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though, are you really sure it’s not too low-cut?”
    Adam sighed. Preparing an outfit for this evening had preoccupied Rachel since the previous weekend—the dress she was wearing was one of three she’d bought. Anything connected with Rupert and Georgina Sabah made her nervous, and finally she had announced that she was going shopping with Ellie who “knows about clothes,” and had indeed returned with the most flattering dress he’d ever seen her in. It was a little more revealing than any garment she’d have chosen alone but only subtly so, an enhanced version of Rachel’s own style rather than a grand deviation. “I thought you were going to come back dressed like her,” Adam had said when she showed him, and Rachel had screamed with laughter at the very suggestion.
    “Sorry, yes, I know it’s fine, I’ll stop going on about it,” she said now, cutting off his impatient reply, but nonetheless she patted the reassuringly voluminous pashmina that she had herself added to the outfit.
    Rachel was not the only guest to consider the evening significant. Unlike the Goodmans, Rupert and Georgina Sabah opened their house only on rare occasions, and invitations to these events were rarer still. As with all of the Sabahs’ entertaining, the motivation for staging this recital was philanthropic, for Georgina would tolerate the intrusion of other people into her home only when it was for a good cause. But this she did with grace if not with great frequency, for she felt keenly her own privilege and the corresponding responsibility to share it. This time, a Russian string quartet was visiting from Israel under Rupert’s patronage and, for a relatively modest charitable contribution, a select guest list was invited to a private concert. The charity was one of the Sabahs’ own, a children’s music school in Jerusalem dedicated to political as well as melodic harmonies, bringing Muslim and Jewish children together to play their instruments and to learn to play with each other. Next year, Georgina believed, the school orchestra would visit and perform at the Wigmore Hall, hope-filled and concordant. Already a few of the students had been to rehearse at one another’s houses.
    That sustaining image of two dark little children bonding over hummus and Handel was all that could have induced the frail and retiring Georgina to stand as she was now, greeting a glossily jeweled and furred procession of guests and saying faintly but earnestly to them, over and over, “So very good of you to come.” Rupert was nowhere to be seen.
    “Look at the fireplace!” said Rachel, and Adam stifled the urge to hush her. She had been here before, had made the same exclamation before, and in any case, alone he was far better at affecting nonchalance when he visited the Sabahs. This was ironic considering that it was Rachel’s grandmother Ziva through whom they were all connected. Newly married in 1946, Rupert and Georgina had toured the British Zone, and in the Bergen-Belsen Displaced Persons Camp they had made substantial contributions to the makeshift kindergarten and orphanage. It was there that they had met Ziva, fierce and fearsome with pride and rage. She had been their translator, and she and Georgina had been devoted to one another ever since.
    Behind Georgina loomed the fireplace in question, dove gray Italian marble veined with pale chestnut, as tall and broad as the doorway of a ballroom. The grate in the cavern beneath it was stacked with thick logs between which yellow flames licked and wavered, and above its mantel hung a gilt-framed antique mirror of similar proportions, mounted too high to reflect anything but the faded burgundy silk walls of the grand hallway. In the crowd Adam saw Sarah London, mother of Dan and Lisa London, talking earnestly to a man with a clipped blond beard who Adam believed was the father of someone he’d known from Sunday school. He was related, in some way Adam could not remember, to Rachel’s