Take, for instance, the entrance into it this very afternoon of Liam Fitzcharles. It was not, she thought, squinting thoughtfully at herself in the mirror as she tried to process her feelings about this evening, that she had not enjoyed talking to him earlier. She had liked it, in fact, she reminded herself encouragingly: they had talked about food, and about Charlie, and he had made her laugh, and obviously loved his sister, which would have been an important point in his favor even if his sister hadn’t been Lulu’s closest friend. But whether that meant that she had welcomed the way he had looked at her just before he had left to meet his new boss, she thought, was another matter entirely. It was one thing, she thought, to sit safely alone in the attic, reading the letters of happily married Grandma Jo and think how pleasant it would be to have someone to give her own heart to; it was quite another to be confronted with the risk of actually opening up her chest to give it.

Down below, she heard a door open and close, and Sophie’s voice calling her name. She crossed her eyes at herself, stuck out her tongue childishly, and opened the bedroom door to go downstairs and meet her date.

“The thing is,” said Liam in the taxi while they were speeding through the darkened streets of the winter London night, “we can’t do anything to draw attention to ourselves.”

“They do let me out,” she said. “Every other Sunday, with a suitable companion.”

“No, you idiot.” The playful nudge he gave her was reassuringly unromantic. “We can’t do anything to let on we know about food. We don’t want this guy to figure out who we are and pull out anything special for us—we want to know what he cooks for everyone. So no food talk in front of the waiter, okay? No suspiciously informed questions. No letting on we know the difference between cilantro and parsley. Act like we don’t have palates. Act like we’re Freddie, okay?”

“Okay,” she said. Maybe this might not be frightening after all, she thought. Maybe, if they kept the conversation light and joking, it might even be fun. “Can I be Sophie instead of Charlie?” she asked. “I’ve had lots more practice being her.”

“I’d rather you were you,” he said in a tone that was very far from reassuring, but caused instead a positive flotilla of butterflies to swoop and circle down to the very pit of her stomach.

The restaurant was dimly lit, with comfortably solid chairs around dark wood tables. Liam touched her lightly on the waist as he guided her to her seat, and her body leaped in response in a way she did not care for at all.

“Can I tell you something?” he said, when they had ordered their food.

She looked across the table at him.

“What?” she said. She missed her hair, she thought, oh, how she missed her hair.