She felt her phone vibrating. When she saw who it was, she didn't answer.

"Christ," she muttered, but Annie didn't hear her.

"And expensive," Annie was saying. "They make it so expensive." That had certainly been her experience. She had been married, many years ago. She had two grown children to prove it. But her husband, such an intense, driven young man, had turned out to be a gambler. Annie hadn't seen him after the divorce, eighteen years ago, nor had he kept in touch with his children. She had been informed of his death, of leukemia, two years ago. "Nothing lasts," she said now, thinking of the waste that was love.

Miranda said, "You're so literal minded."

And the two sisters continued down the street, arm in arm, affectionate and indulgent, each smiling a small, comfortable smile at her superiority to the other.

On leaving her stepfather's office, Annie had given Felicity Barrow a brave, friendly hello, yet she had never liked Felicity. Felicity had round, oversized eyes, bright blue eyes, like a child actor who knows how to act like a child. Annie respected her stepfather's colleague. She knew how hard Felicity worked and how much she had contributed to the company, but she knew of Felicity's accomplishments by way of Felicity. It was not that the woman boasted. Quite the opposite. She was modest to a fault, the fault being that she insinuated her modesty, deftly, into almost any conversation, proclaiming her insignificance and ignorance, thereby assuring a correction.

Even so, under other circumstances, Annie would have stopped for a more extended greeting, for Felicity's older brother was the distinguished novelist Frederick Barrow, and through Felicity's generous intervention he had been induced to speak at the library where Annie worked. It was a small, private, subscription library started in the nineteenth century by wealthy furriers hoping to help promote literacy and thus good citizenship among aspiring young men entering the trade.