It was Thomas’s death that convinced Sadie that she and Jack should finally marry. Without marriage, what was Thomas to her? She’d known him since childhood, a wiggling, insinuating, wonderful boy, a puppy, a darling; she’d known and loved him in every incarnation since. As a small child he liked to be tickled; as a teenager he’d hated haircuts and had worn his daffodil hair like a veil he intended to never lift; as a young man he developed a love of organized runs in which you had to crawl through mud and allow yourself to be shocked with live wires. It was not so much to know about a person, though enough to recognize a taste for obliteration. But without marriage he was, at his death, Jack’s nephew, not hers. So they would marry at last, and Jack would arrange everything, because Sadie, while not a reluctant wife, was at thirty-nine a very reluctant bride.

Twenty years, or nearly. She had grown stout and he furious, but to be fair they’d tended in those directions all their lives. She would have been happy to marry at city hall, but Jack’s parents, Michael and Irene Valert, astonishingly alive in their grief in Sussex, had suggested they marry in the church at the end of their drive. “Does your family have money?” Sadie had asked the first time she’d seen the former rectory his parents lived in. “Used to,” Jack answered. But this was more than residual money. In America if you used to have money you probably had a relative or a former accountant in jail, and you lived in a two-bedroom apartment miles from the city of your dreams. The Valerts’ house was the sort of place you’d rent in America for a single day in order to have that vulgar thing, a storybook wedding, to prepare yourself for the reality of married life.

Why not? Sadie had no relatives left to horrify with a church wedding. The Valerts had lost a child and lost a grandchild, and this was something that could be given. She thought of the wedding as a practical thing—she didn’t even plan to invite friends to come over from the States—not knowing how Jack would take to it, the sentimental asshole, how much he wanted an English wedding himself. His parents had lived seventeen years in America, during which time they’d had him, their last child, and had developed a hatred of the country. Not developed, it wasn’t brand-new, but now their hatred was expert. They’d repatriated when Jack went to college, and seemed like zoo animals stymied by the offspring they’d had in captivity.