all have become family to each other, and in a way, to me. I have had very little of that in a very long existence, and I wanted you to hear it from me while I can still say it.”

Andy’s throat closed. He had to wait for it to open again. Out on the water a gull dropped, came up with nothing, and dropped again, and he watched it do that twice before he trusted his voice.

“You are family,” he said. “To me. To Laura. To all of us. I don’t…” He stopped, shook his head, and started over, because it deserved better than trailing off. “You’re family, Arabella, too. Not the Host. Not the woman who kidnapped me. Just family. The real kind. I don’t know how to say it any bigger than that.”

“You don’t need to,” she said. “That is quite big enough.”

Neither of them reached any further than that word. There was nowhere further either of them could have seen to reach. Family was a large enough thing to stand in on a terrace on a bright morning, and they stood in it, and let it be exactly as large as it was; and if it would one day turn out to be larger still, larger than either of them had any way of knowing, the morning gave no sign of it.

Arabella was the one who straightened first. She stepped back from the rail, and Andy stood with her, and for a second they just looked at each other, the way people do when they both know what comes next and neither wants to be the one to start it.

Then she stepped into him.

He put his arms around her before he’d thought about it. She was taller than he always remembered—and lighter, somehow, as if most of her weight had always been something she carried rather than something she was—and she held on hard, her chin on his shoulder and her hands flat against his back. She smelled faintly of something earthy, herbal, and green, and of something older underneath it, like myth. He could feel her breathing, slower than his, and then, after a while, not slower at all. He held her just as hard. He didn’t loosen his grip, and she didn’t loosen hers, and it went on well past the point where a hug between friends would ordinarily end. Neither of them was willing to be the one who let go. Neither of them knew for certain there would be another chance to do this, and neither of them said so.

When they finally stepped apart, her eyes were wet, and she didn’t do anything about it.

“Go and get ready,” Arabella said. “You have a great many women waiting for you.”

“I know. Seven of them.”

“Seven at the altar. Nine in the pews, and every one of them will notice if you’re late.” She paused. “And Andy.”

“Yeah?”

She looked at him for a long moment. Whatever she’d been about to say, she didn’t say it. She only reached up and straightened his collar, once, the way family does, and let her hand fall.

Neither of them said goodbye. It was there anyway, in the space between them, plain as the light on the water. Andy nodded to her, and she nodded back, and he turned and went inside to finish getting ready.

He didn’t look back until he reached the door. When he did, she was standing at the rail again, alone, looking out at the sea and at the islands of the siblings she would, at last, soon join.

---

The firepit was cold, and Harper had it to herself.

Nobody had lit it since the night before. The ash in the bowl had gone grey and soft, and the stone benches around it were still damp from the early air, and the whole place had the particular hush of somewhere that had been loud a few hours ago and hadn’t yet been told what to do with the morning. Harper liked it that way. She had come out with a cup of tea she’d stopped drinking ten minutes ago and a list of things she was trying very hard not to think about, and she’d been sitting on the east bench with her boots crossed at the ankle, doing a fairly good job of it.

She was not, as a rule, a woman who got ambushed. So when she heard boots on the path behind her, she turned with a little more interest than alarm.

Then she stopped turning, and simply stared.

Someone was coming up the path three times over, and every one of her was Harper.

Or near enough. Long blue coats, cut the way hers was cut, with the same brass buttons catching the light and the same fringed epaulets riding three sets of shoulders. Corsets over frilly linen. Tight breeches tucked into heeled boots that rang, faintly, on the flagstones, in a way that meant somebody had gone to real trouble to find metal ones. The hair on every head was a sea-green wig, pinned and shaped until it fell almost exactly the way her own hair usually did. The skin was blue, carefully and completely, every visible inch of it, a shade that was not quite hers but was chasing it hard. Pointed ears. And at every hip a long sword in a scabbard, its hilt bound in a knot that someone had very obviously studied from a picture. The fact that every one of her was significantly shorter than Harper somehow didn’t detract from the accuracy.

The row stopped on the other side of the firepit. Every face in it wore the same smile.

Harper looked at the costumes. She looked at the swords. Then she looked at the row itself, and felt her eyebrows climb.

Laura. Obviously Laura. Nobody else on this island would have done this. But Laura, as of the last time Harper had seen her, and every episode Harper had ever watched, came in a set of two.

“Okay,” Harper said slowly. “I have questions, and I’d like to go in order. First of all, this is incredible, and I mean that. Second of all…” She pointed, one finger moving along the row. “One. Two. Three. That’s three. You’re three. When did you become three? What exactly am I looking at?”

“There was a promise,” all three of her said, in the same breath, with perfectly straight faces, “made in the last round of fan mail.”

Harper waited.

“And promises,” all three of her went on, “are meant to be kept.”

That was, apparently, all she was going to get. Laura squared all three pairs of shoulders at once, rested three left hands on three sword hilts, and turned every one of herself, not toward Harper at all, but toward the cold firepit, as if addressing an audience that had gathered on the far side of it.

“We are gathered here this morning,” said Laura, in a voice pitched noticeably higher than her own, “to honor a woman.”

Harper opened her mouth.

“A woman,” Laura continued, “of great courage. Of great taste in outerwear. A woman who, across many worlds and several very long letters, has been a true friend.”

“I’m sitting right here,” Harper said reasonably, gesturing at herself and the real coat. “Laura. Four feet away. The actual one.”

Not one of her so much as glanced at Harper. It was genuinely impressive. Harper had seen honor guards with less discipline.

“To Harper,” said Laura, to the firepit, “who was a friend to Andy when he had almost no one on this island who wasn’t bound to him by a game. Who wrote to him. Who wrote back to him, which is harder. Who showed up.” One of her placed a hand solemnly over her heart. “To Harper, who gave the two of us a piece of her own kingdom. Land. Actual land, with dirt, and a view, for two people who didn’t even know yet whether they’d have a home to go back to. We have not stopped talking about it. We will never stop talking about it. It is an extremely good piece of land.”

Harper felt her mouth twitch. She tried to hold it still and failed. The voice was the worst part—or the best part, depending on how she chose to feel about it—because Laura had clearly studied it: the pitch, the clipped consonants, the little upward lift at the end of a sentence that Harper had never once noticed in herself until this exact moment. It landed the way a recording of your own laugh lands when someone plays it back at a party: mortifying, and accurate, and impossible to argue with.

“And to Harper,” Laura went on, and her voice had changed, just slightly, underneath the bit, “who has been kind to this whole family. To every one of us. Not just to him. Who looks at a house full of women with tails and wings and too many arms and extra bodies and sees people. Who never once made anyone in it feel like a spectacle.” All three of her bowed, deeply, to the ashes. “I am, forever, your devoted fan.”

There was a pause.

Harper set her tea down on the bench beside her.

“Laura,” she said, more gently this time. “Hey. Are you actually all right? Under all of this?”

Laura didn’t answer. The one in the middle pressed both hands to her chest and gazed at the sky with an expression of such exaggerated, swooning devotion that it bordered on the operatic. The two on either side nodded along, slowly, in perfect time, as though agreeing with something profound.

Harper looked at all three of her for a long moment.

She knew that kind of performance. She’d given it herself, more than once, on mornings she’d rather not remember, in a season that had been much less kind than this one. It was the kind of joke that only held up as long as nobody leaned on it. So she stopped leaning.

“You know,” Harper said, conversationally, to no one in particular, “I’ve heard the real Harper is terrible at mornings. Absolute disaster before her second cup. I’ve heard she once challenged a sea wall to a duel.”

The middle body’s lips pressed together very hard.

“Lost, too,” Harper added. “Badly. The sea wall had the high ground.”

One of the flanking bodies made a small, strangled sound.

Harper picked her tea back up and didn’t say anything else. She just sat there, in her real coat, beside three copies of it, and let Laura be what she was being for as long as she needed to. The wind came across the benches and tugged at three green wigs and one head of real hair. Out past the path, somebody was hanging lanterns.

After a while, all three of Laura went still at once.

It wasn’t the stillness of the bit. Harper could see the difference. The shoulders came down. The swooning hands dropped. The three faces, blue-painted and pointed-eared and absurd, lost the smile together, and what was left underneath looked very tired and very young.

“I needed this,” Laura said.

It came out as one voice. All three mouths moved, but what reached Harper sounded like a single woman, speaking low.

“I needed somewhere to put this morning,” Laura said. “Somewhere that wasn’t the wedding, and wasn’t…” She stopped. “Wasn’t the other thing. Just somewhere stupid. I needed to be ridiculous for ten minutes. I’m sorry I did it at you.”

“Don’t be,” Harper said. “It’s a very good coat. Honestly, the epaulets are better than mine. I’m going to have to ask where you got them, and I’m going to have to be very dignified about it. Just don’t let Skye see you, or she’ll pass out. I mean it.”

Laura laughed, and it broke in the middle, and she didn’t try to fix it.

Harper waited a moment. Then she stood, and came around the firepit, and sat down on the bench closest to Laura, close enough that the nearest body could have touched her knee.

“Can I tell you something?” Harper said. “Not as a Host. As somebody who’s been watching your husband for a while.”

All three of Laura nodded.

“I’ve known Andy longer than almost anyone you’re going to meet outside this family,” Harper said. “I was the first friend he made here. He told me so. I didn’t believe him, at first, but he meant it.” She turned her cup between her hands. “And I’ve watched him. Every season has a way of taking things from a person, and his has tried most of them. I’ve watched him lose, and lose again, and climb back up out of it every time, sometimes with nothing but his fingernails. I watched him bring you back.” She looked up. “From the river. From the dead, Laura. I watched him do the thing nobody does. So whatever today turns out to be, I know exactly who I’d put my money on. I’d bet on him. Every time.”

Laura didn’t say anything. Her three faces had all gone wet under the paint.

“I want to say more than that,” Harper went on, more quietly. “I can’t. There’s a binding on me for today. A waiver. It isn’t mine to break, and believe me, I’ve read it very carefully, looking for the gaps.” Her mouth twisted. “It means I can’t warn you of anything, and I can’t tell you anything I’m not supposed to, and I can’t promise you anything I don’t get to control. But I wanted you to have this much before you go. That’s the part nobody can stop me saying.”

Laura nodded, slowly. All three of her.

The two of them sat together for a while. Nobody said anything. The lanterns went up one by one along the far path, and somewhere up at the house a door banged and a voice called for someone who didn’t answer.

Eventually, Laura’s bodies stood up, all three at once, and straightened their coats.

“Thank you,” Laura said. It was three voices again, close and warm and almost in character. “On behalf of your devoted fan. And on behalf of me.” A pause. “Mostly on behalf of me.”

“Anytime,” Harper said. “You can keep the coat.”

“I was always going to keep the coat.”

Laura turned, all of her together, and went back down the path toward the house to finish getting ready, three bright blue backs in a row, three borrowed swords swinging, three pairs of metal heels ringing on the stones until the sound was gone.

Harper sat alone by the cold firepit and looked at her tea for a long time. She went back over every word she’d said, the way she’d go back over a battle plan, checking each line against the waiver for anything it might count as a breach. She didn’t think it would. She wasn’t sure. She wondered, not for the first time that week, what she would do if the moment came when being sure stopped mattering.

Then she drank it.