She could tell Jane didn’t quite understand but wasn’t sure what to say.

“Just sit with it,” Jane said. “I didn’t think I ever wanted to be the pregnant one. And then, well. I listened to CeCe, I listened to what I didn’t want to hear. One of life’s great pleasures is figuring out when and how to change your mind. But you’re not wrong. Marriage is an inequitable trap for most women. Do a civil partnership instead. Most of the same benefits. And you know, he’s patient. It took you eight years to officially move in together.”

Even that made Ayanna pause. She was fully committed; they lived together.

Ayanna wondered if this was the process already. Wasn’t telling Jane a step toward wanting to compromise? She didn’t want to tell Jane about Margot, not before she had told Felix. That, too, was a reminder of how much she had built her life around him. There were things she always wanted him to be the first person to hear. Maybe the problem on some level was that she felt guilty. Here she was, far older now than Olivia would ever be. Olivia had wanted a husband and kids and a house filled with plants and dogs. Why should she—the person who’d never wanted to get married—have an approximation of that?

“No matter what you do,” Jane said, “you already have something beautiful together. You don’t have to do what everyone else does.”

It wasn’t that Ayanna had expected a normal, quiet funeral for Stephen’s dad. It would’ve been deeply out of character for him to have a church service or to pick only one hundred of his closest friends and associates to pack into a funeral followed by a buffet. Stephen’s dad had been rich in a way Ayanna could not truly understand: not homes but estates; owning seemingly unrelated businesses or at least shares in them that were interesting to him only based on their ability to generate disparate sources of income; dollars springing up from making the right eye contact with someone at a party who knew a good idea. As Ayanna stepped out of the rideshare, a woman dressed in all black was waiting to serve them vodka martinis or some sort of blackberry tonic mocktail. While they watched her shake the martini, Jane pointed to what appeared to be an elaborate art display celebrating Stephen’s dad. There was a painting of him with his head shown in a regal style juxtaposed against an abstracted background. An even bigger black-and-white photo of him and a maybe four-year-old Stephen wearing tuxedoes and holding hands. A statue of a child holding a terrier. And below each one, an elaborate display of deep-red, almost black, roses.

“Have you ever worked a funeral like this before?” Jane asked the bartender.