“Josephine.” Emma smiled. “That’s my name.”

“Well, there you are, my love. It was meant to be. And there she is in the window, look, waiting for you.”

He pointed to a stand in the window that held a concoction of dark pink straps and rosettes set high on a slender heel. It was an absurd shoe, which would begin to pinch after an hour, would fall apart after half a dozen wearings, and which, by coincidence, cost precisely the sum that Emma and Matthew had in the fridge fund.

Emma looked at it, and wanted it as she could not remember having wanted any inanimate object in her entire life.

“Aha.” Nigel-Manolete identified her expression and winked. “When she’s the one for you, you know, don’t you, Josephine? Size five, am I right? Come in and try her on.”

Whirling through rose petals and birdsongs in a vortex of clouds the color of the sunset, Emma caught herself, and returned herself, firmly, to earth.

“I can’t afford new shoes,” she said. “I have to buy a fridge.”

Nigel looked pained, as if he had caught her kicking a puppy.

“A fridge?” he said. “A refrigerator, Josephine? We’re talking about your wedding day, my love.”

“A fridge is very important,” she told him. “You use a fridge much more often than you use shoes. Our old one hums when you open it, and the freezer drips. We really need a new one, and we’ve decided on the one we’re going to buy. In John Lewis at the end of the week, when Matthew’s next paycheck arrives.”

“A refrigerator,” he said again, shaking his head uncomprehendingly. “In John Lewis. That’s criminal, that is, Josephine.”

“And by the way,” she said. “My name’s not Josephine, it’s Emma. Actually, it is Josephine, but it’s Josephine Emma, and everyone calls me Emma. And I have to buy a fridge. Good-bye, Nigel.”

“A refrigerator,” he said sadly.

In a secret corner of her mind, Emma had always wondered whether she might not have turned out differently if she had continued to be known as Josephine. She had been very small when Lulu’s inability to pronounce the name had caused the family to adopt her middle name instead, but even so, she had memories, faint but wonderfully warm, of the time when she was called by the name she had been given. It had been a good time when Emma was Josephine, a time when she was the only child in the house, the smallest one, the sweetest one, and the world, it seemed, had revolved around her; and sometimes still, in idle or dreamy moments, Emma would entertain herself by fancying that out there somewhere, in an alternative world where younger sisters had not presented themselves with their needs and their fuss and their pulls on her parents’ time and attention, there was another self who was still called Josephine.

Josephine was not like Emma. Josephine was self-indulgent and more than a little lazy. She lay on a Victorian reclining chair covered with brocade in a sunny upper room filled with out-of-season flowers in ornate vases, and ate exotically filled chocolates from a pink oval box, smiling placidly on the admirers who thronged at her feet and occasionally sweeping a dramatic gesture with a rounded, pampered arm. Josephine wore flowing, feminine clothes in sensual fabrics, silks and satins and lace, used just a little too much makeup and looked lovely in it, and let her hair grow long and loose and tousled. Josephine had a string of credit cards, which she ran up with abandon and never ever worried about how she would pay them off. Josephine adored—simply adored—beautiful shoes.