Upon awakening, I was disoriented for a moment before suddenly remembering where I was. The angle of the light flowing in through the window told me I'd been asleep for at least a couple of hours.

I heard voices coming from the living room and rose and made my way down the hall. I saw that James was sitting on the sofa, talking to an attractive blonde who strongly resembled him.

"Ah, Lily, you're up," he said when he saw me. "This is my sister, Mary. Mary, this is Lily, the American girl I told you about."

"Oh, right, of course! How do you do?" She smiled as she stood up and came to shake my hand.

"Hi," I said, a bit shyly.

"Your lunch is on the table, Lily," James told me. I realized that he'd probably eaten some time before and was suddenly famished. I ate the sandwich and potato chips with relish as James and Mary chatted in the living room.

"So, shall we take you round to meet the others?" Mary asked me when I'd finished eating.

"Boris won't be home for a couple of hours," James said. "I've a bit of shopping to do anyway. Lily, how would you like to see the inside of a British supermarket?"

"Oh, yes!" I exclaimed. I wondered whether or not Mary would accompany us to the supermarket. I didn't realize it was gonna be a package deal, I told myself, then instantly berated myself for complaining.

To my relief, Mary left soon afterwards, and James and I headed to the supermarket together. The supermarket he took me to was called Sainsbury's. Once inside, my eyes went round with wonder. Everything looked so different from any supermarket I'd ever been inside before. Not only were the brand names different, but there were also different products, and different flavors of the products I was familiar with.

"Ever had ginger beer before?" James asked me with a grin.

I shook my head.

"It's lovely," he told me, adding a couple of bottles to our shopping cart. He selected many other items, including Ribena currant juice, shrimp-flavored potato chips which he called crisps, and two different kinds of cookies that came in rolls. One was called McVities digestives and the other was called hobnobs. James called them biscuits, not cookies.

We'd returned to James' apartment and were in the middle of putting everything away when the telephone rang.

"That was Mary," James told me when he'd finished talking. "She and Ian will be round in about a half hour or so to run us over to meet everyone."

There were butterflies in my stomach at the prospect of meeting James' family. From what I'd seen so far, I gathered that they must be quite wealthy and high class. What would they think of a middle-class college student from Montana?

Ian turned out to be tall and slender with dark hair, not particularly handsome but very open and friendly. I immediately felt very comfortable with him.

Boris and Emily lived in a picturesque cottage with a thatched roof in the countryside. It wasn't very large, but it was cozy. Boris was tall, middle-aged, and partially bald. He looked to be a few years older than his wife. Emily was plump and maternal-looking with short salt-and-pepper hair.

"So you're Lily," she said as she gave me a warm hug. "James has told us so much about you."

"Good things, I hope."

She laughed. "Wonderful things. So you're in uni in Montana, are you? What are you taking there?"

"Just general classes for right now."

We all sat in the living room, and Emily served us lemonade which, to my surprise, was fizzy like a soft drink. "It isn't fizzy back home," I told Emily.

She laughed. "We have the non-fizzy drink as well. We call it lemon squash."

I soon met Boris and Emily's children, Alex and Ruth. Alex was twenty-one, and Ruth was eighteen. "They're named for my parents," Emily told me. I remembered the biographical information I'd looked up on the internet about James' father and felt a little bit guilty.

"Boris also has a daughter from his first marriage, but I've always thought of her as my own," Emily continued. "Her name's Olivia. She's married now, with a little girl of her own."

"That's nice," I said. "So, how did you two get together?"

"Boris was my psychology tutor at uni," Emily told me. "I met him right before my mother...passed."

"I'm sorry," I said.

"It was such a shock," Emily continued. "She was so happy. We children were just about grown, and she finally had time to focus on her career. If only she hadn't used that underground bunker as a photo developing lab!"

"It's all right, dear." Boris gave his wife a comforting hug. "At least she died doing what she loved, and now she's looking down on us all from above."

"I guess I'm lucky," I said. "I never lost anyone close before."

"It's your first day here," Emily replied. "Let's talk about something cheerful. Tell me about your family back home."

I told them all about my childhood, my parents, Rose and Dimitri. "How did your sister meet a Russian?" Emily asked me.

"He was one of her instructors at college...I mean university," I told her.

"Well, coincidences never end, do they?" She laughed. I knew right away that I was going to like her.

We stayed for dinner, and Emily talked to me in great detail about the rest of her family: her half brother, Kit, his wife Angela, and their daughters, Laura and Lavinia, her brother Leo and his wife Claire, and her sister Harriet and her husband Simon.

"You'll meet them all very soon," she promised.