“Special luxury wedding weekend package,” Lulu told her. “Champagne on arrival, chocolates in the room, and well-behaved sisters over dinner on the first night.” Looking past her sisters, she caught sight of herself in the mirror, her hair a mass of curls that were wilder than ever in the steam. “God, is that my hair? I didn’t realize how much of it there was, I look like an overgrown privet hedge.”

“You could get topiary work,” said Sophie. “Have it cut like a swan for the wedding, that’d get Andrew’s attention.”

Lulu continued to look at herself. It was some time since she had had a haircut, she realized; she had grown so accustomed to fielding comments on it that she had stopped noticing just how bushy it had become. She looked at herself for a while, and then looked, thoughtfully, at Emma.

“There’s a hairdresser in the hotel,” she said. “Would you like me to have it cut? For the wedding?”

“I’d like you to be you,” said Emma, immediately and firmly. “I hate brides who ask people to be in their wedding and then want them to change things about themselves. It’s so insulting—if I want you to be there, it’s because I want you, not some idea I’ve made up all in my own private head of my personal opinion of how you should be. So all I want, please, is you to be there with me and wishing me well. That’s all I have the right to ask, and it’s all I do ask.”

Lulu waited patiently until she had finished.

“But you wouldn’t mind me having it cut, either, for the photographs?” she said, then. “Would you?”

“I think you’d look nicer,” said Emma, cautiously, after a moment, “if it was just a little bit tidier. But that’s just my opinion, it’s your hair, not mine.”

Lulu looked into the mirror and sighed a little.

“I’ll do it,” she said, “if you’ll promise never, ever to nag me about Tom again.”

“I do believe,” said Emma, taking care not to speak too quickly, “that we have ourselves a deal.”

When Lulu walked into the hotel bar an hour and a half later, a couple of young men turned to look at her.

“Oh my God!” said Sophie, already sitting over a bottle of champagne with Emma. “You’re pretty!”

“Thanks for the vote of astonishment, Soph,” said Lulu. “I wish I could say you’d grown a working brain, but it’s wrong to tell lies.”

Before she sat down, she turned to look in the mirror above the bar at the new and surprising Lulu who met her eyes there. She was just a little taller than the old Lulu and already seemed to carry herself with just a little more grace; she had big brown eyes and unexpectedly neat features under a close-cut curly crop. She was different, though, Lulu thought, a little uncertainly; the cut was shorter than she had expected or, now that she thought about it, had asked for. She would reserve judgment, she decided, on whether or not she preferred the new self to the old.