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"How is it?" said Lance, sitting down beside him.

"This is very good cake." Through a mouthful. "Almond. Steven wanted lemon."

"Steven was wrong." I reached over and took a finger's worth of frosting.

"Steven was wrong about the cake," Blaine agreed, and had some more.

Blaine has never liked lemon.

I sat there with that piece of information doing absolutely nothing useful in my chest, the way it has done for two years.

Then Lance reached for the tier below and his hand made a sound against it that cake does not make. His eyebrows came down. He tapped it.

"Benny."

"Yes."

"Why does that sound like a door?"

"Because it's polystyrene."

Lance turned around very slowly. "I'm sorry?"

"The bottom two tiers are dummies. Iced over foam." Benny folded his hands. "You cannot get four real tiers to stand through an afternoon outdoors in this weather. Nobody does. It has been like that at every wedding you have ever attended."

"It's hollow—"

"It's structural."

"I have cried over hollow cakes, Benny." Lance looked like he might cry over this one.

I laughed. Put my hand over my mouth, the way I always do. And when I looked up, Blaine was watching me do it with an expression I could not read at all.

Then my ex-husband threw a fistful of cake at me. He missed by a margin I still find difficult to account for and hit Benny square in the face. Nobody moved. Benny sat there with sponge on his cheekbone and a flake of gold leaf stuck to one eyelid, blinking.

"Eleven years," he said.

"Benny—"

"Eleven years I have done this job." He stood, very calm. "I've been screamed at by mothers of brides on four continents. I once had a best man arrested. And not one single time have I been permitted to touch the cake."

"Benny, don't—"

He picked up the second tier and drove it into my chest.

I went over backwards in the chair. Then I came up on my knees with buttercream in my hair, looked that man in the eye with genuine professional respect, got hold of the sugar work that had taken somebody two days, and said:

"That's a shame."

Lance took it in the shoulder and screamed like a man in a film co-starring a shark.

Nothing was organized after that. I smashed a fistful of frosting down the back of Lance's shirt. Benny worked methodically along the table and did not miss once. At some point I was under the tablecloth, and Lance was standing on a chair holding a cake knife over his head and had to be talked down by Benny and Blaine together.

And the entire time, I watched Blaine laugh.

He laughed with his whole face. Wrecked, covered in his own wedding cake, wearing my clothes — and it was the first time I had seen that man properly laugh in years. And I knew, the way you know a scene isn't playing right, that he was about ninety-seconds out from crying, and that every person in that tent was going to pretend otherwise.

I came around the table at him and he went backwards into a chair. I caught the chair. Not him. Blaine landed on the floor, and then Lance caught me in the ear with a spoonful of frosting.