This is the answer Asia wants, but she resents Hattie being the one to have it. Hattie can have June if she likes: Asia doesn’t care so much about this brother who left the house before she was quite old enough to know he was in it. But Edwin is hers. She doesn’t want to hear that he and Hattie are close.

That night Asia asks across the darkness between their beds if Rosalie doesn’t find it a little strange, how June and Hattie showed up with no warning.

“Clementina is divorcing him,” Rosalie says, which Mother must have told her and not said to Asia. Mother and Rosalie have no secrets between them. It’s just Asia left on the outside as if she’s still a child. “He needs it done quietly. You know that he’s already married Hattie?”

Despite the overabundance of evidence to the contrary, Asia thinks well of actors. For actresses she has nothing but contempt—those women who make public love to men for money. She would never go onstage herself, has never even considered it. Hattie retired from the profession when June pretended to marry her and somehow Asia finds that narrow throughway that allows her to excuse her bigamist sister-in-law while remaining thoroughly shocked by the behavior of Catherine Sinclair.

“Have you ever wanted to travel?” she asks Rosalie. “Just take off and see the world?”

“Never,” Rosalie answers immediately, as if she doesn’t even have to think about it.

—

June’s visit is a brief one. Three weeks later, his divorce in motion, he returns to San Francisco with his family. Saying good-bye proves hard, especially on Mother. “How many years before we’re together again?” she asks. Her eyes are a watery red. She holds the squirming Marion tightly against her breast. “How big you’ll be when I see you next! You won’t even remember me.”

John will ride his horse alongside the carriage into Bel Air and say his good-byes there. Having his older brother around was a wonderful respite for John. The two men had an instant, comfortable rapport, June preferring this younger brother to the other one.

Edwin’s drinking is worse than ever, though June never says so. Neither Catherine Sinclair nor Laura Keene had a successful run in San Francisco and in both cases, reviews laid much of the blame on their leading man. Edwin might at least bother to memorize his lines, critics suggested.