It was a good story, romantic, uncomplicated, the kind of origin a marriage is supposed to have.

And it had been, I now understood, at least partly manufactured — or if not manufactured, then arranged, engineered, made to look like chance by someone with a reason.

Alistair’s stillness when he heard my name.

The intensity of that unreadable look. Henrik Lindqvist was your father? At the time I had read it as nothing, a moment of polite curiosity from an older man, and had let it dissolve into the noise of the evening.

But it had not been nothing.