Epilogue
The apartment in Marylebone, in Central London, had a south-facing sitting room, and at half past nine in the morning, the light streamed across the floor in long, pale rectangles that warmed the rug.
Alexandra was in the chair by the window with the Financial Times folded once on her knee and a cup of coffee on the table by her elbow.
She’d been reading the same paragraph for the better part of ten minutes because she kept getting distracted by the light.
In her defense, though, it was more interesting than the analysis.
She had grown up understanding that London was a place you went to for board meetings or weekend excursions before jetting back off to home.
Dorothy had treated it as an extension office, so Alexandra had treated it the same way, never exploring beyond what was strictly necessary.
The first weekend Simone had brought her here, she had walked through Marylebone on a Saturday afternoon and felt the discomfort of having been in a city without ever really having experienced it.
That had been four years ago, almost to the week.
She picked up the coffee. Simone had made it before going out—strong, French press, no milk for Alexandra and a splash of cream for herself.
The cup was one of the four they had bought at a market in Bermondsey on a Friday morning when neither of them had been able to remember what they were supposed to be doing.
They had gone back to the apartment with mismatched cups and a bag of cheese.
The ring on her left hand caught the light when she set the cup down.
Alexandra still noticed it some mornings.
It was a plain band, brushed gold, and the inside was engraved with a date in May two years ago and nothing else.
She had not worn jewelry for thirty years except for her watch, and the small additional weight on her fourth finger had taken some weeks to get used to.
Now it registered only when the light hit it, the way the watch did, and even that was becoming rare.
She heard the key in the door before Simone opened it.
“Hyde Park to Marylebone in twenty-two minutes,” Simone said from the hall. “Which is faster than it should be.”
“You ran.”
“Only at the end.”
Simone came into the sitting room in her running clothes, hair pulled back and damp at the temples, color high in her cheeks.
She was fifty-six, and she had been running in some form since her twenties.
The Serpentine route was the one she had used when she lived in London the first time.
She still ran it the same way. She stopped at the chair, bent down, and kissed the top of Alexandra's head without saying anything, then disappeared toward the kitchen. Alexandra heard the kettle boiling.
“I was thinking we could walk,” Simone called out.
“Where?”
“Kensington Gardens. The long way.”
“All right.”
Alexandra refolded the paper and set it on the table.
The long way meant the Serpentine, the bridge, the Albert Memorial, the Round Pond, and a coffee at a café Simone had been going to since the nineties—a route that took close to two hours and that Simone reserved for days when she wanted to talk about something.
Alexandra had stopped questioning her methods.
The park at midday was crowded. Not American crowded, with bodies pressed into corners, but distributed, with families spread on rugs, runners along the path, and the long, even green of the lawns absorbing everyone without protest. The sun was high and warm but not hot.
Alexandra had taken off her cardigan and folded it over her arm.
Simone walked beside her with her hands in her pockets.
They hadn’t said anything for a stretch of perhaps four minutes when Simone said, "I keep forgetting what date it is."
“The twelfth.”
“I know what date it is. I mean what it is to us.”
Alexandra looked at her. Simone was looking ahead, biting the inside of her lower lip.
“Our wedding was the eighteenth,” Alexandra said.
“I know that too. I keep forgetting the run-up: the weather, the dress fitting, my mother on the phone all hours of the day. It comes back to me in disjointed pieces.”
“That’s because we did everything in three days.”
“Four, if you include the flight.”
They had been married in Montreal on a Saturday afternoon in May, two years ago.
The decision had taken longer than the planning.
Alexandra had brought it up over dinner on a Tuesday in January as a question about whether they had been avoiding the conversation, and Simone had said Montreal before Alexandra had finished the sentence.
Nadine's apartment in Villeray. A civil ceremony at the palais de justice in the morning with a small officiant who spoke French and English and had not made a fuss.
Lunch at a place on Saint-Laurent that Nadine had been going to for forty years and where the owner had cried at the table without explaining herself.
Dinner back at Nadine's apartment that night, with Meg and Ruth flown in, Audrey down from her sister's house in Outremont, and Tess having driven from Boston.
Alexandra had worn pale gray, and Simone had worn dark green.
Neither of them had carried anything. Nadine had cooked the dinner herself, refusing all help, and the apartment had smelled like cardamom and lamb and the orange-peel sweetness of the cake she had made the night before.
There had been thirteen people at the table including both brides.
Nadine had said something during the toast in French that Alexandra had not quite caught the meaning of, and Simone, sitting beside her, had reached for her hand under the tablecloth and squeezed it three times.
“What did she say?” Alexandra had asked later in the cab back to the hotel. “Your mother, at the table.”
“She said I waited a long time for this one.”
“For which one?”
Simone had smiled. “For you.”
Alexandra hadn’t known what to say in the moment, so she had moved her hand across the cab seat and put it in Simone’s. They had ridden back to the hotel without saying anything else.
She thought about that exchange now, walking past the Serpentine in the London sun, and she said, "Your mother is coming next month."
“To London?”
“To us, wherever she finds us first.”
She smiled. “She’ll fly to Phoenix Ridge, and then you’ll fly her here.”
“I’ll offer.”
“She’ll let you. She likes the way you ask.”
Alexandra felt the corner of her mouth lift.
The truth was that Nadine liked the way Alexandra did most things, and Alexandra knew it.
She didn’t need Nadine’s approval and she hadn’t expected it, but she received it anyway.
They walked over the bridge. The water was dark under it and bright on either side, and a pair of swans was moving without urgency.
“What are you smiling at?” Simone asked.
“My mother. She would have wanted the spare key.”
Simone laughed, a short and real laugh, and reached over and took Alexandra's hand. Their rings touched briefly when their fingers laced. Alexandra felt the small click of metal on metal, two bands that matched perfectly, and she kept walking.