Unseen by the others, Lulu jabbed her sister, hard, in the ribs.

“Don’t push your luck,” she hissed sternly.

“Marvelous food, Fee,” said Caroline to Fee at the end of the evening.

“Thank you,” said Fee.

The two women looked at each other, and, as one, decided not to prolong the conversation.

“Stick around,” said David to Andrew when the guests had departed and Fee and Susan had retired to bed. “Nobody cares if we get beauty sleep or not.”

“I suppose I’d better,” said Andrew. “Someone has to help you finish all this wine.”

“Bunch of lightweights, the younger generation,” grumbled David, reaching for the corkscrew.

Looking back on her wedding day, Emma always thought how simple it all had been.

She and her sisters had gone back from dinner at their parents’ house to spend the night in Belsize Park, where they had sat for one last delicious hour around the kitchen table with Charlie, gossiping sleepily, drinking chamomile tea, and eating chocolates from the shop in Camden Passage, which Lulu had urged upon her, pointing out that it was a medical impossibility to gain very much more than half a stone between ten on one evening and two the following afternoon. She had slept in Lulu’s bed, and the next day woke to a morning of pale February light, to her last breakfast as a single woman of toast and apricot jam and not too much coffee, followed by a walk to wake her up and a visit from Fee’s masseuse, a gentle Brazilian woman with kind hands.

She bathed in Jo Malone’s bath oil smelling of lotus blossom and water lily, wrapped herself in a dressing gown, and ate her last single lunch, chosen after careful consultation with Lulu, of broccoli quiche with spinach and walnut salad and a large fruit plate of melon, pineapple, strawberries, and grapes. She dressed herself in the slippery silk garments in the lovely indescribable pinky-creamy-champagne color, which had been waiting so patiently in the closet for her for almost a year, fastened the pearl buttons, and clasped around her neck the single strand of pearls that Aunt Amy had given to each of the sisters on their eighteenth birthdays, which all three were wearing today.

Then she went to the mirror and sat while Sophie, pretty as a picture in her own sweet-pea-pink bridesmaid dress, her lower lip caught in her teeth with concentration, fastened in her sister’s hair a comb of white silk flowers with silver seeds, then, at last, she opened the box containing the Josephine shoes, and, at last, slipped them onto her feet.

Then all three sisters, laughing together, clutching each other, feeling a little dazed and as if they were dreaming, went out to the street, where a friend of Jamie’s, who worked for a vintage car company, awaited them in a capacious and gleaming black Rolls-Royce. They drove through the streets of North London, where people who saw them drive past either smiled, or waved, or looked nostalgic, or thoughtful, to the oblong cinnamon and cream brick pumping station by the reservoir, which was looking exactly as Emma had hoped it would that day, with great blocks of silver light reflecting from the water and pouring through the long windows, bouncing off the iron pillars and onto the shining wood floor, where Mom and Dad were waiting for them: Mom elegant in tailored maroon and pink and clutching a tissue, Dad unrumpled and wearing a suit and tie, with his smile a little wistful today, offering her his arm as the steel band struck up a reggae version of the “Trumpet Voluntary,” to walk her through the long, light room past the eighty people she loved best in all the world, to meet the man she loved better than all of them.