Maybe Geri had said, It sounds like a heavenly arrangement, actually.

“Wait a minute,” Leland says. “You do?”

“I do. And I’m in love with him. I’ve always been in love with him. But it’s contained, like in a hermetically sealed box. It has never leaked out into real life. It’s come close. But yeah, me and him, one weekend a year, for a long time now. And nobody knows but me and him. And now you.”

“Why are you telling me?” Leland says. She’s not sure there’s such a thing as a relationship that exists in a hermetically sealed box. “Was he at the funeral?”

“No.”

“Does he know about your parents?”

“He must.”

“He must?”

“I’m telling you because I need to confess,” Mallory says. “I know it’s stupid, but a part of me believes…” She scrunches her eyes up and emits a couple of throaty sobs. Poor Mal. They’re sitting in the library with their drinks in Senior and Kitty’s house but Senior and Kitty are in coffins in the ground. Leland leans over and puts an arm around Mallory’s back.

“It’s okay, Mal,” she says.

Mallory shakes her head. She’s all clogged up. Leland hurries to the powder room for tissues. She’s been a half-hearted friend to Mallory since the beginning, always believing for some reason that she was superior and therefore didn’t have to try as hard, but now she wants to make up for it. If Mallory feels like she has to confess about her Same Time Next Year, then fine. Leland will accept the information without judgment.

Mallory mops her face with a tissue, gets in a couple clear breaths, composes herself somewhat. “Part of me believes that what happened to Kitty and Senior is my fault. Because of this thing I’ve been doing.” She pauses. “The other person, the man…he’s married.”

“Well, yeah,” Leland says. “I figured. Otherwise…I mean, if he weren’t married, you two would just be together all the time. Or more frequently. But whatever, Mal. What happened to your parents was a random, stupid, senseless accident. It doesn’t have anything to do with this other thing. I can assure you of that.”

“But you can’t assure me.”

Leland takes her friend’s hand. “Tell me about him. If no one else knows about him, then you must have a bunch of pent-up stuff you’ve been waiting to share.”

“Not really,” Mallory says. “In some ways, there isn’t enough to share. He comes every year, we do the same things, we have a sort of routine—the things we eat, the songs we listen to—and then he leaves.”

“You don’t call him?” Leland says. “You don’t text him?”

Mallory shakes her head.

“I find that hard to believe.”

“It’s even harder to do than to believe,” Mallory says.

“And you see him every year? What about Link?”

“He’s always with Fray when this person comes,” Mallory says. “It’s at the end of the summer.”

Leland is starting to picture it: A sun-soaked weekend, just Mallory and her mystery dream man in that romantic cottage on the beach. They make love and feed each other fresh figs and sing along to the Carpenters and then he leaves; Mallory stands in the doorway, blowing him kisses. They flip the hourglass over again.

It sounds like a heavenly arrangement, actually.

“Still, it’s amazing, right, that you’ve never missed a year? Does his wife know?”

Mallory shakes her head. “His wife…I can’t even get into everything about his wife.” She drops her voice. “She came to the funeral. By herself.”

“She…what?” Leland says. And suddenly, she pulls away from Mallory, just a few inches, nothing dramatic, but she needs space. The wife came to the funeral alone. Every year for a long time now. How long? Since the beginning, when Mallory inherited the cottage? Leland hadn’t planned on asking the guy’s name because she wanted to respect Mallory’s privacy and also because she’d assumed it was someone she didn’t know.

The end of summer.

Leland racks her brain to remember her visit that first summer. They had surprised Fray, that she remembers, and she and Fray had nearly hooked up. Cooper was there, and his friend from Hopkins, Jake McCloud. What does Leland remember about Jake? Aaaaarrrgh! Very little. If he hadn’t ended up marrying Ursula de Gournsey, he would have been erased from Leland’s memory forever.

But he had ended up marrying Ursula de Gournsey.

Who came to the funeral by herself. Why? Why had she been at the funeral without Jake when Jake was the one who was friends with Coop? “Is it Jake McCloud?” Leland whispers.

Mallory releases a breath.

“Oh my God, Mal.”

“I know.”

“Mal.”

“Believe me, I know.”

“In the spirit of full disclosure…” Leland says.

Mallory looks up.

“I sat with Ursula at the service. I was shocked to see her, obviously. And this might sound horrible—no, it definitely will sound horrible—but I got her e-mail and her cell phone number. I asked her if she would do an interview for Leland’s Letter and she said yes.”

“Oh, Lee.”

“I’m sorry, I had no idea. But yes, I am that friend who took full advantage of your parents’ funeral to further her own career. It’s just…I didn’t know.”

“But you know now,” Mallory says. “So, please…”

Please what? Leland wonders. Mallory doesn’t say anything else. Her head falls back against the sofa and her eyes close. Leland considers trying to get Mallory upstairs to her childhood bedroom but it feels like an impossible task. She covers Mallory with the deep red chenille blanket that has lived in this room for as long as Leland can remember and then she succumbs to the allure of the other half of the sofa.

So, please…what? Leland thinks as she falls asleep.

Leland wants to do an extended interview with Ursula de Gournsey, but because of the situation with Mallory, she decides it’s best not to dive too deeply into Ursula’s life. Instead, she features Ursula in her Dirty Dozen—twelve questions, some rapid-fire and fun, some provocative. Turns out, this suits Ursula better, anyway. She doesn’t have time for Leland to do a detailed profile.

Twelve questions is a lot, Ursula says. She hopes they can blow through them in thirty minutes, forty-five tops.

“Or I could e-mail them to you?” Leland says. “So you have time to mull them over?”

“It’ll go straight into the black hole,” Ursula says. “This isn’t constituent business or legislation, which makes it personal, and my personal business gets triaged last. Let’s do this now. Go ahead.”

Leland’s Letter

Dirty Dozen with Senator Ursula de Gournsey

1. Gadget you can’t live without?

There’s a pause on the other end of the phone.

“Do people ever say their vibrators?” Ursula asks.

“All the time,” Leland says.

“That’s not my answer,” Ursula says. She sounds nearly offended, as though Leland were the one who suggested it. “I was just wondering.”