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"Where's Steven?" I asked.

"Down at the koi pond," my mother said, rolling her eyes. "Filming something. I swear that’s all Steven does. He's asked Esteban to stand in the water and hold a reflector."

"He's asked Esteban to do what?"

"Esteban seemed confused. I gave him to Steven for the afternoon."

I looked past her, down the slope. There he was — shin-deep in ten thousand dollars of imported carp, holding a silver disc over his head at an angle he was plainly being coached on. Steven crouched on the bank dressed all in white with the phone out, saying something encouraging.

"He'll be on the Ascent by tonight," I mumbled.

"The what, darling?" Mom’s eyebrows drew together.

"Nothing."

"The planner's arrived," my father said, brightening. "Benny. Terrifying. You'll like him. He made your mother cry yesterday."

"He did," my mother agreed happily. "About the napkins. And he was right."

Benny Longworth was coming up the path from the meadow — which I was not looking at, so I caught him in the corner of my eye. Compact, immaculate, a blazer with actual structure to it in a house where nobody else was wearing shoes. Moving at the clip of a man who has solved four problems since breakfast and resents the fifth on principle. Earpiece. iPad held flat against his chest like a breastplate. The posture of a person held upright entirely by organizational systems.

I liked him instantly. It's the recognition you get in a room full of amateurs. Oh. You're the other one who actually works here.

"You must be Blaine." He didn't offer a hand. His hands were full of everyone else's happiness. "Benny Longworth. I need ninety seconds. Then I'm leaving you alone until the rehearsal dinner, which is more than any other human being on this property is getting, and you're getting it because you look like a man who has read a contract all the way to the end."

"I've read a few,” I remarked dryly.

"Thank God." He swiped the iPad. "Three things. One. The florist wants to know whether you have feelings about ranunculus."

"I don't have feelings about flowers."

"Correct answer." Swipe. "Two. The string quartet is now a string trio, owing to a custody situation I am not going to burden you with."

"Fine."

"Three." He looked up. "Your mother has asked me to keep Saturday afternoon flexible. In case a healer becomes available." He said healer the way you hand somebody a wet thing. "Flexible is not something a wedding can be. A wedding is a series of immovable objects arranged in a line. So I need you — the lawyer — to tell me whether I'm building a schedule or a suggestion."

And I opened my mouth to say a schedule, obviously, build the schedule.

Because that was correct. The entire architecture of this wedding — the safe one, the drafted one, the numbers-run choice I made with my eyes fully open — is a series of immovable objects arranged in a line, with nothing flexible in it and nothing arriving that I did not send for.

What came out was, "Leave the afternoon flexible."

Benny's thumb stopped over the screen.

I’ve gone over it a great many times since. The way you go over a deposition in which the witness says the one thing you did not prepare him to say. There is no strategy in it. No logic. Nothing I could bill for.

Maybe it was the meadow. Or perhaps it was standing on the gravel of my childhood with a mug of nettle tea going cold in my hand and my jaw full of everything I wasn't saying. Possibly it was because I was forty feet from the exact patch of green where I once handed my entire reckless heart to a man who couldn’t stay on one continent for three consecutive weeks.

Something in me did not want the line of immovable objects. It wanted a crack left in the schedule. A door I hadn’t yet decided to close.

"Flexible," Benny repeated. He wasn't typing.

"You heard me."

"I did." He held my eyes about two seconds longer than the iPad required, and something moved behind his face. He knew. Of course he knew. It's his job. He has stage-managed hundreds of these, and Benny knows exactly what a man looks like when he is building a wedding around a hollow place and calling it a plan.

"Flexible it is," Benny said, and swiped, then strolled off to his next disaster.