Isabella and Julian's own relationship had settled, over the months since their first tentative acknowledgment of it, into something steady enough that neither of them bothered any longer to describe it as new, though Wren noticed, watching them together at increasingly frequent family dinners, that they still carried a particular carefulness with each other that felt less like uncertainty than genuine respect — the deliberate tenderness of two people who understood exactly how easily something valuable could be mishandled if either of them stopped paying attention.
The dinner where Wren first noticed how far the relationship had come took place at Julian's own apartment, an evening he'd organized ostensibly to celebrate the wedding invitations going to print, though Wren suspected, watch
