“Max, darling, I’d like to take your father upstairs.”

Other than a brief conversation in the receiving line after the ceremony, he’d succeeded in his mission to avoid his parents. But he couldn’t avoid this. “Max, darling, I’d like to take your father upstairs” was code for “Your father is drunker than usual and about to embarrass us.” Max and his mother had an unspoken agreement to put aside their differences and join forces to extract his father in these sorts of situations.

Max sighed. “Where is he?”

“He’s talking politics with Lucille Müller.”

Lucille Müller was the leader of the far-left opposition party in Parliament. She was not a good person for Father to be talking to, especially if he’d been keeping up his usual pace at the bar. Remarkably, Max hadn’t been counting this evening. He looked around for Sebastien, who apparently hadn’t been counting either, because he was nowhere to be seen. “All right. Let’s go.” He steeled himself.

In some ways, even with all the chaos and unkindness that characterized his family interactions, these rare moments when his mother asked for his help managing his father were the worst. They didn’t happen very often. Only when they were in public and there wasn’t household staff on hand.

It was in these moments that Max was reminded how elementally alone he was. One would think, given that his mother was asking him to help, that there would be a sort of solidarity in the act of trying to manage Father. There was certainly a common understanding of what needed to happen. But somehow that didn’t translate into actual understanding. Understanding of the emotional variety, the sort that was supposed to travel, unconditionally, from parent to child.

“You and Lavinia looked like you had a lovely evening,” Mother said.

“Yes,” he said flatly.

“Your father was very happy.”

“Grand. That is the most important thing, after all.”

“Max.” She huffed a martyred sigh. “Don’t start.”

He eyed Father. He was right in Lucille’s face, jawing about something and shaking his finger. The crowd had thinned considerably, and their heated argument was beginning to draw the attention of people near them.

“Don’t you ever get tired of it, Mother?”

She looked at him for a long time, and for an instant, he thought he saw something different in her eyes—a flash of uncertainty, perhaps? It was gone before he could puzzle it out. “I’m sure I don’t know what you mean.”