Wy could feel Liam looking at her. She knew he was remembering her insistence on a small wedding, Bill to officiate, Moses to give her away, two random witnesses they’d pulled off their stools at the bar. None of Wy’s blood relatives from Ik’iki’ka. “Did Alexei know?” she said.

“I don’t know. I wondered at the time. But Kimberley was smart and capable and a true beauty, quite the catch. He might have known and not have cared.”

Toward the end of the visit, Liam and Wy exchanged a glance, and Wy said, “We were so sorry to hear about your brother Hilary.”

“Who?” Sybilla said vaguely, and for a moment Liam thought she was going to phase from one reality to another. He looked around and spotted a robe lying on her bed. Just in case. And then Sybilla’s eyes sharpened into the now and she said, “Oh yes, Hilary. Well, my dears, I appreciate the sentiment but Hilary and I were never close.”

“What a shame,” Wy murmured.

“Yes, well, he was a bit of a prude, my brother. He did not approve of either my job or my lifestyle, I’m afraid.”

“He didn’t like you singing?”

“Not singing or slinging liquor, either,” Sybilla said cheerfully. “Although to be fair, his dislike of my owning a bar might have had something to do with his intolerance for alcohol. It wasn’t as if he could partake himself, you see.”

There was a pause. “His intolerance for alcohol?” Liam said.

“You mean like allergic?” Wy said.

“Oh my yes,” Sybilla said, “acutely. We found out when we were teenagers. The two of us were at a party at a friend’s house and his parents weren’t home so of course we got into the liquor cabinet. After one drink Hilary started vomiting and his blood pressure dropped so low and so fast that he actually fainted. No, he never touched liquor, my brother.”

“Who else knew this, Sybilla?” Liam said in a voice that sounded strange to his own ears.

She shrugged. “Myself, a few close friends. It wasn’t something he talked about.” She reflected. “The fainting incident didn’t do his social life any good afterward, I’m afraid. The other kids nicknamed him the Dying Swan and he was incapable of laughing it off, so he carried that all the rest of the way through high school. I think he went to college out of state to get away from it. And then, when he did come home, the arthritis kicked in. He was three years younger than I was and he looked thirty years older.”

Illness might have had that effect, Liam thought.

So might guilt.

“Poor Hilary,” Sybilla said. “He never really had a chance at life, you know? I’m certain he died a virgin.”

She looked up to see them staring at her. “What?”

Acknowledgments

ALL MY GRATITUDE GOES TO BARBARA Peters and Nic Cheetham, who never beat up on me for being first one, and then two, and then three, and now four months over deadline. The price of an understanding editor and publisher is far above rubies. The title of my next work is going to be Love and Not Writing in the Time of Covid-19.