“Californians.” Fee, who was standing by the kitchen cupboard, shook her head sadly at Liam as she took out the bottle and handed it to Lulu.

“Aha,” said Lulu. “That explains it, then.”

“Explains what?” said Liam.

“Nothing,” she said. “Have some sauce. Actually, can I try a bite? I thought it would just taste weird, but now that I think about it, it might be quite interesting.”

“This is amazing food, Fee,” said Jamie, who an hour before had appeared at the door at Sophie’s side, looking, Lulu later said, like the cat that had swallowed the caviar. “Really awesome. I can see where Lulu gets her talent.”

Lulu looked at Jamie’s plate.

“Are you all right, Jamie?” she asked. “Because I notice you’ve only had a normally enormous-sized portion and yet you seem to be slowing down. Are you not feeling well or something?”

“It’s his second breakfast,” said Sophie. “I wasn’t going to unleash the full appetite on you all without proper preparation, so we stopped on the way at Carroll’s, in your honor, Lulu-belle. Oh! And you’ll never guess who we saw coming in when we were going out! Only Tom and Susan, looking all pink and happy, and I think they’d been holding hands!”

“I knew it!” said Emma triumphantly. “I knew they’d get on! I was hoping for that all along, they’re like two peas in a pod! What on earth’s the matter with you three?”

From the sofa where Lulu, Sophie, and Charlie had collapsed in a heap of merriment, Lulu raised a weak head.

“Nothing,” she croaked feebly. “Nothing at all. Carry on eating and ignore us.”

“I think,” said Javier to Liam and Jamie, “that there are matters about our girlfriends that we will never understand. And I think it is better if we do not try to.”

“And I think,” said David, raising a coffee mug to him in salute, “that you’re a very wise young man.”

“What’s it like to be married, Emma?” said Sophie. “Does it feel different being somebody’s wife?”

“In a funny kind of way it does,” said Emma. “Not different with Matthew, he and I are the same as we’ve always been, which is good, because I wouldn’t have wanted that to change. But I do feel different about myself somehow. Yesterday I was a woman who lived, very happily and faithfully, with my boyfriend. Today, I’m not just me anymore. I’m a wife, which means I’ve become part of a line of women in the family who fell in love and got married, a whole long line that goes back through history, past Mom and Grandma Jojo, and even past Grandma Jo and Grandma Jo’s mother and Grandma Jo’s mother’s great-great-grandmother, all the way back to the women we don’t know anything about and never will, but who we look like and walk like and think like in more ways than we can ever guess, because they were the ones who made us. Mom’s always saying that times have changed for women, but this is something that’s stayed the same, this falling in love and promising to be together forever, even when the romance has worn off and we’re old and busy and tired, and we’ve raised babies and fixed houses and changed jobs and heard each other’s jokes and stories a hundred thousand times, and Matthew’s got a paunch like his dad and I can never find my car keys like Mom. He’ll be my husband, and I’ll be his wife. And that feels … just … amazingly wonderful, really.”