“You can’t drive,” Jonathan said. “Just sit down, and let’s get you something to eat. You’ve been manhandled.”

“What?” Graham said in disbelief.

“You were fighting with her over my glass of wine,” Jonathan replied.

“Didn’t know it was yours, but I did not manhandle Mary Anne.”

Jonathan ignored Graham. “I’ll get myself another,” he told Mary Anne gently. “Thanks for trying.”

“Ah, Cameron.” Graham turned to Mary Anne’s cousin and dropped some keys into her hand. “My car’s just outside in the bank parking lot. Why don’t you take it and meet us at Mary Anne’s house? Can you drive a shift? I’ll drive Mary Anne in her car.”

“Maybe we should hear what Mary Anne wants,” Jonathan said, staring intently at Graham.

And they all, Graham and Jonathan and Cameron, looked at Mary Anne, as if to discover what she wanted.

She had no answer, except that Graham was paying attention to her in front of Cameron, who couldn’t help seeing the direction of the wind. And Jonathan was finally noticing her—but he was engaged! Everything was messed up and she wished she’d never gotten involved with the love potion that Graham Corbett had drunk.

She stared at the bottle of water and lifted it to her mouth, drinking deeply. Drinking in a clear, bright thought.

Love potions don’t work anyhow.

MARY ANNE MADE her excuses—to Jonathan and his fianc'ee and to Cameron, who had secured the promise of a ride home from Graham—and was back at her grandmother’s house before ten, just as Nanna’s housekeeper and attendant, Lucille, was about to turn out Jacqueline Billingham’s bedroom light. Putting the debacle with the love-potion-that-wouldn’t-work-anyway behind her, Mary Anne hurried upstairs to kiss her grandmother good-night.

Nanna still sat up against a three-cornered pillow, wearing a nightgown made of some delicate cotton that reminded Mary Anne of the woman’s soft skin, grown thinner with age yet always seeming smooth and young. As usual, her grandmother smelled good, the scent of her night cream reminding her of roses. An Emilie Loring novel, marked with a lace bookmark, sat on the bedside table next to Nanna’s water glass and rosary beads. Mary Anne kissed her, and Nanna, her white hair loose for the night, asked, “Did you have a good time, dear?”

“Yes,” Mary Anne lied blithely.

“And did Cameron come back with you?”

“No,” Mary Anne said. “She has a ride home with someone else.” Mary Anne steered the conversation carefully away from mentioning any possibility of Cameron being, in any sense, with a man. Rationally, she knew this was unnecessary. However, some genetic reflex compelled her to participate in the family conspiracy of pretending the world was like one of Nanna’s romance novels. Even if sometimes it seemed to her that the pretense was subsuming her own reality.

Mary Anne had been a rebellious teenager, a Florida surfer girl. Every summer, her mother had sent her north to Logan, where Mary Anne, rather than succumbing to her grandmother’s influence, had spent every free moment with Cameron and the sort of boys their mothers hated, doing every forbidden thing one could arrange and usually escaping detection.

After that, Mary Anne had gone away to university in New York City, but she’d still returned to Logan each summer. Gradually, she had ceased to be a hellion, had entered therapy to help her accept everything she hated about her family and had become a decent contract bridge player, who could prepare a nice-looking dish for a church potluck and who sent thank-you notes on time.

It was now five years since Mary Anne had come to live with Nanna. The drawback was that Mary Anne could not bring a man to her grandmother’s house for the night or allow her grandmother to know that she would spend the night at a man’s house. Her grandmother did not want the world to be the kind of place where men and women who were not married to each other had sexual intercourse. So Mary Anne was due an Oscar for lifetime achievement, for pretending she would never consider sleeping with a man outside of marriage. The most difficult part of the pretense was that Mary Anne simply couldn’t lie to her grandmother.

So for five years she hadn’t spent the night with a man.

She’d had rare, brief sexual encounters with men at their homes and then said she needed to get home, citing newspaper deadlines. Because the world could not wait for her feature on the Logan Garden Tour.

Cameron had once asked her, “What’s Nanna going to do if you ever want to move in with someone? A man, I mean.”

“There’s no one I want to move in with,” Mary Anne had replied. “Anyhow, the same applies to you.”