They held a small gathering the following month, once the legal proceedings had fully concluded and the household had settled back into its ordinary, comfortable rhythm — not a formal celebration exactly, simply an accumulation of the people who had, in their own varied ways, helped build the strange, sprawling, chosen family that now surrounded Sam on every side.

Lucien’s father arrived first, considerably more relaxed these days than the careful, guarded man Lucien remembered from his own childhood, carrying a gift for Sam that turned out, with typical understated generosity, to be a beautifully bound blank journal of his own.

“Every Ashford should have one,” he said, handing it...