“Hello, excuse me?” said Patrick on his tippy-toes at the countertop. “I have some questions about the train set. It is quite a lot of questions. Hari, say hello. Sometimes he forgets to say hello unless I tell him, but he is really quite clever. When I help him.”

Hari was a beautiful child, with messy straight black hair and olive skin, and he smiled cheerfully. “Hiya,” he said in a surprisingly deep voice, his accent much thicker than Patrick’s. “Ah like your train set, ken.”

“Well,” said Carmen, “I’m going to be doing a story in a little while—would you like to stay for it?”

Hari looked immediately interested; Patrick, less so.

“I can read for myself perfectly well,” he announced. “I am six.”

“All right, Jacob Rees-Mogg,” said Carmen, before remembering she was being nice to children these days—everyone’s children. But Ramsay just laughed.

“Patrick, what did we talk about showing off?”

“Being able to read is not showing off!” And he opened his backpack and pulled out a large paperback.

“What is he reading?” asked Carmen.

“Uh, Teach Your Child to Read,” said Ramsay.

There was a momentary silence.

“Aye, gies the story,” said Hari, just as the gaggle of children for story time started to arrive after school.

To her amazement, given not just the short notice but also the debacle that had happened last time, she had another good crowd of children. The girls were neat and tidy in their little kilts; the boys were wearing shorts even in the freezing cold, their bright red or blue socks—depending on their school—lagging at half-mast.

“Is this story going to be frightening?” said Phoebe straight off the bat as they arranged themselves at the front.

“Shh!” said another child.

“No, I can talk actually—that’s my aunt.”

Carmen found herself overwhelmingly proud and happy at this.

“Hello, children,” she said. She glanced around, noticing a few familiar faces. There were actually more than there had been before.

“I, like, totally cried so much,” one girl of about eight was solemnly telling her friend. “It was amazing.”

Carmen had briefly glanced at the sheaf of papers she’d printed out at home from Blair’s email when Skylar sidled in, holding up her phone.

“I’m just going to video it?” she said. “I was going to livestream it, but he’s busy with meetings all day?”

Carmen froze inside. She realized now that this was exactly why she hadn’t mentioned it. Because he wasn’t asking her because she was special or because he couldn’t wait to see her. He was asking because he knew she’d do it, and he knew Skylar would do it too.

And she felt absurd and tiny and incredibly foolish and like the world’s biggest idiot—Sofia would never do anything like this.