It had been recognition.

Alistair had known who I was before I knew who he was; had known, perhaps, that I would be there; had looked at the daughter of Henrik Lindqvist across a charity dinner and seen not a stranger but the answer to a thirty-year-old question, the arrival of something long anticipated.

And everything that followed — the courtship that felt so natural, the marriage that felt so fated — took on, in the light of that envelope, a different and colder possibility: that I had not stumbled into the Abernathy family at all, but had been guided into it, gently, invisibly, for reasons that were about my father and Alistair and a signed ledger outside an accounting office thirty years before I ever put on that gown.

I do not yet know how much was chance and how much was design.