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I turn to look out of the crowd. I’ve heard this before. "You sound like my sister. What do you think this wedding is for? We could have had a much smaller wedding and been done with it. Everly saw her chance and she knew I couldn’t veto any of it because of the image she’s selling to the board."

She rests her chin in her hand, elbow on the table, and watches Zayne convince two board members' wives to join some kind of line dance that looks legally actionable.

"Your father's having a good time," I say.

She's quiet for a moment. Then: "He won't remember this tomorrow."

The words land between us like a stone dropped in water.

"But tonight," she says, "tonight he knows exactly where he is and exactly who I am and he's happy." She straightens. Pushes a strand of hair behind her ear. "That's enough."

I don't tell her that I arranged for Brookhaven to allow extended hours. I don't tell her that the therapist on the van is being paid triple her rate for a weekend shift. I don't tell her any of the logistics because the logistics aren't the point.

The point is that Henry Taylor is laughing at a table full of strangers and calling them by name, and his daughter can hear it from here.

"It's enough," I agree.

*

Later, the champagne incident.

Levi is telling a story that involves hand gestures and increasing volume when his elbow connects with a server's tray. The server—young, horrified—pitches forward, and a full glass of champagne arcs through the air in a trajectory that my brain calculates in real time as ending directly at Aria's chest.

I'm across the table.

I am across the table and somehow I am there before the glass lands—four steps I don't remember taking—and my jacket is off my shoulders and around hers in a single motion that has no logical explanation given the laws of physics and the distance between us.

The champagne hits the jacket. Soaks through the outer layer. Doesn't touch her.

The server looks like he's about to pass out.

"You're fine," I tell him. Then, to Aria: "You're fine."

She's looking up at me from inside my jacket—the shoulders too big, the collar against her neck, her face surrounded by navy fabric—and something about the image does more damage than the kiss did.

"You just ruined a Tom Ford," she says.

"He'll make another one."

"That was..." She adjusts the jacket around herself. "Very fast."

My hands are still on her shoulders. I become aware of this fact at the same time as Levi, who is watching with the expression of a documentary filmmaker who just caught something rare on camera.

I remove my hands.

"Reflexes," I say.

"Right." She's smiling. The small one. The one that's worse than the big one because it means she's keeping something to herself. "Reflexes."

*

Midnight.

The last car has disappeared down the drive. The caterers are breaking down the tent in near-silence, moving through the dark like ghosts disassembling a dream.

Aria stands in the foyer of the house in her wedding dress, my champagne-stained jacket still draped over her shoulders, holding her shoes in one hand.

We are married.