“No, don’t. It’s okay. I like this room. And good for Lillie Langtry for standing up for what she wanted. It’s just…” Anna trailed off.

Vronsky reached across the table and took Anna’s hand. “Tell me what you want. I’ll do whatever makes you happy.”

At his touch, Anna blushed. Lunch in a private dining room was fine, but holding hands was definitely not. She pulled her hand back out of his grasp. “I am happy,” she said. “Happy that Jon Snow won second place. It’s nice to have someone to celebrate with.”

She was about to tell Vronsky that her father would have been here with her if he could, but their waiter entered at that moment, a lanky man as tall as the maître d’ had been short, and as surly as the other was friendly. Anna decided to wait to thank Vronsky for his Valentine’s Day gifts, and instead the two ended up discussing every family animal they’d each had the pleasure of knowing. Vronsky was a skilled storyteller and captured his mother’s voice in a way that was accurate, but not disrespectful. His best story was about the time he and his older brother, Kiril, were charged with looking after one of his mother’s lap dogs, who they had managed to let wander off in an airport in Italy. The two of them searched everywhere, frantically trying to find the Yorkie, which they did only minutes before boarding their plane. Or so they thought. After they had taken off, they realized they had the wrong dog.

“How did you find out?” Anna asked, her face bright from laughing.

“When the dog lifted his hind leg and peed on the man’s shoe across the aisle. You see, my mother’s dog was named Petunia. She was a girl!”

Anna then shared the history of how she came to love Newfoundlands, which she followed by telling the story of her six-year-old declaration of having a dog at Westminster one day when she was grown up.