It’s strange, later that night, to not have Lena and Maxine fussing over me as we dress for dinner. I’ve grown so accustomed to Lena swearing as she tries to pin up my hair, it’s a little disappointing to have one of the DuPre household lady’s maids conduct the task in such silence. She’s better at it than Lena, pulling my hair back into a stylish twist at the back of my neck, draping a string of pearls over the crown of my head, then securing it with a satin pink ribbon at the base of my skull.

Lena and I laugh as we exit our opposite bedrooms at the same time, bedecked in finery. Lena has a whole ostrich feather stuck in her dark hair. “Oh my,” I say.

“All this for a simple family dinner?” Lena says. “They’d keel over dead if they saw what we wear at home.”

“Tell me, what does your beloved Mark wear to dinner?” I joke.

Lena magicks the hem of my dress under my feet so I trip on it. “Ostrich feathers, a thousand of them. It’s a sight to behold,” she replies.

Lena and I are instructed to sit on one side of the table, facing Maxine and Nina, and a wall made entirely of ornate mirrors.

By the time the soup course comes I realize why people don’t usually have mirrors in the dining rooms. Watching myself eat is strangely embarrassing, so I make faces at Maxine instead.

Maxine’s stepfather sits at the head of the table in a white tuxedo with tails, but says barely a word to any of us, flipping instead through an English-language newspaper.

Maxine’s mother is quiet and birdlike, sharp like her daughter, but hollow somehow, more fragile.

In a lilting voice she asks Maxine about school. “All is well,” Maxine answers.

“But when will you marry?” her mother prods. “You must leave eventually.”

Maxine makes a face at Lena and me from across the table before turning sweetly to her mother and saying, “When someone I can stand comes along.”

“More like someone who can stand you,” her stepfather mutters from behind his paper.

Later that night, Maxine takes us up to the roof. Up and up a spiral staircase, through a skylight, before we pop out into the night sky.

The buildings are so low here, for a moment all I see is stars scattered across the navy-blue dark.

The air is warm and heavy, the promise of summer no longer a promise, but something that’s here. The promise of this trip is no longer a promise either, but something I’m living.

I’ve lived this trip in my mind so many times that it’s disorienting to be doing it in reality. It feels sharper, more vivid, a little disappointing somehow too, but I think that’s how imagination always goes. Minds are good at skipping over the boring bits.