Max chuckled. “Can you imagine if I went home and told Mother and Father that I was done with Lavinia and was marrying Dani?” He thought back to his grand exit from the wedding.

Seb turned serious. “You know, Max, you can marry whomever you want. They can’t prevent it. They can make life unpleasant for a while, but ultimately, they can’t do anything about it.”

“Actually, I have to tell you something.” He filled Seb in on how he’d refused to help Mother round up Father at the wedding and about how it had felt like a decisive shift in how he related to them. “Of course, I have no idea how things are going to be when I get home. They’ll probably try to pretend that nothing is different. As far as Father is concerned, there won’t be anything different. It won’t be as if Mother will have said, ‘Maximillian refused to assist me with wrangling you in your embarrassingly inebriated state.’”

“And you want him to know,” Seb said.

“Yes. I realize that it probably sounds hollow, given all the other times that I’ve behaved in ways that have displeased them, but—”

“This time it’s different,” Seb said vehemently, finishing the sentence the way Max had been planning to. “You’re done playing by their rules.”

“Indeed. But I don’t know how to make them see that.”

“We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.”

The we in that sentence felt like a tonic.

“Anyway,” Seb said with a chuckle, “I’ll come out when I get home. They’ll lose their minds, then your not behaving the way they want won’t seem so bad.”

Seb was in jest, but it was another example of how much the tables had turned. Regardless, Max didn’t want to lose track of the fact that his brother was planning to do something momentous. “I wonder if the world has changed enough that they won’t care that you’re gay.”

“I’ve wondered that, too. But it doesn’t really matter because they will care that it’s Torkel who’s my . . . person. They’ll see him as a servant.”

“It is very Upstairs, Downstairs of you.” Max couldn’t help but find his brother’s use of the phrase my person adorable.

“Joking aside,” Seb said, “I think all you can do is try to keep the truth in front of you. Try not to hide it or hide from it. That’s what I’m attempting to do.”

Hmm. That was both well put and profound in its simplicity. “How’d you get so smart?”

“This is the part where I’m tempted to make a crack about how I went to a vastly superior school while you stayed home and worked with a tutor, but I think this is actually the part where I tell you that I know why you did that.”