Each night, after the game was won, the winner would ask a question. It was how Cordelia discovered that James didn’t like parsnips, that he sometimes wished he were taller (though, as she reminded him, he was a very respectable six feet), that he’d always wanted to see Constantinople. And how she told James that she was afraid of snakes even though she knew it was silly, and that she wished she could play the cello, and that she thought her best feature was her hair. (James had only smiled at this, and when she tried to make him tell her what he was thinking of, he waved it away.) The teasing and laughter after was often the best part; Cordelia had loved James as a friend before she’d ever loved him another way, and this was when she was reminded why.

She liked the way conversation would fade and slow as they both became sleepier, but neither wanted to stop talking about anything and everything. She talked about traveling the world, and what she had seen: chained Barbary apes in Marrakech, the lemon trees of Menton, the Bay of Naples after a storm, a procession of elephants at the Red Fort in Delhi. James spoke longingly of travel: how as a boy he had kept a map on his wall with pins stuck into the places he hoped to one day go. Since neither had ever been to Constantinople, they spent a night pulling books and maps off the shelves, reading accounts of travels to the city aloud, discussing the sights they’d want to see—the minarets of mosques illuminated at night, St. Sophia, the ancient port, the city divided by its river. James lay on the rug with his arms crossed behind his head as Cordelia read aloud from an old travel memoir: “The Queen of Cities was before me, throned on her peopled hills, with the silver Bosphorus, garlanded with palaces, flowing at her feet.”

He chuckled, only a sliver of gold visible beneath his half-closed eyelids. “You’re better than a Baedeker,” he said. “Go on, then.”

And she did, until the fire burned down and she had to rouse him, and they crept upstairs together. They parted at their separate doors. Sometimes she thought his hand lingered at her shoulder as he kissed her good night, chastely, on the cheek.