Happy Pride! You were supposed to get a love scene before this month was out, but apparently that wasn't the chapter that wanted writing. That doesn't mean it's off the table, it just means I haven't got there yet. And apologies for the hiatus. You were also supposed to get this...last month sometime. I blame work.

Parnokianlipstick - A fellow Elina Garanca lover. If ever a voice tempts me to sing alto, she does. My accademic daughter got to see her live just before the pandemic hit Latvia full force and I was more than a little jealous. Lovely music to write to. And indeed, you hit on something that's always felt really integral to me - this idea that we can choose our family. And watching how that matters to people I care about, it seems an important story to tell.

AxeofLabrys - you touch on something that I felt was really important to try and get across in this idea that sometimes the people who hurt us and our families are otherwise completely ordinary people. The kind of people we might even like, right up until the moment they say or do something unconscionable, like discriminate on grounds of sex or gender or what have you. I've always loved Kitty, but she's of her time and trying to make her accepting when her own found family were police and doctors seemed disingenuous and a disservice to anyone whose lived experience this was. So it means a lot that that hit home.

Cassandra Hargreave, standing in the landing to Miss Forster's cabbagetown flat, could not now remember the first time she met Jims Anderson. But she thought about it descending the stairs, about the boy with a smile to out-dazzle the sun, all fair-haired, bright-eyed and opinionated.

They were quite new, in those days, her and Persis. Still feeling out the edges of them. The St George St flat must have been two thirds unpacked and empty boxes, and one third - hers - still unopened. But for the boxes it was almost spartan and nondescript. A visitor would not have supposed anyone lived there. And suddenly there was a seven-year-old rucked up in the St George St flat, sifting through index papers, peering in boxes, looking in drawers and asking all kinds of awkward questions.

'Sorry,' said Persis, from where she perched on the arm of a chair, stroking Hera's mottled, tortoiseshell fur. 'Rilla had a doctor's appointment and could I possibly…'

Cass hadn't minded. Was, in fact, touched by the childish security of Jims sitting legs crossed on the floor of the newly-acquired St George St flat. She watched as he shuffled through the index notes and struggled to read them, the long unwieldy words of Digby Fox's latest paper, the language longer-sounding and more unwieldy than ever in Jims' mouth.

Then, spotting something familiar, Jims said into the undemanding silence of the sitting room, 'What are Heathens, Aunt Persis? Are they at all like Methodicalists and is that why Miss Cornelia doesn't like them?'

'Methodists,' said Persis reflexively.

On the floor, Jims considered this and said, ' Methodicalists. 'Swhat I said.'

'It is, you know,' said Cass from where she sat kneeling among the ever-shifting papers, the unopened boxes. She was trying surreptitiously in some semblance of order without discomfiting Jims.

'Whose side are you on?' said Persis.

And Jims, triumphant, 'Mine! You're on mine, aren't you, Aunt Cass?'

They had known each other – but standing in the darkened landing of Miss Forster's upper-storey flat, Cass forgot now how long she and Jims Anderson had known one another before he had conscripted her into his life as aunt, co-conspirator and ally. Five minutes? Half an hour? A heartbeat?

Afterwards, once he'd scarpered homeward spaniel-like at Ken Ford's heels, Persis apologised again. For the disrupted research, the childish presumption, the disarmingly total absorption of Cass into the little boy's orbit.

'I don't mind,' Cass said and sat back on her heels among Digby Fox's research notes. 'It's nice, having family again.'

And there, unsaid, the nebulous things that had been tacitly written off; not only children but contact with her sisters' children. And there was Jims like a sunbeam, seven years of undiluted self-assurance and a smile that would have charmed the Devil's own way into heaven.

Cass descended the cabbagetown stairs and made her way out onto the pavement. It was late; too late to be walking alone through the city. Especially when the last bell for the last tram had yet to sound. But standing among the boarded up vegetable shops with their shuttered windows and covered boxes, Cass wanted the walk. She breathed in the smell of wet wooden crates and vegetables past their collective best and cherished the luxury of fresh air.

After all that time in the darkly-lit, even narrow confines of Miss Forster's flat, it was refreshing to stand outside amid the guttering street lights and the smell of cabbage. And anyway, it wasn't a long walk. The university was in session. The thing was perfectly safe.

At the corner of Winchester, Cass turned for Parliament Ave and began walking with purpose, shoes clacking gently against the pavement. Recalled how, afterwards, before that fateful afternoon in the library, she, Jims and Persis had conspired to create an amended family tree.

That was the year Liam was born. Cass remembered that because Jims had looked up at them – at her and Persis – one drowsy afternoon in April and said, again with that disarming charm, 'Aunt Cass, why haven't they put you in the family bible? It's not because you aren't a Ford, because Mum isn't either, not really, but she's there. So why…'

They dissembled; of course they did. This was back when Liam was only a baby and Jims of an age where his awkward questions could be fobbed off with a light touch of misdirection. Back before the Casting Asparagus. Long before the little cherubs had looked up from the floor of the spare bedroom that did not actually belong to Cass and demanded the telling of an incommunicable love story. It was enough to say, 'Oh, that's different, darling,' and Jims frowned, because he was clever, but didn't actually argue. He had simply set himself up with ink, blotting paper and yards of untouched paper and started amending the family tree.

Only he couldn't spell half the names of his familial inheritance, so in the end it had become a joint endeavour; Persis leaning over his shoulder on the one side, figners lightly around Jims childish ones, Cass on the other. Even Hera had delicately minced her way through the ink, her pawprints and unsolicited but irrevocable contribution to the project.

Past Aberdeen Avenue, and down until Parliament hit Carlton. Cass stood at the intersection and squinted into the darkness for traffic. There was none. Chaos had breached the world she and Persis had so carefully constructed all those years ago, but you'd never know if for the stillness of the night, the blinking of the stars.

Kinship tables, Cass thought now, with an almost-smile, were never Jims' subject, even in the heady days of the 1920s. But he'd beamed at her in the fickle spring sunlight tumbling and blowing its way through the St George St flat. It was green that year because Hal the porter had been defeated by the ebullience of the ivy and the windows were thick with it.

In the green, semi-translucent sunlight, Jims' imperfect handwriting sketched Cass's name onto a branch of its own on his evolving tree and he beamed at her the beam of a cherub.

'When did you meet, Aunt Persis?' he wanted to know. So Persis told him, and Jims wrote that in too, nestled snug and secure between there two names. Persis and Cass. Cass and Persis. A papery, clumsily scribbled unity.

'There,' Jims said with childish satisfaction.

'Little Cherub,' said Cass, which only made Jims grin wider still.

'Chance would be a fine thing,' said Persis, and that was how it had started, all that endless talk of Cherubs. All because Jims, with touching obliviousness had no idea of the momentous thing he was doing, age eight, as he scuffed his shoes against a vacant kitchen chair and revised the Ford family tree.

Past Berkley St at Carlton. In Cass's memory, a young Jims squinted up at her, hands inky, and said, 'If I'm a Cherub, why are you crying?'

'I'm not, darling,' said the ghost of the Cass that had been, but too thickly.

Jims again, 'I thought you'd like this sort of thing,' and gestured clumsily at the sprawl of paper with childishly imperfect writing.

'Of course I do,' said Cass and folded a hand over Jims' ink-besmudged one. She wondered how one explained – if one could explain – that nowhere else would think to link her name to Persis'. Not in family bibles of the variety that had perplexed Jims, not on Christmas invitations or summons to the island.

Well, nothing that came from family, anyway.

And perhaps, Cass thought, that was when family had stopped being names-in-a-bible and morphed into something more incommunicable. Had become Cherubs and ices, Thais and swapped recipes. Evening safe at home, away from the gawping scrutiny of the masses, or else securely sequestered among trusted friends. They did have them, after all.

At Ontario St Cass stopped and fumbled again in her pocket for a handkerchief, unsure if she wanted it for the sake of the boy that had been or because impending doom was barrelling down on them all faster than Mallard had ever taken Stoke Bank. And like Mallard, Cass thought they were headed for derailment.

It was no good. She turned up a handful of loose coinage, a pen nib, and an old ribbon of Hera's, unaccountably stuck in the seams of her coat. No handkerchief. So Cass blinked in the lamplight and scrubbed at her eyes. Then she squared her shoulders and went on down Carlton.

Time skipped. There was Jims with his cocoa that memorable evening after Sissy was born, But how do you know? Stumbling and feeling his way through self-awareness. And in the background, the crackle of the gramophone as it crooned Charlestone. The cocoa blooming on Jims' mouth in testament that he was every bit as young as Cass had almost forgot he was.

You leap into space, she said to him then, with the gramophone crackling and the sweet smell of chocolate thick as treacle and richer than ever in the air.

Carlton butted heads with Sherbourne. Cass did not make the turn. She bisected it at the Allan Gardens because that was the way she used to walk with the Cherubs. There was no moon, but even without it she could see quite clearly the path they used to tread, tripping and tumbling over each other. Wrestling like puppies, cavorting like acrobats. Later, after that awful Gertrude had given them Mops at no notice, they'd taken her too, and it only hit home how like unruly, gangly dogs they were, the lot of them. Jims was older then, and sometimes he'd fall back and tuck Cass's arm in his, Persis' too, if she were with them, and shake his head at the riot.

'On a scale from one to one thousand,' he said, 'how mad do you reckon strangers think we are?'

He was trying desperately hard to be grown-up. But he was two-thirds the confidence of youth and one-third undiluted affection for his siblings. The effect meant he landed more nearly in the middle of a boy's idea of adulthood, all charm and too-tall stature. That smile that could out-dazzle the sun poised ready to charm if not his aunts anymore, then someone.

The garden smelled of the dying gasp of autumn. At Cass's ankles leaves scuttered skeletal and chitinous. She kicked absently at them for the sake of the memory, and found the grass was damp. It must have rained then, while she had sat so fruitlessly with the indomitable Catherine Forster.

She thought, the grass damp on the toes of her shoes, of another autumnal evening, of Jims newly home from Lake Devine. The weather was warm, but they did not sit on the terrace that night. They could never have talked about Jims' fancy for the boy that called himself Barry where just anyone could hear them.

'And,' he had said in summation, 'It's all jumbled up. I know that, because it's not supposed to be like that. I mean I'm not meant to notice…' Here he trailed off and affected great interest in the contents of the St George St bookshelves. Cass did not point out that he must by then have learned the contents by heart, even unto the peculiar shelving system that she and Persis had devised.

Persis said, 'Where does supposed come into it?'

Jims said to the bookshelf, 'It just does, doesn't it? I mean nothing can ever be allowed to happen.'

Cass got up. Crossed the room. Fished for and found Thais among the records and set it playing. She watched as Persis rubbed at Jims' shoulder, the one nearest her, and how between her and the music he began to unwind.

'Supposed didn't stop me noticing Ada Clow the summer I was thirteen,' she said. 'I remember that particularly, because I couldn't understand how neither of the Blythe girls noticed her.'

Cass smiled, offered up her own first glimpse through the veil that was young love. 'It always felt so much then,' she said more to Persis than Jims. 'Do you remember?'

'Well, perhaps to you,' said Persis and laughed. But then she tossed her head and agreed whole-heartedly. Said she wouldn't have the first flush of girlhood love back for love or money. They debated the point good-naturedly, Jims listening and grinning at them.

He said, 'It's not normal though, is it? For me, I mean?'

'If that's right,' said Cass, leaning against the back of the sofa, arms folded, 'and we'll suppose for sake of argument you're right, where do we come in?'

Jims had, per necessity, to turn his head to look at her. He tilted his head backwards, and Cass gestured idly between herself and Persis. Hummed a bit of the Meditation. Jims opened his mouth, whetted his lips and closed his mouth again. Said, 'That's completely different. I can't think of anything more normal. You've always been you.'

It was not a million miles away from the boy who had once opined that aunts didn't argue, that only parents cast asparagus. As then, the temptation to smile was overwhelming. Cass didn't. She carded a hand through unruly golden hair – his, not hers – and said, 'Not always.'

For a moment, leaning on the back of the sofa, Cass idly scanned the books on the shelf opposite and thought of things as they hadn't been. The nieces and nephews whose birthdays she didn't know, christenings she had missed, wedding invitations that had never materialised. Recalled those first, daunting days alone in Toronto, and how stuffy the university with its colleges and reading rooms had felt to a young woman alone and adrift.

And how – of all unlikely people – the pompous Digby had suddenly appeared as one on a mission, Persis at his elbow and demanded a collaboration from the pair of them. These were not things to tell Jims, anxious in the half-light. She thought, from the set of his jaw, what she could see in profile, he sensed it anyway.

Persis said, 'You'll always have aunts. You know that?'

'Yeah,' said Jims with all the clumsiness of masculine youth. 'And I love you too. But I won't have the others, will I?'

'They might surprise you,' said Cass.

And Jims turned his head and said with the same disarming acuity that had charmed Cass years ago, 'Yeah, but if that were true, you wouldn't have cried that day, years ago, would you, Aunt Cass? Over that tree we drew?'

'I've still got that,' said Cass, because it was the easier answer.

Jims smiled. He said, 'I'm sure. And you'll add – whoever comes into my life next to my name, I shouldn't wonder. I wish…' He didn't finish.

Persis said for him, 'I wish that was enough, too.'

The little park ended at Gerrard. Cass stood at the place where the grass abutted the pavement and felt a rush of relief that she'd done that much for him, after all. Tom's name in full on that long-forgotten familial history, snug against Jims. She'd done it back when Sissy was so ill and Toronto awash in dead and dying children. The ink was the wrong colour and her writing too neat and careful, mixed in with Jims' childhood scrawl. It hadn't mattered.

Now she picked her way across Gerrard and down Pembrooke. Somewhere in the shadows a dog whined indignation at her temporary trespass. And opposite, heading in the other direction, some anonymous person in a long, dark coat picked their way through the park. Cass tucked her hands into her pockets, found the Alice key that would admit her to St George and tucked it snug against her index finger. Just in case.

Recalled now, as her heels clicked against the pavement, Jims home from university and radiant with it. Persis had known at once; she'd looked at him and said afterwards that had to be more than love of his subject. Cass recalled too those long terrace evenings with Jims and the Cherubs, and how they'd all but stuck their fingers in their mouths so as not to swamp him with questions. Much better to give Jims the time he needed. To wait until eager and opinionated ears couldn't overhear.

And then, in July, the Cherubs drifting asleep in the room that wasn't really Cass's, Jims saying over the strains of Thais, 'You'd like him. Both of you.'

'We'll come down,' said Persis. 'If you like, when term's up again. Take you out for lunch. How would that be?'

Jims beamed. It was still a smile that dazzled the sun.

Pembrooke became Dundas, swirling and serpentine in the dark evening. It hummed with traffic – eleventh hour trams and late night shift workers heading for shifts. Bells rattled, engines whirred. Cass tightened her grip around the Alice key, but it was still a security measure only. Another dog howled, then another and another, in a chorus of late-night disconsolation. Cass sympathised. Then she had rounded the hill and there was St George with its pressed lawns and swirls of desiccated maple leaves. If Cass listened, she could just hear St James Cathedral tolling the hour down the road and around the corner.

There was a light on in the flat. Cass saw it at once, lone beacon of home and comfort on the eve of the end of the world. Noiselessly as was possible Cass unlatched the gate and unlocked the outer door to the building. She nodded to the night porter on her way up the stair, pausing to reflect on the absurdity that faced with Armageddon it was still possible to take the time to be civil to strangers. Stranger still that they could afford civility to her when the Fords and Miss Forsters of the world could not.

Andromache was waiting on the mat, a small, kitten-sized loaf determined to obstruct incoming ankles. The name, Cass thought now, was never supposed to be an aptronym.

'That bad?' said Persis, emerging from the sitting room and Cass realised she must have said it aloud. She allowed herself to be folded tight into a hug that smelled of books, must, ink and exhaustion. To be kissed gently but thoroughly. If the apocalypse did not immediately abate it at least had the grace to temporarily recede.

'You telephoned Jims?' said Cass afterwards, the seconds eliding.

Persis hummed, her breath warm against Cass's ear. 'For what it was worth. I could only give him the bare bones of the conversation.'

'Disastrous dinner party? Ken's colleagues on fishing expedition? That sort of thing?'

'They sounded less like newspaper headlines,' said Persis, and Cass could hear the smile in her voice. 'But that was the gist.'

'Oh God.'

There was nothing else to say. They went together through the sitting room into the bedroom, Persis lingering to turn the switch on the dresser lamp. Cass stripped her gloves off methodically, only too glad to shed any trace of the evening.

Undoing,she thought they called this, the traitorous prickling of her eyes, now of all times, the crisis moment long abated. She had stood the civilised onslaught of Catherine Forster dry-eyed, and the morass of memories that had followed too. And yet, here in the lamplight and security of St George St…Ridiculous that it should hit home now, the crisis moment so long past.

'I know,' said Persis, embracing Cass again. Obscurely, into her shoulder, Cass said, 'I'm going to miss them.'

'I know.' She allowed Persis to coax them onto the bed, and for a long time after they sat there and cried together for the loss of the world as it had been. Cried until there were no more tears, and they were both dry-eyed and aching. Until the world had reformed such that it was only the two of them and Andromache the kitten there on the bed, its circumference no broader than the shared bedroom in its jumble of furniture, feline and the pulsing cord of connectivity the years had spun between them.

'I promised Jims we'd drive down,' said Persis. 'Tomorrow. I've wrangled it with the university. My nephew isn't well and what with the new baby his mother can't possibly, etc, etc.'

Cass smiled in spite of herself. 'Of course you have,' she said. She could picture it too. How they'd share the drive, notwithstanding her hatred of driving, Jims watching for them from that upper-storey window of his own. The miles of idyllic countryside they'd traverse to get there and the seclusion their quartet would seek out to talk the thing through. The dawning apocalypse and management thereof. If only Miss Forster…But there was no turning back the clock now. Wishes were far from becoming horses. And then, too, there was still the vexed question of Anthony Ford. Nothing they could do about that, either. Not now.

'We'll have to remember…'Persis began. Cass, running her fingers through Persis' short-cropped hair, shook her head.

'It will keep,' she said. 'Come to bed.'

She did not particularly think they would sleep. It wasn't what she meant. But if it was to be them against the world, forever and ever, world without end, amen, then Cass supposed they might do worse than begin as they meant to go on. Together.