American chatter. I felt an unaccustomed swell of fondness for my compatriots. At home, I pined after things English like a parrot for the fjords, but after a few months of England—and Englishmen—there was something rather nice about a cacophony of brash American voices butchering the language as only we know how.

All in all, I was feeling decidedly sanguine as I bounced up the three steps to the front door. Pammy's mother wasn't exactly the warm, motherly sort, but there was the comfort that came of having known her for absolutely ever (or since I was five, which amounted to much the same thing). She was a known quantity. After dealing with strangers, there's a lot to be said for that. Once you've gotten Marshmallow Fluff all over someone's Prada bag, there's not much else that can go wrong.

Relinquishing my raincoat and bottle to the maid who opened the door, I ventured into the drawing room. It wasn't a big room, but it was cleverly arranged to provide the illusion of space, papered in textured pale blue and hung with Pammy's father's guilt offerings: one Degas, two Monets, and a smattering of lesser impressionists. His Renoirs were in the back parlor, which was paneled in Victorian walnut (original to the house) and as darkly traditional as the front room was airy, linked to the decorating scheme by the use of the same shade of blue in the accents on the upholstery.

I could see Mrs. Harrington holding court on a sand-and-blue sofa in the front room, chatting with a couple I didn't know, but whose voices marked them as fellow refugees on foreign shores. We were going to be just shy of twenty for dinner, Pammy had told me, and it looked like the gang was mostly here. The crowd seemed fairly well split between Pammy's friends and her mother's, a nice sample of the American expat community in various stages of development.

Pammy's mother's friends were of the banker-and-wife variety, men in suits or blazers with wives about a third of their bulk and/or age, with shoes even pointier than mine. As for Pammy's friends, only one guy sported a blazer. It was constructed of orange velvet with elaborate piping, and boasted a faux flower in the buttonhole. I had no doubt that, if asked, he would refer to it as ironic.

A bar had been set up in the back room, appropriately located beneath a painting of a frowsy Parisian barmaid, a depiction made acceptable for the drawing room with time and a famous name to sanctify it. I spotted Pammy there, wearing a belted sweater with fur bristling five inches deep from her collar and the hem of her skirt. Knowing Pammy, the animal-skin theme was probably in honor of Thanksgiving. I was just glad she hadn't insisted everyone arrive dressed in tasteful ensembles of wampum and turkey feathers.

Waving at her, I started across the room—and stopped short when I saw just who was standing by the bar next to her.

Oh, no. No, no, no. She wouldn't.

She had.

Next to me, I could hear orange blazer man drawling, "An ironic reconstruction of an iconic representation…"

All the I's and R's blurred in my ears into one general buzz. Maybe my ears were going. More to the point, maybe my eyes were going.

No such luck.

Detaching herself from her companions, Pammy bounded across the room, arms flung wide, a miraculous feat of balance considering the nearly full glass in one hand. "Ellie!"

I wasn't hallucinating. What I was, was the victim of an interfering, intermeddling—

"Pammy!" Flinging my arms around her, I muttered, "I could kill you. What is he doing here?"

I have to give Pammy some points; she didn't try to pretend that she had no idea what I meant.

Instead, she smiled a big cat-and-canary grin, glancing over her shoulder at Colin, who was chatting with a couple of Pammy's work friends and looking unfairly dishy. "Well, if Mustafa won't come to the mountain…"

"That's Mohammed," I said through clenched teeth.

Pammy waved a hand. "Whatever."

"I'm not interested."

"Sure you're not."

"I'm not!" I insisted.

"Oh, go have a drink, Ellie. It will put you in a better mood."

"Who said I was in a bad mood?"

Pammy held up a hand, palm out. "You are just so lucky we've been friends for twenty years."

"Twenty-one," I muttered after Pammy's departing back. She never had been any good at math.

Not like it really made a difference. But in those twenty-one years, I was pretty sure that I'd put up with just as much from her as she had from me. More. I added tonight's party to the balance against her. She owed me at least a year of good behavior for that one.

She might at least have warned me.

Pammy aside, I wouldn't have minded a drink, just to have something in my hands. A drink, held debonairly aloft, goes a long way to inspiring social confidence. It's as much the pose as the contents. Combine it with a tinkling laugh and an appropriately rapt expression and, after a while, even I might be fooled.

But Colin was standing at the bar, like a linebacker guarding a goalpost, or whatever it is that linebackers guard.

Right, I told myself. This was it. Just to prove that he didn't mean anything to me at all, I was going to walk right up there and say hi, just as I would to any other random person on whom I had never had the teeny-tiniest hint of a crush.

"Hi!" I said brightly, following it up with a little wave. "How are you?"

Okay, maybe I was overdoing the gushing bit.

"I'm fine," said Colin. No gushing there. His entire demeanor gave a whole new meaning to the word "chill." "You?"

"Vodka tonic, please," I instructed the man behind the bar. Pammy's mother only allows drinks with a clear base, for the sake of her carpets. It's a long-established policy, dating back to their days in New York. Pammy and I were only allowed to have Coca-Cola in the kitchen and den. This, by the way, was in effect even before the Marshmallow Fluff episode.

"I'm doing well," I said over my shoulder to Colin. "Same old, same old."

The bartender fumbled with the tonic bottle, one of those funny little half-sized bottles, rather than the big, plastic ones we have at home. It was empty. Kneeling, the bartender started scavenging under the table.

Colin propped an elbow against the table. "You didn't bring Jay."

Jay? Oh, right. "He went home for Thanksgiving."

"And didn't take you?"

Under the table, the bartender's progress was marked by the clink of glass and crackle of cardboard. I was half tempted to tap him on the shoulder and tell him to give up already; I would just take my vodka straight. Anything so that I could take my glass and go.

"You know how it is," I said, trying not to peer too visibly over the edge of the table. "I had work to do."

"Hard on you." He didn't sound terribly sympathetic.

"I'll live." I accepted my long-awaited glass from the bartender, and smiled a stiff social smile at Colin. "I really should go say hi to Pammy's mother. Good talking to you."

"You, too." Colin raised his glass a fraction of an inch in farewell.

"Later, then. Bye-eee!"

Yes, I actually said "bye-eee." There is no accounting for what the brain will produce under stress.

Since I really did have to say hi to Pammy's mother, I wandered in that direction, wondering how I had contrived to sound quite so moronic in all of three or four sentences.

I glanced back over my shoulder at Colin, who was not glancing at me.

How dared he ignore me when I was working so hard at ignoring him? It was downright ungentlemanly of him.

Oh, wait. It wasn't supposed to matter anymore. I didn't care what Colin Selwick thought of me. I took a sip of my vodka tonic. Heavy on the vodka, light on the tonic, it tasted a bit like window cleaner (not that I've ever tasted window cleaner, but I imagine it has the same astringent properties). Drink any more of that, and not only would I not remember that I was supposed to be totally indifferent to Colin Selwick, I wouldn't be capable of coherent thought at all. Feeling my lips go numb from that one small sip, I deposited the glass discreetly on a small table next to an unnaturally lush potted plant and went to exchange hellos with Pammy's mother.

Mrs. Harrington was still holding court on the small sofa in the front room, her ash-blond hair cut in a neat shoulder-length bob, brushed to the shiny patina of the Bombay chest in the hall. Her face, with its retroussй nose and wide cheekbones, was more piquant than pretty, clear illustration while I was growing up that grooming and charm get you much farther than raw good looks.

Pammy was going to look just like her in another twenty years or so. I could see it happening already, although Pammy would vehemently deny it.

"Hi, Mrs. Harrington!" Under the influence of old habit, my voice went up half an octave into schoolgirl sweetness. "Thank you for having me here tonight."

"Eloise!" Mrs. Harrington lifted her cheek to be kissed. After so many years in the States, her accent was neither recognizably American nor English, but faltered somewhere in between. "We couldn't leave you alone for Thanksgiving."

"Mom and Dad send their love."

"How is your sister?"

"Enjoying college."

Mrs. Harrington narrowed her eyes shrewdly. "Not too much, I hope."

"You know Jillian," I said, with a grin. "But somehow she always pulls through in the end. I don't know how she does it."

Mrs. Harrington wagged a finger at me. "It's those Kelly brains. I don't know how Pammy would have gotten through algebra without you."