Vera looked at the numbers on the doors and then the paper in her hand. She stopped and my stomach lurched. I'd harbored a fear of the horror behind hospital doors from my childhood service projects, delivering whatnots to elderly patients in declining stages of death and decay. Now the door concealed a new horror: my competition. A sensible person would have fled. I, on the other hand, having accepted the role of Other Woman, entered the room. At first, it seemed I had nothing to fear. A very thin young woman wearing tight jeans stood facing the bed, her back to us, coaxing Lady Weston to eat.

Nigel and Willis had been right. Lady Weston could hardly speak, so frail the part below the sheets didn't stick out in the places you would expect, no indication she had an awareness of things going on around her. She was busy getting ready to die and our festival concerns were inappropriate. I knew immediately I wouldn't press a legal document on this woman.

"Philippa," Vera said. "I bring greetings from Nigel." The young woman turned at the sound of her name. I gawked at her.

"Vera," she said. "How thoughtful of you to come." Outwardly gracious, I sensed something private cautioning us not to make a habit of showing up here. I studied her for what made her different from the rest of us. Her scoop-necked sweater did not come from the mall. It fit as though by magic, its shade of blue from a palette reserved for aristocrats. Every shift of her torso struck a pose; each movement released a fragrant breeze of her natural scent and revealed a new aspect of her perfection: white teeth, thin wrists, soft brown earlobes. Pictures of perfection make me sick and wicked. She looked for Randolph, who spoke with a doctor in the far corner of the private room while Vera and I stood against the wall like peasants, both chairs filled with Philippa's and Randolph's things.

As hard as I tried, I couldn't imagine Willis telling her about me.

Philippa returned to her task, coaxing Lady Weston to eat applesauce. "If you don't eat, they'll come and stick more tubes in you, Nana," she said, in a British head voice, blatantly denying Lady Weston's prerogative to die in peace. "You won't like that." Philippa glanced at Randolph, still huddled with the doctor. "Would you like me to get you a pudding, Nana? Would that be better?"

Lady Weston closed her eyes and I remembered when my mother looked like this. Close to the end, she no longer smiled at her grandchildren or listened to the details of my day, preoccupied with her inward progress away from us. And then, two days later, she stopped making sense. She left us many days before she actually died, a blessing, because how else could she bear to go?

Vera startled me. "I'd like to introduce my colleague, Lily Berry."

"I'm pleased to meet you," I said, "and so sorry about Lady Weston's illness." I stepped forward and extended my hand but retracted when Philippa nodded to the applesauce and spoon, so obviously straining her present capacity.

"Rand," she called; the doctor had left.

"Yes, Pippa." Randolph stood at comic attention.

"Would you mind fetching a pudding? We must find something she'll eat."

Sad, she thought food would bring her grandmother back at this point. As Pippa placed the applesauce on the tray table, I noticed a tiny sparkle on her left hand. I almost failed to draw the obvious conclusion but Vera, having also seen it, remarked, "Congratulations on your engagement. Nigel told me you've set a date."

Pippa wore an engagement ring; not flashy like Texas diamonds, but humble and serious in a way that made me ill. "Yes, we did." She smiled fondly, then glanced at the bed. "But we'll just have to wait for Her Ladyship to be well enough. And Willis is finishing his thesis."

Rand stood looking at me, waiting. I extended my hand again. "Lily Berry," I said, from the depths of active trauma.

"Pleased to meet you." He took my hand, lingering over it, so that I pulled out before he loosened his grip. "Are you with the festival?"

"Yes," I said, not sure what festival he was talking about, or what planet I happened to be visiting at the moment, still processing the information that Pippa wanted to get married before her grandmother died and Willis was stalling until his thesis was finished. And I was playing the part of Sue. How easily I'd slipped into the role.

"An actress?" Rand asked.

But Willis had been writing a vampire novel for most of the summer.

"Yes," Vera answered when I hesitated. "From Texas," Vera added meaningfully.

"Ah," he said. I saw him connect with Philippa in a quick glance I would have called The Look except I never thought of The Look within the sibling context. His eyes rested on me longer than seemed normal and I tried to pull myself together.

"Rand," Pippa said; a trifle pushy. "A pudding?"

"But where should I find a pudding?"

Pippa took Rand into the hall to point the way, and I found myself alone with Vera and the dying Lady Weston. I touched Vera's shoulder and shook my head. "Don't do it," I whispered.

Vera frowned and reached for the lease document; I backed away, worried Philippa would see us arguing.

"Don't do what?" Philippa asked, returning.

Vera shushed us and pointed toward the bed. I turned and left the room in an act of self-preservation, the lease still in my JASNA bag.

*   *   *

Busy people in white coats and blue scrubs moved about the hall; charts and pens in their hands, ducking in and out of doors, saving people. A doctor's surgical mask dangled jauntily from one ear as if he'd just emerged from the front. He passed behind the nurse's station, the border separating medical professionals from the masses, reminding me of an altar to which the humble could approach and beg for things like pudding. It seemed to me hospitals were portals for birth and death—the place where people come into the world for the first time or leave forever. Surely this hospital had a chapel.

I couldn't believe Willis had not told me he was engaged.

I pulled the Acting book out of my bag in a desperate effort to disguise my panic. Holding it open, I stood in the hall and stared at it blankly, reeling from confusion. But even the Acting book conjured Willis. He'd taken it from my hand one day and said, "Looks like a much-read book." He opened it and flipped through the pages, releasing the musty paper smell of my adolescent summers: pool chlorine mixed with David Copperfield, the soothing smell of raindrops on hot concrete mingled with the desolation of the moors, lake-house mildew like musty Manderley, newly mown grass merging with longing and tragic endings. Willis had looked at me, there in the attic, his eyes smiling as if he heard everything I was thinking and agreed. "Nothing like the smell of old paper," he said.

My Willis would never hurt me like this.

"Can I get you anything?" Randolph said, back from the cafeteria, a plastic cup of vanilla pudding in his hand. His manner toward me felt inappropriately familiar, especially considering his reserved British gene pool. While he spoke, his eyes followed a nurse's backside to the counter, breaking contact when she turned to reveal a bad complexion.

"Oh," I said, "no, thank you." I closed the book.

"Say, Vera's told me about you," he said. "You're working on the business plan?" His expression was perfectly serious, as though he spoke with a legitimate business consultant.

"Yes," I said. "We understand the need to rethink the festival to meet financial demands more effectively." Not knowing what the financial demands might be, I was winging it to a major extent. But Randolph nodded, the pudding hanging at his side. My Jane Austen began coughing so furiously that, if she weren't already dead, she would have required medical assistance. Pulling what felt like the draft of ideas out of my JASNA bag, I found some entirely unfamiliar papers; Bets's stuff. "I don't wish to add to your burdens," I said, holding the unfamiliar papers as if they were the beginnings of a plan to save Newton Priors and Literature Live. "However, with our agreement expired and future operation depending upon the use of your house, we're developing a plan that promotes everyone's best interests." My Jane Austen had turned purple.

"Well." Randolph touched his breast pocket as he straightened. His eyebrows arched seriously at the paper I held up. "That's not your business plan, is it?"

I looked at the paper, scrunched from having been in my bag, a photograph of some scruffy people posed gloomily around a bare-chested man. They wore lots of black stuff around their eyes like vampires. Superimposed over the picture were the words: "I'll Find You." I pushed the photo back into my bag. "My roommate, Bets, used this bag," I said. "She forgot to take her papers."

"Bets. She's my cousin, you know." Randolph folded his arms, manicured fingernails peeked around his biceps; the natural ridges of his nails smoothed. "Say, how about if I call you after things have settled a bit. And perhaps we could meet and take a look at your plan together."

"Yes," I said. "I know this is a difficult time."

Randolph looked into his grandmother's room. "Yes, difficult," he said.

"Rand?" Philippa called from the bedside.

"I'd better deliver this." He held up the pudding. "I've enjoyed meeting you." He extended his hand and I made certain not to withdraw prematurely. "I'll be in touch," he said.

*   *   *

Walking to the car, the truth hit and my world shifted: Willis misled me.