Infuriating man. She’d been happy enough to consider him as a likely friend, until he had to go and ruin it all with that flirtation nonsense. She’d hoped he would have let such ridiculousness go by now, but apparently not. Did it never occur to him that she’d like to eat her dinner without someone staring at her and making her too conscious of every bite she took?

Smile, Margot, Maman said in her head. A long look is a compliment, and how do we respond to compliments?

She shot a glare at Willa, since she didn’t want to encourage Drake with even that much attention. Her sister-in-law just chuckled into her water glass, which thankfully went unnoticed by anyone else, since Dot and Holmes and Lukas were all laughing down at their end of the table. She hadn’t caught what had inspired the amusement because she’d been so busy ignoring him, seated to her right, at the head of the table, that she’d apparently ignored everything else too.

She forked her last bite of chicken and lifted it to her lips. Counted her chews. Swallowed.

And why wasn’t Willa helping her? She, of all people, could commiserate with Margot’s discomfort over having anyone linger so long over her looks.

Finally, at long last, Willa seemed to have had her fill of smirking and leaned forward. She’d say something biting and clever to him, no doubt. Willa was an expert at biting and clever. Or perhaps she’d just deflect his attention. Strike up a conversation that would force him to pay attention to her rather than to Margot.

So why did she turn her head toward the opposite table end? “Dot, this chicken is divine. May I get the recipe from you? Lucy would love to make it, I know. She considers it her own special challenge to make sure no one in the family notices the shortages.”

Some help she was.

Dot, face aglow, launched into a discourse about how pleasurable it had been to learn to cook when she and her aunt got this flat. Had she actually launched into the recipe, Margot might have paid attention—recipes were just mathematics, after all. But they were mathematics she usually happily left to theory.

Other than when she’d come here or gone to Lukas’s, she’d had nothing to eat that required more cooking than porridge since Maman . . .

It wasn’t lack of ability. It was lack of incentive. Cooking for one just seemed pointless.

“Did you have a happy birthday, Miss De Wilde?” Drake’s question was low, quiet, as if he’d asked a more sensitive question that he wanted no one else to hear.