Chapter One: Welcome Home, Mrs Rao

London greeted Naina Bhandari the way an old lover might, with rain and indifference and the faint suggestion that she should have called first.

It came down over Heathrow in fine grey sheets, the kind of rain that never quite committed to falling and simply hung in the air, waiting for someone to walk through it. She stood beneath the concrete overhang outside Terminal Five with her coat collar turned up and her phone pressed to her ear, listening to it ring out for the fourth time, and wondered how a man who owned eleven hotels, two restaurants and a racehorse named after her dead mother could fail to organise a single car.

Driver will be waiting, beta. Arrivals. Don’t be difficult.

That had been her father’s last message, sent while she was boarding at JFK. She had read it somewhere over the Atlantic, between a glass of warm champagne and a film about a heist she had stopped following after twenty minutes, and she had rolled her eyes at the word difficult, because Vikram Bhandari had been calling her difficult since she was four years old and refused to wear a lehenga to her cousin’s wedding. Now she had walked the whole length of the arrivals hall twice, past the families with balloons and the tired men holding printed names on tablets, and not one of those names had been hers.

She hung up, tried again, and got his voicemail. His recorded voice boomed at her with its usual cheer, as if the world had never once disappointed him. She did not leave a message. Five years in New York had taught her that silence was more expensive than words, and she preferred to spend it wisely.

A black cab slid up to the rank, its orange light glowing like a small mercy. She took it.

“Hampstead,” she said, folding herself into the back seat with her single suitcase, the rest of her life having been shipped in boxes that would arrive sometime next week, or next month, or never. “Hollins Lane. Off East Heath Road.”

The driver glanced at her in the mirror, taking in the camel coat, the diamond studs, the particular set of her mouth. “Visiting?”

“Returning,” she said, and then, because it sounded too much like surrender, she added, “Briefly.”

He grunted, and they pulled out into the long crawl of the M4.

London unspooled beside her in wet, familiar pieces. The Chiswick flyover. The brutal glass of the Hammersmith offices. The white stucco of Kensington, streaked grey with weather, and then the long slide north through traffic that moved like cold treacle. She watched it all with her forehead near the glass and told herself she felt nothing. She had left this city at twenty-two, in the middle of the night, with mascara running down her face and a single bag on the back seat of her father’s Bentley, and she had promised herself then that she would never need it again.

She did not need it now. She was here because her father had phoned in August, his voice thinner than she had ever heard it, and said, Come home for a while. Please. I’d like to see your face. And Naina, who could refuse him anything when he was loud, had never learned how to refuse him when he was quiet.

The cab turned onto Hollins Lane just after five. The street was narrow and tree-lined, the kind of place where the houses hid behind high hedges and old brick walls as though embarrassed by their own size, and at the very end of it, where the lane curved towards the Heath, stood her mother’s house.

It had always been her mother’s house, no matter whose name was on the deeds. Leela Bhandari had found it in 1998, a sagging Edwardian pile with a leaking roof and a garden gone feral, and she had spent six years turning it into something that looked as if it had grown out of the ground. Wisteria over the porch. Tall sash windows. A conservatory at the back full of plants that had no business surviving an English winter and did so anyway, out of sheer loyalty to the woman who watered them. Naina had been twelve when her mother died, and in the fifteen years since, she had never been able to walk up that front path without expecting to hear her voice calling from somewhere inside.

Tonight the house was dark.

She paid the driver, overtipped him out of habit, and stood on the pavement with her suitcase while the cab pulled away. Rain beaded on the wrought iron of the gate. Not a single light burned in any of the front windows, not in the hall, not on the landing, not in her father’s study where the lamp had been left on every night of her childhood like a lighthouse for a man who was always coming home late. The staff should have been here. Mrs Pereira, at least, who had kept the house running for twenty years and who would sooner have died than let a Bhandari arrive to darkness.

Naina punched her birthday into the keypad on the gate. It flashed red.

She stared at it, then tried again, slower, as if the machine might simply have misheard her. Red.

“Brilliant,” she told the gate. “Absolutely brilliant.”

She tried her mother’s birthday, and the gate clicked open.

That, somehow, was worse.

The front door was unlocked. She pushed it open and stepped into the hall, and the familiar smell of the house wrapped around her, beeswax and old wood and the cold mineral scent of the black and white tiles her mother had rescued from a demolished chapel in Norfolk. The staircase curved up into shadow. The grandfather clock ticked in its corner with the same slow, unimpressed rhythm it had kept for as long as she could remember. Everything was exactly where she had left it, and it all felt faintly as though it had been waiting for someone else.

“Papa?” Her voice climbed the stairwell and came back to her empty. “Mrs Pereira?”

Nothing.

She left the suitcase by the door and walked further in, heels clicking on the tiles, and that was when she noticed the other smell. It was threaded underneath the beeswax, warm and heavy and entirely out of place: cardamom cracked open in hot ghee, onions cooked slowly until they had surrendered all their sweetness, the deep brown note of lamb that had been left to braise for hours. Her stomach, which had been fed nothing but a sad airline pastry since New York, woke up and paid attention.

Her father did not cook. Her father had once tried to make toast and set off every smoke alarm on the ground floor.

She followed the smell down the hall, past the dining room with its long table under dust sheets, past the closed door of the study, towards the soft blue flicker coming from the snug at the back of the house. The television was on. She could hear the low murmur of a financial channel, some anchor with a nasal voice discussing bond yields, and beneath it, the faint creak of leather.

She stepped into the doorway, and stopped.

There was a man on her mother’s sofa.

He was sitting with his back half turned to her, long legs stretched out before him, and his bare feet were resting, crossed at the ankle, on the low rosewood table her mother had carried back from Jaipur wrapped in three blankets and a bedsheet. The table Naina had been forbidden to put so much as a glass on without a coaster. The table her mother had polished herself, every Sunday, with a cloth and a small tin of wax and a look of perfect contentment. This stranger had his feet on it as if it were a footstool from IKEA.

She took all of him in at once, the way you took in weather. Dark hair, still damp at the ends, as though he had showered not long ago. A plain white shirt with the sleeves pushed back over forearms that did not belong to a man who spent his life at a desk. A wide set of shoulders, relaxed against the cushions. There was a glass of something amber on the side table, sweating onto the wood, and a thick hardback book lay open and face down beside him with its spine cracked in a way that made her want to slap him on principle.

He must have heard her breathe, because he turned his head.

For one treacherous second she forgot why she was angry. He had the kind of face that did not bother trying to be handsome and managed it anyway: a hard jaw shadowed with a day’s stubble, a straight nose with a slight bump halfway down where it had once been broken, and eyes so dark they looked black in the television light. They were not warm eyes. They were watchful and still, and they moved over her with unhurried attention, from the wet hem of her coat to the sunglasses she had pushed up into her hair, and back to her face, where they settled.

He did not get up. He did not take his feet off the table. He simply looked at her for a long moment, and then one corner of his mouth moved, not quite a smile, more like the acknowledgement of a private joke.

“You’re late,” he said. “Welcome home, Mrs Rao.”

The words dropped into the room and lay there.

Naina heard them. She understood each one individually. She simply could not make them sit together in any order that made sense, so she stood in the doorway with her mouth very slightly open while the rain ticked against the conservatory glass behind him and the bond yields continued to disappoint the man on television.

“I’m sorry,” she said at last, and her voice came out cold enough to frost the windows. “What did you just call me?”

“Mrs Rao.” He said it slowly, as though she might be hard of hearing. “It’s going to be your name. I thought you might like to start getting used to it.”

“That,” she said, “is not my name.”

“Not yet.”

He swung his feet off the table at last, which should have been a victory and somehow felt like a threat, and stood. He was taller than she had expected, tall enough that she had to tip her chin up even in four-inch heels, and he moved with an economy that made her think of something kept on a leash. He did not come towards her. He stopped at a careful, deliberate distance, close enough to be seen properly and far enough that she could not accuse him of crowding her, and he slid his hands into his pockets.

“Samar Rao,” he said. “Your father will have mentioned me.”

“My father mentions a great many people. Most of them are jockeys.” She did not move from the doorway. Her heart was going hard and fast, but her voice, thank God, stayed level. “I don’t know who you are or how you got the gate code, but I’ll give you thirty seconds to get your shoes and your terrible taste in reading and leave before I call the police.”

His gaze flicked, briefly, to the book. “You don’t like Conrad?”

“I don’t like strange men in my mother’s house.”

Something in his face shifted at that. It was very small, a tightening at the corner of the eye, gone almost before she registered it. “Your father’s on a boat off Sardinia,” he said. “He’s well. He asked me to be here when you arrived because he didn’t trust himself to explain it properly without shouting, and he’s been told not to shout.”

“Told by whom?”

“His cardiologist.”

The floor tilted, very slightly. Naina kept her face still. She had spent five years in the New York art world, where showing a single honest emotion across a room was considered a form of indecent exposure, and she was not about to crack in front of this man. “Cardiologist,” she repeated.

“Call him.” Samar nodded at the phone in her hand. “He’ll pick up for you. He’s been waiting all day.”

“He’s not been picking up all day.”

“He’s been waiting to be brave enough.” That faint almost-smile again, gone as quickly as it came. “Dinner’s nearly ready. You should eat before you murder anyone. It’s harder on an empty stomach.”

He walked past her, close enough that she caught the scent of him, soap and cedar and something warmer beneath it, and disappeared down the hall towards the kitchen. He did not hurry. He did not look back. She heard a pan lid lift and settle, heard the low, contented rumble of a man humming to himself while he stirred, and she stood in the snug staring at the empty sofa and the damp ring his glass had left on her mother’s table, and she thought, with great clarity, I am going to kill him.

She called her father instead.

He answered on the first ring, which told her everything. His face filled the screen, tanned and a little thinner than she remembered, framed against a sky so blue it looked edited. There was a linen shirt open at his throat and a pair of sunglasses shoved into his silver hair in exactly the way she wore her own, and for a moment the sight of him made her chest ache with something that was not anger. Then he smiled, wide and guilty, and the anger came back so fast it was almost a relief.

“Naina! Beta! You’re home!”

“There is a man,” she said, very precisely, “in Mummy’s house. With his feet on Mummy’s table. Who has just called me Mrs Rao.”

Vikram Bhandari had the grace to wince. “Ah,” he said. “Samar. Yes. I was going to tell you.”

“When? At the christening?”

“Don’t be dramatic.”

“Papa, I have been awake for twenty-two hours and a stranger has renamed me. I think I’m entitled to a little drama.”

He sighed, and the sound came crackling across a thousand miles of Mediterranean. Behind him, she could hear gulls and the slap of water against a hull and someone laughing on a lower deck. “He isn’t a stranger,” her father said. “He worked for us for years. He drove you, for God’s sake, for three years before you went to America. You must remember him.”

She did not. She tried, and there was nothing there but a vague impression of a dark suit and the back of a head, a pair of hands on a steering wheel, the anonymous shape of a man who opened doors. She had been nineteen, twenty, twenty-one; she had been in love with the wrong man and at war with her father and she had not looked at the person driving the car, not once, not properly, because it had never occurred to her that he was someone to look at. The realisation left a sour taste in her mouth, and she swallowed it and turned it into anger, because anger was easier to carry.

“I remember that we had a driver,” she said. “I don’t remember inviting him to move into my bedroom.”

“He’s in the blue guest room. Don’t be crude.” Her father rubbed a hand across his face. When it came away he looked older, suddenly, and tired in a way the Sardinian light could not quite hide. “Beta, listen to me. In June I had a bit of a scare.”

“Samar said. A cardiologist.”

“Two stents. Very routine, they tell me. Very modern.” He waved his hand as though brushing away a fly, but his eyes did not quite meet the camera. “But I lay in that bed at the Wellington with wires coming out of me, and I thought, if I go now, what happens to her? Who is there? You’re in New York with a gallery that loses money every month and friends who only phone when they want an introduction. Your uncle is circling the company like a vulture. And I thought, I cannot die knowing I left you with nobody.”

“I have plenty of people.”

“Name one who would get on a plane for you at three in the morning.”

She opened her mouth. Closed it again. The rain went on ticking against the glass.

“That’s what I thought,” her father said gently. “So I changed my will.”

The words landed in her stomach like a stone dropped into a well. She waited to hear it hit the bottom.

“The house,” he said, “and your thirty per cent of Bhandari Group, which I was holding in trust for you until you turned thirty. The conditions have changed. You will marry Samar within twenty-eight days of arriving in London. You will live with him, in this house, under one roof, for six months. After six months, if you want out, you walk away with everything and a divorce, and nobody will say a word against you. But if you refuse, or you leave before the six months are finished, the house and the shares go to him.”

For a moment she genuinely could not speak. The room seemed very far away, as if she were looking at it through the wrong end of a telescope.

“You’re giving Mummy’s house,” she said slowly, “to your driver.”

“He hasn’t been my driver for a long time.”

“You are blackmailing me into marrying a man I don’t know.”

“I am asking you,” her father said, and his voice cracked on the last word in a way that made her hate him a little less and hate herself a little more, “to give a good man six months of your life. That’s all. Six months. It was his idea, the limit. I would have made it a year. He said no, that it wasn’t fair to trap you, that you should have a door you could walk through.”

“How generous of him.”

“It was, actually.”

“Papa, this is England, not a Bollywood melodrama. You can’t make people marry each other. There are laws. There are lawyers. I’ll call Harriet Cole in the morning and she’ll tear this to shreds.”

“Call her.” He shrugged, and the gesture was so infuriatingly calm that she wondered, with a cold drop of suspicion, which of them had taught it to the other. “Nobody is forcing you to do anything, beta. You’re a grown woman. You may marry him or not marry him, as you choose. I’m simply choosing where my property goes when I’m dead. That is also allowed.”

She wanted to throw the phone into the conservatory. She wanted to scream until the windows cracked. She wanted, more than anything, to be twelve again, sitting on the rosewood table while her mother painted her toenails and told her that nothing in life was ever as bad as it looked in the dark.

“I’ll think about it,” she said.

“That’s all I ask.”

“No, it isn’t. You’re asking me to sell myself for a house.”

The smile went out of his face then, entirely, and what was left was a man she barely recognised. “No,” Vikram said quietly. “I am asking you to stop running long enough to see what’s standing in front of you. Go and eat his food, Naina. He’s been cooking since two o’clock. And be kind to him. He has had very little kindness in his life, and none of it from us.”

He ended the call before she could answer, which was cowardly, and very like him.

She found Samar in the kitchen.

He was at the range with his back to her, a wooden spoon in one hand and a tea towel slung over his shoulder, and the whole long room was warm and golden and full of that smell, the lamb and the cardamom and something green and sharp underneath it, coriander perhaps, torn fresh. The copper pans her mother had collected hung on their rail above the island, catching the light. Someone had polished them recently. Someone had also moved the knife block from the left of the sink to the right, and that small, domestic trespass made her angrier than everything else put together.

“You,” she said.

He did not turn around. “Samar. It’s quicker than you. Only two syllables.”

“You knew. You’ve been sitting in my house for God knows how long, knowing exactly what he was going to say to me, and you let me walk in and find you like some sort of…” She searched for the word and could not find one vicious enough. “Some sort of squatter.”

“I’m not squatting. I’ve been invited.” He set the spoon down, finally, and turned to face her, leaning back against the counter with his arms folded across his chest. It was an easy pose. There was nothing easy in his eyes. “And yes, I knew. I’m sorry it happened this way. I told him to tell you in person months ago. He’s a braver man in a boardroom than he is with his own daughter.”

“Don’t,” she said. “Don’t apologise to me as though you’re the reasonable one.”

“Would you rather I didn’t apologise?”

“I would rather you didn’t exist.”

“I’ve tried that,” he said evenly. “It didn’t take.”

It was such a strange thing to say, so flat and so unguarded, that it stopped her for a beat. She looked at him properly then, for the first time, and saw a faint white scar running through his left eyebrow and another, older, across the back of one hand. She saw that his shirt was good but not expensive, that his watch was plain steel, that he stood like a man who had learned to take up exactly as much space as he was allowed and not a centimetre more, and that he had decided, tonight, to take up a great deal more.

“How much?” she said.

His eyebrows rose.

“How much did he pay you? To agree to this.” She stepped closer, into the warmth of the kitchen, and lifted her chin. “Because whatever it is, I’ll double it. You can take the money and go and live somewhere nice by the sea and tell everyone you were very nearly married to an heiress, and I’ll never have to see your face again.”

For a long moment he said nothing at all. Then, quite slowly, he began to laugh.

It was not a loud laugh. It was low and rough and genuinely amused, and it did something disgraceful to the back of her neck, and she hated him for it with a purity that almost felt clean.

“What’s funny?”

“Nothing.” He shook his head, still smiling, and picked up the spoon again. “You wouldn’t understand. Not yet.”

“Try me.”

“No.” He lifted the lid of the pot and steam rolled up around his face, fragrant and dark. “Dinner’s in ten minutes. It’s lamb, if you’re still eating meat. If you’re not, there’s dal. If you’d rather starve on principle, that’s entirely your choice, but I’d point out that you haven’t eaten anything decent since yesterday and you’ve got the particular look of a woman who’s about to faint in a very dignified way.”

“I’m not eating anything you’ve made.”

“All right.”

“I mean it.”

“I believe you.” He tasted the sauce, frowned, reached for the salt. “You’ll want the green room upstairs. I’ve had the bed made up. Mrs Pereira’s in Goa with her sister until Christmas, so it’s just us.”

“Just us,” she repeated, and the words sounded obscene.

“Just us.” He glanced at her over his shoulder, and something moved behind his eyes, dark and patient and not remotely safe. “Don’t worry, Naina. I’m very good at keeping my distance. I’ve had years of practice.”

She left before she could say something she would have to live with.

Her old room was exactly as she had abandoned it. That was the worst part. Someone had aired it and changed the sheets and put fresh flowers on the dresser, white roses, her mother’s favourite, but the rest was a museum to a girl who no longer existed. The pale green walls. The window seat with its faded cushions. The bookcase still crammed with paperbacks she had read at sixteen and pretended not to love. A photograph of her mother on the bedside table, laughing at something outside the frame, her head thrown back and her dupatta slipping off one shoulder.

Naina sat on the edge of the bed in her coat and stared at that photograph until the laughing face went blurry.

She did not cry. She wanted that noted, somewhere, by someone. She sat with her hands in her lap and her jaw clamped tight and she did not cry, not about the stents, not about the will, not about the fact that her father had apparently spent months planning to trade her to his driver like a racehorse at auction. She took off her coat. She showered until the water ran cold. She put on the oversized T-shirt she slept in and a pair of shorts and she lay on top of the duvet with her phone in her hand, scrolling through emails from the gallery that she could not bring herself to answer, and she listened to the house.

He moved around downstairs for a while. She heard the scrape of a chair, the clink of a plate, the sound of the dishwasher. Then his footsteps came up the stairs, unhurried, and paused for one moment outside her door. She held her breath. The footsteps moved on down the corridor, and a door closed softly at the far end.

The blue room. Twenty metres away. She could have hit it with a shoe.

At eleven her stomach began to complain. At midnight it staged an open rebellion, a long, hollow, humiliating growl that seemed to echo off the walls. She rolled over and pressed her face into the pillow and told it to be quiet. It did not listen. Jet lag had wound her up like a clock; it was seven in the evening in New York and her body was demanding dinner with the fury of a toddler.

Fine. There would be something in the pantry. Crackers. Cereal. A tin of something. She was not going to eat his food, but she was not going to faint in her own bedroom out of spite either. There was dignity, and then there was stupidity, and she had been accused of enough of the latter today.

She crept downstairs barefoot, keeping to the edge of the stairs where the wood did not creak. The hall was dark. The kitchen was darker still, lit only by the green glow of the oven clock and the pale wash of the security lights from the garden. Everything was clean. Every surface had been wiped, every pan scrubbed and hung back on its rail, the range gleaming. It was as though nobody had cooked here at all.

Except for the plate.

It sat in the middle of the island under a clean tea towel, and propped against it was a folded square of paper. She should not have looked. She should have walked past it to the pantry with her head held high and eaten dry crackers in the dark like a woman of principle.

She looked.

The handwriting was small and very neat, the letters slanting slightly forward, as though they were in a hurry to get somewhere. For when your pride gets hungry. The microwave is on the left. S.

She lifted the tea towel. Lamb in a sauce so dark it was almost black, glossy with ghee. A mound of rice studded with cumin seeds. A little heap of something green and bright, spinach with garlic, and a folded chapati wrapped in foil to keep it soft. It had been arranged on the plate with a kind of care that felt almost insolent.

Her stomach made a noise like a dying animal.

“No,” she told it.

She went to the pantry and found a box of oatcakes and ate two, standing at the counter in the dark, and they tasted like sawdust and resentment. The smell of the lamb was everywhere. It had soaked into the air, into the wood of the cabinets, into her hair. She ate a third oatcake and looked at the plate. She looked at it for a very long time.

One bite would not constitute surrender. One bite was reconnaissance.

She did not use the microwave. That felt too much like following instructions. She picked up the fork he had left beside the plate, cut a small piece of lamb, and put it in her mouth, and then she had to put her free hand flat on the counter to steady herself, because it was not fair for food to be that good. It was rich and deep and slow, the meat falling apart on her tongue, the spices opening one after another like doors in a long corridor: cardamom, then clove, then something smoky, then a slow warmth of chilli at the very end that made her eyes sting. It tasted of patience. It tasted of hours she had not been there for.

She took another bite. Then another. Then she was eating properly, standing up in the dark kitchen in her T-shirt with her hair falling in her face, tearing the chapati with her fingers and using it to scoop up the sauce, and she did not stop until the plate was empty.

Somewhere out in the hall, a floorboard creaked.

She froze with the last scrap of chapati halfway to her mouth. The house was silent again. She stared at the doorway, at the black rectangle of the corridor beyond, and for a moment she could have sworn that something in that darkness was darker than the rest, a shape, a presence, the pale edge of a white shirt. Her pulse beat in her throat. She waited for him to step forward and say something smug.

Nothing moved. Nothing spoke.

After a full minute she let out her breath and told herself it had been the house settling, the old wood contracting in the cold. She washed the plate and the fork very quietly and dried them and put them back in the cupboard, and she folded his note into a small, hard square and pushed it to the bottom of the kitchen bin under a used teabag, because that was what it deserved.

Then she crept back up the stairs, warm and full and absolutely furious with herself.

She was halfway under the duvet when her phone lit up on the pillow beside her. A number she did not recognise, a London mobile.

Next time, heat it up. Cold ghee is a crime.

Naina stared at the screen. Heat climbed up her throat and into her face, and she was glad beyond words that there was nobody in the room to see it. He had been there. He had stood in the dark and watched her eat his food like a starving fox at a bin, and he had said nothing, and he had let her keep her dignity for exactly as long as it took him to walk back up the stairs and pick up his phone.

She typed with vicious thumbs. I have no idea what you’re talking about.

The reply came before she could put the phone down. Of course not. Goodnight, Naina.

Not Mrs Rao. Not wife. Just her name, plainly, as though he had every right to it.

She turned the phone face down on the bedside table and lay back and glared at the ceiling. She was not going to think about him. She was going to sleep, and in the morning she was going to phone Harriet Cole, who had broken the prenup of a Russian oligarch’s third wife over a single breakfast, and together they would find the flaw in her father’s lunatic will and Samar Rao would be back behind a steering wheel where he belonged by the end of the week.

Sleep did not come. Her body thought it was evening and her mind would not stop turning over the same handful of images: the bare feet on the rosewood, the scar through his eyebrow, the low laugh in the kitchen when she had offered him money. You wouldn’t understand. Not yet. What kind of chauffeur laughed at money?

At a quarter to two she gave up and went down again, this time for water, and this time she was careful. She kept to the wall. She did not turn on a single light. At the foot of the stairs she paused, because there was a sound coming from the back of the house, from the conservatory, where the glass walls looked out over the black mass of the garden and the Heath beyond.

A voice. Low and even. His.

She should have gone back up. She knew that, even as her bare feet carried her silently along the hall to the half-open door of the snug. Through it she could see the dark shape of him standing among her mother’s plants with his back to her, one hand braced on the window frame, the other holding a phone to his ear. The rain had stopped. Beyond the glass the garden dripped and glittered under a thin moon.

“She’ll sign,” Samar said.

Naina went very still.

“Because she loves this house more than she hates me. That’s all it takes.” A pause. He laughed, softly, without any humour in it at all. “No. I’m not worried about her lawyer. Let her try.”

Another pause, longer. His head dropped slightly, and when he spoke again his voice had changed, gone quieter and harder, the voice of a man who was used to being obeyed and did not bother raising it.

“No, she doesn’t know. She has no idea what I own. And she won’t, until I decide she’s ready to.”

In the dark of the hallway, with her heart hammering against her ribs and the cold tiles biting into the soles of her feet, Naina Bhandari understood two things at once: that the man her father had chosen for her was not who he claimed to be, and that whatever he was hiding, he had already decided she would be the very last to know.

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