“Gaz got hooked on Ready, Set, Bake, and now he fancies himself competitive,” Cilla explained. “I’ve never been happier. Or fatter.”

“Food is my love language,” Gaz said, coming up behind his wife and giving her a peck.

Cilla blushed. “Yes, well, I’m chock-full of adoration, then.”

I wrapped my arms around myself. The rapport between us seemed like it was slipping back into place. “I missed you loons.”

“All these feelings are exceedingly dull,” Bea cut in. “Move along. We’ve barely started.”

The apartment’s infamous twenty-six rooms were spread across three floors and a basement. We saw a multitude of guest chambers with chaste twin beds, all sporting once-trendy Laura Ashley floral wallpaper and thin cotton comforters in matching pastels. A few lesser reception rooms were empty, as if they’d already been scraped for everything valuable, or simply never used. The large formal dining room, its display cabinets teeming with silver that hadn’t been polished since Georgina died if not before, led into a kitchen too far away to feel particularly useful to the occupant—which, as Bea pointed out, had been immaterial until now because Georgina probably hadn’t made so much as a glass of ice water in her entire life. There were countless bathrooms, a small kitchenette on each floor, and even an elevator. The most tempting spots were an unused day nursery for the children Georgina never had, which boasted floor-to-ceiling windows and would make a great art studio; the first-floor library (complete with one of those sliding ladders, which Gaz rode while singing selections from Beauty and the Beast in a key best described as “nonmusical”); and a sprawling terrace, whose rotting white plastic loungers faced a magnificent view of London.

Despite not being in the employ of the royal family, Bea had filled her notebook with thoughts and announced I’d receive a report by the end of the week before stomping out to, in her words, “break a very stubborn mare.”

“She’s so cranky when Gemma is away,” I said.

“How can you tell the difference?” wondered Gaz.

Cilla’s laugh morphed into a groan when we peeked into a second-floor half bath. “Why is this carpeted?” She twisted the faucet for the hot water. The sink answered with a groan and a rust-colored trickle. “Please distract me. How’s Lacey getting on at Gemma’s place?”

There was a time I’d felt jealous of Gemma Sands, the ex with whom Nick had remained the closest. That was before I’d discovered her true love was actually Bea. Since then Gemma had been as loyal to me as to Nick, and when Clive’s story made a public enemy of Lacey, too, Gemma had immediately offered her an escape: a temporary internship at her father’s game preserve in Kenya, where nobody cared who Lacey was or what she’d done as long as she pulled her load. Lacey had kept me posted via email, the long-distance relationship we should have tried when I decided to stay in the UK after college—the one we might have had if she hadn’t quit medical school to join me here, then lost herself in London, in Freddie, in her resentment of the constraints my relationship put on her freedom, and finally in the attention of a press corps that used to snap her picture at the snap of her fingers.