On their first date, Samuel had taken Lucy to Pete’s Pies. Everyone loved Pete’s Pies. It was a small pie shop run—and you’re ahead of me here—by a man named Pete. Pete’s pies were perfect pastry constructions filled with meat and vegetables, or just vegetables if you were that way inclined, and just meat if you really, really liked meat. The pastry was as golden as the most perfect dawn, the filling never too hot and never too cold. Pete also made what he called his “dessert pies,” triangles of apple, or rhubarb, or pear that made grown men weep for their sheer loveliness, and grown women weep with them. There was nobody—I mean, nobody—who didn’t like Pete’s pies. No one. You’d have to be mad not to like them. You’d have to be impossible to please. You’d have to be—

Lucy Highmore.

On that first date, Lucy had politely declined to share a pie, and had simply sipped delicately at a glass of water—so delicately, in fact, that natural evaporation caused the level in the glass to drop more than Lucy’s sips.

Now, months later, she and Samuel were still together, but both of them were starting to think that they shouldn’t be, although neither could quite find the words to say it. They were also back in Pete’s Pies. Since Lucy never seemed to eat much, it didn’t really matter where they went. She could choose not to eat in Pete’s Pies just as easily as she could choose not to eat anywhere else. They were the only people in the pie shop apart from old Mr. Probble, who now spent his days reading the Oxford English Dictionary in order to improve his word power. He’d started at A, and was reading a page a day. This meant that conversations with Mr. Probble tended to involve exchanges like the following:

“Hello, Mr. Probble. Nice day, isn’t it?”

To which Mr. Probble might reply, “Aardvarks amble awkwardly.”¹⁷

Samuel stared into Lucy’s eyes, and Lucy stared into his.

“You know,” she said, “you ought to get new glasses.”

“Really?” said Samuel.

“Yes, those ones make your face look a funny shape. They also make you seem like you have trouble seeing properly.”

“But I do have trouble seeing properly,” said Samuel.

“But you don’t want everyone to know, do you?” said Lucy. “It’s like ugly people and hats.”

“Is it?” said Samuel, not sure where ugly people came into it, exactly, or hats.

“Of course, silly.”

Lucy patted Samuel’s arm. To be honest, “patted” might have been an understatement. There were wrestling champions who would have screamed “Ouch!” after being patted by Lucy Highmore. She had quite a swing on her for a thin girl.

“Ugly people wear hats so that people can’t see how ugly they are,” explained Lucy. “The hats cast a shadow, and so they hide their ugliness, and pretty people don’t have to feel so bad about being pretty.”

“But . . .” said Samuel, rubbing his arm. He tried to find his train of thought, but it had departed the station long before, with a fat lady on the back waving good-bye with a handkerchief and leaving Samuel stranded on the Platform of Confusion. “But don’t pretty people wear hats, too?”