Everyone exhaled. Lori had been chosen, and that was only fitting because Lori was one of them now and nobody could argue with that. Right? Duly noted?

Yes, but that was just the preliminary to the main event, because Tim dipped back into the sombrero, took a second to unfold the slip of paper in his hand, then looked straight at him.

The tradition, three whole weeks in the making, was for the selected couple to publically embrace or at least clasp hands, make a tour of the room to accept everyone’s congratulations (and relief?), then proceed through the library doors and out into the currents of the party-in-progress while Tim led the way waving a censer of Tibetan incense and Charlie thumped out a slow funereal march on a pair of bongos clutched under one arm. It was no different this time, the anti-game become its own game already. Fitz barely had a chance to register Joanie’s reaction—was she scowling or was that an ironic smirk?—before he found himself in the center of the room beside Lori, tiny Lori, Lori of the slumped shoulders and eyes that seemed always to be focused on something off in the distance, the drug coming on in a cascade of shattering reds and oranges and the carpet beneath him falling away as if he were in an elevator and present on every floor simultaneously. Lori moved into him, her hip pressed to his thigh, and gave him a noncommittal hug, the sort of hug she might have given her grandmother on the steps of the nursing home, and he felt as strange as he ever had. Then the bongos were bongoing and all the faces were parting and he was weaving out of the library and through the sitting room—more faces, grins, jazz like a horse collar—and down the hallway to the back door and the night, Lori at his side and her hand clutched in his as if she were a schoolchild on a class trip. But this was no class and she was no child.

The night air hit him like a bucket of cold water and he must have frozen there on the steps of the porch, everything cycling back inside him again, because Lori, who’d removed her hand from his to slip on her mittens, said, “Well, are we going or not?” and her words hung there in front of him, written on the air.