“If you’ll excuse me a moment, I think I’ll have a smoke outside before dinner.”

A HALF HOUR LATER, Iris found him beyond the lawn and the shrubbery, all the way near the sea cliffs. He stood with his hands in his pockets and stared over the Channel waters, pink and purple with sunset.

“You almost had me for a moment,” she said, “and then I remembered you don’t smoke.”

“Ah, foiled again.”

“Dinner’s ready, if you’re ready to come in.”

He held out his elbow. “Shall we?”

Iris took his elbow with her hand, but she didn’t turn back to the house. “Philip, I’m so sorry. I wish I could help.”

“Iris—”

“I hope—I’ve been worried—I hope it doesn’t hurt you, seeing all of ours all running about—”

“No! God, no. The opposite. I can’t tell you what it means to me. Your taking me in like this, like a stray uncle.”

She couldn’t help it. She lifted her hand and found his mauled ear, the scars on the side of his face. “Not like an uncle at all,” she said.

The scars were softer than she expected—like touching a palm, lightly calloused. Philip didn’t flinch, even when her finger traced the ridge of mangled cartilage that was once a perfect ear. He lifted his fingers and touched the back of her hand.

“Do you know something, you’re the only woman who actually looks at me. Straight at me, I mean, not sideways.”

“I love to look at you.”

Where did those words come from? Some other Iris must have said them, some Iris she didn’t even know. The real Iris adored her husband, in spite of all his flaws and his anguish; the real Iris never dreamed of looking at another man. The real Iris kept her husband’s secrets. The real Iris was loyal only to Sasha, and the things that Sasha was loyal to; she understood that he did what he did—drank what he drank—because he was torn apart.

But this Iris seemed equally real. This Iris felt as if some wound in her chest was knitting together right now, under the sweetness of sherry on Philip Beauchamp’s breath—like the scent of home, the smell of something that’s loyal to you.

She put her arm around Philip’s neck and rose on her toes. She caught his stutter of hesitation on her lips and kissed it away. From the house and the driveway drifted the sound of voices, but she was too busy kissing Philip Beauchamp’s suddenly fierce mouth to notice or care what the rest of the world was doing right now, the real world she still belonged to.