Five: Toll the Wedding Bells!!!!!!

It was Liesa who saw him first.

They had come out through the lobby doors for air, mostly, and because the Sunroom had been taken over by Melisande, and had turned into a whirlwind of lace, tulle, silk and other fabrics that made them both dizzy.

The main lawn ran wide and green from the steps toward the water, already scattered with families in their good clothes, and at the far end of it Mildred was supervising the white chairs into rows as if each one had personally let her down. Sam had her hands in her pockets and her shoulders loose. She was thinking about nothing, on purpose, because the other thing, the one coming later, the one she’d promised Liesa this morning not to die in, was not something she wanted on her face in front of anybody’s parents.

Then Liesa’s fingers closed around her wrist.

“Papa,” Liesa said.

It came out small, almost to herself, and Sam followed her eyes down the slope.

A man was walking up the path from the drive, older, broad through the shoulders, in pressed navy trousers and a gray shirt with the sleeves rolled. He kept stopping, at a palm, at the glitter of the water, and giving each thing the same long, level frown, the kind of frown that prices a job before it decides whether to admire it.

Liesa didn’t wait for him to reach them. She took Sam’s hand and went. Sam could have planted her feet and stopped a pickup truck. She let herself be towed. Even at a near-run, Liesa’s hips rolled with every stride, the walk her body gave her whether she was crossing a ballroom or the last stretch of lawn before her father met her wife. Where their fingers were laced, the tightness in Liesa eased a notch, the way it always did when they touched.

“You’re sure,” Sam said. “Now. Like, right now.”

“If I wait, I think about it.” Liesa didn’t slow down. “If I think about it, I do not do it.” Sam had to admit it was fair. She knew that trick. She’d proposed on it.

Willem Claes saw them coming when they were twenty feet off, and stopped walking.

“Liesje,” he said, eyes going soft.

Liesa let go of Sam to hug him, and he let her. He stood very still inside it, one broad palm flat between her shoulder blades, and patted her twice. Then he held her off at arm’s length and looked at her face for a while, and whatever he found there loosened something in his own.

“Dag, Papa,” Liesa said.

“Dag, schat,” said Willem, smiling.

Then his eyes went past her shoulder and found Sam, and stayed.

It was a frank, curious look, the kind a careful man gives a stranger his daughter has walked in holding hands with. He took her in from the shoes up, taking his time, like a man checking a length of lumber for warp, and when he got to her face he gave her a small, polite nod. She stood still for it.

“Papa.” Liesa had stepped back beside her. Her chin was up. “This is Sam. Sam is my wife.”

Sam put out her hand. Willem took it. His grip was dry and hard, a working man’s grip, and Sam, who could have turned his knuckles to gravel without meaning to, gave him back exactly as much as he gave her.

Then the word landed.

His eyebrows went up and stayed there. He looked at Liesa. He looked at Sam. He looked back at Liesa, and his mouth opened, and what came out of it first was a short, astonished huff of a laugh, the laugh of a man who has come home to find the furniture moved.

“Your wife,” he said.

He was still holding Sam’s hand. He didn’t seem to have noticed. Sam noticed. She’d been braced for the other kind of look, the one that goes flat and polite and lets go of your hand a second too soon, and it wasn’t coming. What was on his face was pure bewilderment, and under it, if she was reading him right, something that was very nearly hurt.

“Liesje. Last time you come home, you bring me Andy. You sit at my table, you say, Papa, this is Andy. Okay. An American. I get used to Andy. I like Andy.” He gave Sam’s hand a small, distracted shake, as if to include her in the complaint. “And now there is a wife, and nobody tells me one word? Not a letter? Not a phone call? I am the last to know?”

“Is… I was going to…” Liesa started. “Papa, it is not that I—”

She stopped. Her free hand pressed flat against her stomach, and for a second she looked about fourteen. Sam had never once seen her lose a sentence like this.

Liesa breathed out, and started again, and this time she didn’t dress it up.

“I married Sam last night,” she said. “At the bonfire, on the beach. It was right, and I said yes. There was no time to call anybody. I am sorry, Papa.” She swallowed. “And Andy is still Andy. I love him also. One day I will marry him too. Someday. I do not know when yet.”

Willem let go of Sam’s hand, but only to rub his face with it, hard, the way a man does when he has been handed too much at once and wants a second to put it down.

Then the questions came, and they didn’t come one at a time.

“Weet haar familie ervan? Ben je gelukkig?” he asked. Does her family know? Are you happy?

“Papa,” Liesa said, half laughing. “Engels. For Sam.”

He switched without a pause, turning to ask both of them at once, each question landing before the last had finished.

“Your family, Sam, they know about this? They are happy for you? They come today? And you, Liesje, you are happy, truly, not only today? And the wedding, you promise me a wedding, a real one, with a cake and me walking with you. So this was it? On a beach? With a fire? And nobody calls me?”

The first question hit Sam somewhere under the ribs, and she didn’t get her guard up in time.

They are happy for you?

She opened her mouth to say something easy, and nothing easy was there. There was a kitchen. There was her full name in her father’s voice. There was her mother standing behind him, saying nothing at all. Her throat closed around the whole of it, her eyes went hot so fast it startled her, and behind her breastbone a thin, high hum started up, like a struck tuning fork, the one she had never once in her life been able to stop. She could have lifted a car. It didn’t help. It never had.

Willem had run out of questions. He was looking right at her.

“My brother’s coming,” Sam said. It came out rougher than she wanted. “Michael. He knows. He’s happy.” She stopped. She tried to go on, and couldn’t, and gave a small, useless shrug instead. “My parents aren’t… They wouldn’t be. They’re not coming.”

Willem didn’t say anything. But his face changed, and this time there was no mistaking it for anything but what it was. The bewilderment went out of it all at once. What replaced it was the look of a man who has just understood exactly what he stepped on, and is sorry, and is not going to pretend he didn’t see. Liesa’s fingers tightened around Sam’s.

“Papa,” she said softly. “You ask if I am happy. Ja. Ik ben gelukkig.” Her voice cracked, and she said it again in English, looking straight at him. “I am happy. Truly. Not only today.” She took a breath, and her hand came to rest on her stomach again, where Sam realized it had been drifting all morning. “And there is one more thing. The most important thing. I am pregnant, Papa. Sam and I, we are going to have a baby.” She smiled, wet and shaky. “You are going to be an opa, Papa.”

If two mothers struck Willem as anything unusual, none of it reached his face. He didn’t ask how. He didn’t ask anything at all. His eyes went to Liesa’s hand on her stomach and stayed there, and his own hand came up slowly and covered his mouth.

“Een kleinkind,” he said, behind his fingers. A grandchild.

Then his face came apart: the jaw first, then the mouth under his hand, then the eyes, which filled so fast he had to turn and blink at the lobby glass until he could see again.

“After your mother,” he said, and stopped. He tried again, slower. “After your mother, you come home, and you carry everything. The house. The money. Me. And I let you. Every night I think: and who carries Liesje? Nobody. Only Liesje.” He pointed at their joined hands, and his finger wasn’t quite steady. “And now I look, and somebody carries you. Andy. Sam. And now a baby.” His voice went out from under him, and he pressed his lips together until it came back. “Is good, Liesje. Is so good. More than I could ever give you, alone.”

Liesa let go of Sam’s hand and walked into her father’s arms, and this time he didn’t pat her like a wall. He held on. He bent his gray head over hers, and Sam heard him say, thick and low, “Mijn meisje. Mijn meisje,” and Liesa’s shoulders started to shake. My girl. My girl.

After a while Willem lifted his head. He wiped his face with the heel of his hand, unembarrassed, and looked at Sam over his daughter’s shoulder. Then he let Liesa go, came the two steps across the grass, and held out his hand again. Sam took it. The grip was the same, dry and hard. But this time he didn’t let go after the shake. His other hand came up and closed over the top of hers, so her hand was held between both of his, and his eyes were still wet.

“Sam,” he said. “You carry her, yes? Sometimes?”

“Yes.” It came out rough. “Every time she lets me.”

He nodded. Something in his shoulders settled.

“Good,” he said. “Then listen. Your parents do not come. Okay. Here is family anyway.” He squeezed her hand between both of his. “Welcome in the family, Sam. You, and the little one. Welcome.”

He hadn’t asked a single question about Sam being a woman. As far as Sam could tell, it had not occurred to him that there was one to ask. The hum behind her breastbone stopped.

She hadn’t known it could. She had carried it into every room that held a man old enough to be her father, bracing so long she had stopped feeling herself do it. And now an old man in a gray shirt was holding her hand in both of his on a lawn and calling her family, and the bracing had nothing left to hold up, and it all came loose at once.

Her eyes filled. Her throat closed. Somewhere in her head, out of pure habit, a joke started getting itself ready, something about his grip, something about sons-in-law, and it never arrived. There was nothing she wanted to put in front of this.

“Thank you,” Sam said. It cracked right down the middle, and she let it. “Thank you. You don’t—I just—thank you.”

Willem squeezed her hand once more, gently, and let go.

Then Liesa was at her side, one hand flat between her shoulder blades, and Sam turned her face into Liesa’s hair for a second and just breathed.

Willem cleared his throat, loudly, and looked up the slope at the lobby as if nothing at all had happened.

“So,” he said. “Is coffee, in there?”

Liesa laughed, and it came out wet. Sam laughed too, and wiped her eyes with the back of her wrist, and didn’t care who saw.

“Ja, Papa,” Liesa said. “There is coffee.”

She hooked her arm through his. Sam took his other side. Nobody had asked her to. She did it anyway, and the three of them went up the lawn together, slowly, at the pace of a man who was in no hurry to let go of either of them.

---

The coffee in the lobby had been better than it had any right to be, and Luis had drunk his standing up, the way he drank it at the firehouse, in four swallows. His father was still carrying his. Alejandro held the cup in both hands like a man warming them on a January morning, though it was eighty degrees and climbing, and as far as Luis could tell he hadn’t taken a sip of it yet.

“Double doors,” Sebastian said. “On the left. She said.”

“She said a lot of things.” Luis had watched the woman at the greeter’s table stop listening to them halfway through her own directions, her pen frozen, her eyes on something over his shoulder. He hadn’t turned to see what. It hadn’t looked like his business. “Left’s right, though.”

The double doors on the left were glass, set in a long wall of more glass, and they opened onto the gardens as if somebody had been waiting for exactly the three of them to walk through. The noise of the lobby fell away behind them. Out here it was paths, and clipped hedges, and flowers Luis didn’t have names for, and a wet green smell like a garden after a hose. The paths forked almost immediately. Nobody had put up a sign.

Luis stopped at the fork and did what he always did in a place he didn’t know. He looked for the exits. He looked for where people were bunching up. He looked for anything that didn’t fit.

That was how he saw her.

There was a trellis a little way down the right-hand path, heavy with white flowers, and in the gap between it and the hedge behind it stood a small Asian woman who was very plainly trying not to be seen. She was five feet tall or so, black hair pulled straight back, dressed in something long and plain and dark blue that wrapped and tied at the waist. She was also standing very still, the way a deer stands still, and it wasn’t working, because behind her shoulders, folded tight against her back, was a pair of wings. Gold ones. They rose a good foot above her head. A gold tail curled around her ankles. Two small horns swept back from her hairline. And the arms— Luis counted, and then counted again. Two arms at her sides, holding a folded cloth. Two more below them, pressed flat against her ribs.

She saw them seeing her. The lower pair of arms drew in tighter, as if she could fold them out of existence, and then, a second later, stopped, as if she’d caught herself doing it.

Sebastian made a noise like a kettle.

“Whoa,” he said. “Okay. Whoa. Those prosthetics, the wings, and the, the tail—whoever built those deserves, like, an award. Like an actual award. An Oscar. For the tail.”

He heard himself about a half-second after the rest of them did. Luis watched it land. The kid’s ears went red from the top down, like a thermometer, and his hand went to the back of his neck and stayed there.

The woman didn’t seem to mind at all. She stepped out of the gap, only a little, and bowed to them, a small, exact bow from the waist.

“Forgive this one,” she said. Her voice was soft and very precise, every word set down separately. “This one did not mean to be seen back here. There are a great many people today. More than this one is used to. And this one did not want to startle anyone by accident.”

“You didn’t,” Sebastian said, much too fast. “Startle. Anyone. At all.”

She tilted her head at him, the smallest degree, the way a person does at a word in a language they only half speak. Whatever prosthetics or Oscar meant to her, she let it go by. “This one is called Sumiku, and she is honored to meet you.” She didn’t correct him. She didn’t agree with him, either. She only looked at him, kindly, and waited.

Luis decided his brother had been drowning long enough.

“Ah, I’m Luis. Luis Moreno. You know our sister?” he asked. “Dawn. Dawn Moreno.”

The change in her was immediate. Her shoulders came down. The wings, which Luis would have sworn were holding themselves stiff, eased by a fraction of an inch.

“Dawn-san,” she said. “Yes. This one knows Dawn-san.”

She looked at the three of them in turn, putting the family together, and something in her face warmed.

“You should know,” she said, “that this one owes your sister more than you would probably guess. At the lunch before the wedding, this one began to serve everyone’s plates before her own. It is what this one does. Dawn-san took the dish out of this one’s hands and made her sit down, and eat, the same as every other guest at the table. And later, when this one had to meet someone new, someone this one did not know how to meet, Dawn-san offered to walk beside her. So that this one would not have to go alone.”

Luis didn’t say anything for a second.

He was thinking about the years after their mother died, and about who had made sure everybody in that house ate. It hadn’t been him. He had never once seen who fed Dawn. And here was a stranger telling him Dawn had been making sure somebody else sat down. Behind him, his father’s hands had tightened around the coffee cup. Alejandro was looking at the ground.

“Yeah,” Luis said. “That sounds like her.”

Sebastian had gotten his breath back. He took his hand off his neck. When he spoke again, his voice was lower, and it had lost all the showing-off.

“If those actually work,” he said, nodding at the wings. “Like, if you could actually go up with them. That’d be the coolest thing anybody ever did. Ever. I mean it.”

The woman looked at him for a long moment, and the corner of her mouth moved, not quite a smile, but close to one.

“Thank you,” she said. “This one is glad you think so.”

The wings gave the barest tremble, like leaves in a breeze nobody else could feel.

“Ex-Contestant Sumiku.”

A woman had come around the far end of the hedge. She was in a plain dark uniform, and her face had the kind of stillness that made you check whether she was breathing.

“The drinks table requires you,” she said. “Now, please.”

The small woman, Sumiku, bowed to her, then turned and bowed to the Morenos, one after another.

“This one must go,” she said. “This one is glad to have met Dawn-san’s family.”

Her eyes went across all three of them as she straightened. Then she was gone around the hedge, the tail flicking once behind her, and the woman in the uniform was gone with her, and the gap by the trellis was only a gap again.

Sebastian stared at it.

Luis let it go for exactly three seconds. “I’m gonna ask Dawn,” he said, flatly, “if she’ll introduce you. Properly.”

“What?” Sebastian’s ears lit up all over again. “Why would you— I didn’t— I don’t even—”

“Okay,” said Luis.

“I was being polite,” Sebastian said.

“Okay,” Luis said again.

It was their father who spoke next. It was the first thing Alejandro had said since the lobby, and he said it the way he said most things, low and dry, to the coffee cup more than to either of them.

“Those were not glued on.”

Luis turned. “Dad.”

“I’m only saying,” said Alejandro.

“They were prosthetics,” Luis said. “Good ones. These people have money.”

“They moved,” Sebastian said. “The wings moved. When she left. They did a thing.”

“Animatronics,” said Luis.

“On a tail?” said Sebastian.

“People put animatronics on everything now,” said Luis.

Alejandro finally took a sip of the coffee. It had to be stone cold. He drank it anyway. “Maybe,” he said mildly. “Nobody’s costume looks at your brother like that.” Sebastian made the kettle noise again.

Luis started walking, mostly so nobody would see his face. He had carried people out of buildings. He knew what skin looked like when it was real, and what a joint looked like when it was working, and he had watched the place where those wings met her back for most of five minutes, and he had not been able to find the seam. He didn’t finish the thought. It wasn’t his business either.

They went on down the path toward the noise of the lawn, the three of them, still arguing, and none of them was winning.

---

The fountain was the first quiet thing Shannon had found all morning, and she found it by accident.

She and Anthony had come out of the little sitting room a few minutes after Aunt Marie, a phrase that still didn’t fit in her mouth, and stood in the lobby for about a minute while their mother held Grandma’s hand and their father ran the day’s logistics under his breath. Then Shannon had caught Anthony’s eye, and Anthony had caught hers, and without a word between them they had drifted toward the nearest door that wasn’t the front one, and kept drifting. Past a table where a girl with gold wings was pouring lemonade. Around one hedge, and then another, until the noise of the lawn was a hum somewhere behind them, like a dishwasher in the next room.

The path ended in a little round clearing with a stone fountain in the middle, water spilling down three tiers into a basin.

There was a woman standing beside it.

She was tall, nearly Shannon’s height before the heels, in a cocktail dress of deep midnight blue with shoes to match, and her hair was the same midnight blue, pulled into a ponytail that didn’t stop at her waist, or her knees, but went all the way down to her ankles and pooled a little on the stone. She was swaying, very slightly, the way a reed sways in water. And she had no arms.

Not missing ones. Shannon had seen missing ones, at work, and the way the body closed over the place where something had been. There was nothing to close over here. Her shoulders simply curved down into smooth, unbroken skin, as if arms were a thing that had never been part of the plan. And under the neckline of the dress there were four. Shannon counted twice, because she was a nurse and counting was what her brain did when it didn’t know what else to do. Four breasts. Two, and then two more below them.

She wasn’t alone back here, either. On the far side of the basin, where a bed of white flowers ran along the foot of the hedge, a tall woman with black hair down to her ankles and nothing on at all was bent over the flowers. Next to her stood something Shannon’s eyes slid off twice before they would hold it: one slim body in a pale yellow dress, and two heads on its shoulders, both talking at once, cheerfully, about flowers. And on the fountain’s rim, between the two groups, sat a young woman with long golden-brown hair and huge breasts that bulged out of her dress, trailing her fingers in the water.

Nobody said anything for a while.

Then Anthony drew in a long breath through his nose. “Shannon.” he said, drawing it out into a long, long word. It was his about-to-be-a-pain voice, the same since he was six. Today it was also very tired.

“Don’t,” Shannon said.

“I’m just saying.” He didn’t take his eyes off the woman in blue. “Of course. Of course this is the next thing. Of course it is. We found a quiet spot, and naturally the quiet spot comes with…”

“One more thing nobody’s going to explain,” Shannon said. “Yeah. I know. I told myself in the lobby nothing else could surprise me today. Wrong again. I’ve been wrong since breakfast.”

“Since the car,” said Anthony.

“Since the car,” she agreed. “The car that didn’t have a driver who talked.”

“The sky over the lobby,” said Anthony, “doing that thing skies don’t do.”

“The aunt Mom never told us about,” said Shannon, “who’s older than Mom and looks like she could’ve been in my graduating class.”

“The lady with the wings,” said Anthony. “Pouring lemonade. Like that’s a normal job.” Then, lower, “And over there,” he added, with the smallest tip of his head past the fountain.

“I saw,” said Shannon. “I’m not looking. You shouldn’t be looking.”

“I looked once,” said Anthony.

“You looked twice,” said Shannon.

“Once, and then once to check.” He shoved his hands in his pockets. “And now, what, a lady in heels with no arms and, like, extra…”

“Yeah, sure, put her on the list,” Shannon said. “Why not. Put her right on the list.”

The woman by the fountain had not moved, other than the sway. But she was looking at them now, and Shannon realized, with a small cold drop somewhere under her ribs, that she had probably been looking for a while.

The woman on the fountain’s rim had stopped trailing her fingers in the water. She was soft and curvy and pretty in an open way, in a dress the color of the inside of a shell, and she was looking from Shannon and Anthony to the woman in blue and back again. Whatever she saw in their faces made her get up, dry her hand on her skirt, and come over.

“Hi,” she said. “Sorry. I don’t mean to barge in. I’m Chloe. I’m, um. I’m with the wedding.” She glanced at the woman by the fountain, and her face softened into something like a smile. “That’s Eden. She’s a friend. We’re all sort of keeping each other company back here.”

“Hi,” said Shannon. “We weren’t—”

“It’s okay.” Chloe said it quickly, but gently, the way you pull a splinter. “I just… She’s real. I know it’s a lot. It’s a lot for everybody, the first time. But she’s real, and she can hear you, and it’s kind of rude to stare, you know? No matter how she looks.” She winced a little at herself. “Is that okay to say? I don’t want to be a jerk about it.”

“No,” said Shannon. “No. Yeah. Fair.”

Anthony still hadn’t stopped looking. Shannon could see their father’s gears going in him, the ones that went straight past the feelings in a room to the part with a wiring diagram.

“So can she, like,” Anthony said. “Without arms. Can she do stuff? For herself? Like, how does she eat, or open a door, or…”

“Tony,” Shannon said.

“I’m asking,” Anthony said.

Chloe turned toward him. She didn’t get sharp, but she did get very clear. “That’s kind of her business, I think. It’s not really a thing you ask somebody you just met. Would you want a stranger asking how you do things?” She tipped her head toward the path. “Hey. They’re about to start seating people on the main lawn. If you take that path and keep left, it comes out right by the chairs. I think your family’s probably looking for you.”

It was a rescue, not a scolding, and a very kind one. Shannon knew exactly what it was, because she did it herself, forty times a shift, to visitors who’d gotten too interested in the wrong bed—the same soft voice, the same hand on the arm, as if the whole thing had been the visitor’s idea.

And then she heard it.

Not Anthony. Herself. Put her on the list. Out loud, in a quiet clearing, about a woman who was standing right there—who could hear, who had been looking at them the whole time. Put her on the list, like a thing. Like a symptom.

Shannon’s face went hot. She could have let it go. Nobody was going to bring it up. “Hey,” Shannon said. “That thing I said. About the list.” She made herself look at Chloe, and then, harder, past her, at the woman by the fountain. “That came out wrong. I didn’t mean her like she was a thing on a list. I meant the day. I’m sorry. That wasn’t okay.”

Chloe looked at her for a second. Then she nodded, a small, surprised nod, as if she hadn’t expected anyone to come back for that.

“Thank you,” she said quietly.

By the fountain, Eden was watching Shannon. Her eyes were very dark, and she didn’t blink, and it went on long enough that Shannon felt it on the back of her neck. Then, slowly, one corner of Eden’s mouth lifted, and the rest followed, and it turned into a smile, small and unhurried, the kind of smile that takes its time because it has nowhere else to be. There was a faint flush high on her cheeks that didn’t seem to have anything to do with the sun.

Shannon smiled back—a little crookedly, but she meant it.

Anthony lifted a hand in a half-wave, then turned it into a scratch at his ear.

They took the path Chloe had pointed to. Shannon looked back once, at the last turn. Chloe had gone back to her seat on the rim. Eden was still standing by the fountain, swaying again, and past her the tall woman at the flower bed was holding up a white bloom for the twins to judge, and the water behind all of them was catching the light.

Shannon faced front and kept walking. She was thinking about Aunt Marie, and the thing she had said about the hair and the eyes and the way she stood, and the name she had said along with it. She turned that over for a while. She didn’t get anywhere with it. Behind her, the fountain kept running.

---

Hana Masri walked until she couldn’t hear her mother anymore, and then a little farther.

It wasn’t that she wanted to be away from them. She told herself that twice, on the path, and believed it the second time. It was only that the bench under the pergola had been full, and loud, and Reem had been on her third retelling of the fifteen pounds, and at some point Hana had noticed that her own face had been smiling for forty minutes without her once deciding to. So she had said she wanted to see the gardens. Her mother had said don’t get lost. Hana had said I won’t, Mama, warmly, and had gone to get a little lost.

The gardens were very beautiful. She would tell them that, when she got back. The ocean showed up between the palms in flashes, too blue, like somebody had turned the color up on it. She walked slowly in her good shoes, her hands folded in front of her, and let the noise of the lawn fall behind her until it was only a kind of weather. Once, a tall girl with a long braid and a lanky boy came past her the other way, the boy walking half backward, both of them wearing the same stunned expression. Hana smiled at them. They didn’t seem to see her.

The path bent around a tall hedge, and there was a bed of white flowers along the foot of it, and Hana came around the bend into a small round clearing with a fountain in the middle, and stopped.

There were three women at the flower bed. Or there were two. She couldn’t tell, at first, which number was right.

Two faces, side by side, on one pair of slim shoulders, the same pale, fine-boned face twice over. Both had dark blonde hair, but the one on the right wore it in a tidy braid and the one on the left let it fall loose over her shoulder, and that was the only way Hana could tell them apart. One body in a pale yellow dress that didn’t quite sit right on it, one strap sliding, a seam at the waist pulling as if it had been cut for someone else. Hana’s mind picked up the question and put it down and picked it up again, as if it might weigh less the next time.

And beside them, close enough to touch, was a third woman, tall, with black hair that fell all the way to her ankles, and she was naked.

She was entirely naked, in the middle of a garden, at a wedding. She was leaning down over the bed of white flowers, reaching out with one hand to touch a bloom, then drawing back and reaching for another, slowly, with great care.

Hana looked away, for somewhere safe to put her eyes, and found the fountain. Beside it stood a tall woman in midnight blue with no arms at all, swaying gently, watching the flower bed with a small, fond look. On the fountain’s rim sat a young woman with golden-brown hair, who glanced up, gave Hana a quick, sympathetic smile, and went back to trailing her fingers in the water.

There was nowhere safe to put her eyes. Hana’s hand went to the edge of her hijab, where it lay against her cheek, and stayed there.

The braided twin looked up. Her eyes went over Hana, quick and sharp and not unkind, and landed on her face, and Hana could practically watch her read it.

“Oh,” Hana said. Her voice came out bright, the way it always did. “I’m so sorry. Is this— Have I walked into a photo shoot? For the wedding?” She laughed, a little. “Should I not be back here?”

The braided twin was already shaking her head before Hana reached the end.

“No, you’re fine. No photo shoot,” she said. Her voice was warm and quick. “This is Katherine. She doesn’t talk, can’t, so don’t take it personally if she doesn’t answer you. She’s one of the bridesmaids, and she’s trying to pick her flowers, and we’ve been helping. Or trying to. I’m Summer. Summer Weaver. This is my sister Autumn.”

The loose-haired twin inclined her head, a single slow degree.

“Hana,” said Hana. Her face was going hot under the fabric. “I’m Norah’s sister. Norah Rahman? I’m so sorry to interrupt. I can come back later. Really.”

“Oh, stop, you’re not interrupting.” Summer waved it off with the hand on her side of their body. “Honestly, the more opinions the better. She’s been stuck between the same two for about ten minutes now. We’re running out of ideas.”

Katherine had straightened. She looked at Hana. Her eyes were a clear, startling green, the kind of green that made a person forget for a second where else she had been trying not to look. Her face was open and curious, and Hana could not find any embarrassment in it anywhere.

Hana tried to look at her face and only her face. It was harder than it should have been, because looking only at the face felt like its own kind of rudeness, like pretending not to see a person. She had spent thirty years learning every rule there was, and none of them covered this.

“Which two?” she heard herself ask.

Summer brightened. “Okay. So. This one.” She pointed at a cluster of creamy white blossoms, five petals each, with a deep yellow heart at the center. “Plumeria. It’s got that yellow in the middle. White on white, you want a little warmth somewhere, or the whole thing goes flat in the pictures. That’s the case for that one. The color.”

“It’s lovely,” said Hana, and meant it.

“And then this one.” Summer’s hand moved along the bed to a spray of small white stars, waxy and trumpet-shaped, on a trailing green vine. “Stephanotis. Much less showy. But it’s supposed to mean happiness in a marriage.” She shrugged the one shoulder she could shrug. “So that’s the case for that one. What it stands for.”

Autumn had said nothing through any of this. She was watching Katherine.

Katherine looked from one flower to the other. Her hand lifted, hovered over the plumeria, moved on. It drifted down the bed to the stephanotis, and her fingertips came to rest against the little white stars, and stayed there.

“That one,” said Autumn.

Her voice was lower than her sister’s, and entirely flat. She didn’t explain it or look to see if anyone agreed. She said it the way a person reads a number off a gauge.

Summer glanced sideways at her, then at Katherine’s hand, and her mouth quirked.

Hana looked at the stephanotis. It was not the prettier of the two, but it meant something, and it was obviously the right answer.

“Maybe,” she said. She heard the warmth in it, the pleasant, agreeable warmth she had been putting into that word since she was nine. “Maybe the first one, though? The plumeria?” She laughed at herself. “I don’t know why. I just like it better. The yellow.”

There was a small pause.

Then Summer laughed, a real laugh, out loud, and said, “Oh, good, now it’s a tie again,” and Autumn’s face did something that on anyone else would have been nothing at all, and on her was very nearly a grin.

Katherine was looking at Hana.

She turned away from the flowers and took a step toward her, and Hana, who had been bracing for something without knowing what, found that she wasn’t afraid. Katherine reached out and took Hana’s hand. Her fingers closed around it, warm and firm. She held it for a moment, three seconds, maybe four, and looked into Hana’s face while she did it.

Then she squeezed once, and let go, and turned back to the flowers.

Hana stood there with her hand still half-lifted—warm where Katherine’s fingers had been.

Nobody had held her hand like that in a long time, for no reason except that she was standing there. She didn’t know what to do with that. She put her hand back with the other one, folded in front of her, and it didn’t feel the same as it had before.

“Okay,” Summer was saying, already turning the two of them back toward the bed, their steps perfectly matched. “Okay. So Autumn’s for the stars, and Hana’s for the yellow, and I’m abstaining, God help me. What if we did both? What if we tucked a couple of the plumeria in at the front, just for a little—”

Autumn said, “No.”

“You haven’t even heard the whole—” Summer said.

“No,” said Autumn.

Katherine’s shoulders were shaking, silently. Over by the fountain, so were the shoulders of the woman in blue. Katherine had a stephanotis blossom in one hand and a plumeria in the other, and she was holding them up side by side, looking from one to the other.

Hana stayed. She hadn’t decided to. She stood at the edge of the path with her hands folded and her face smiling, and for once it was a smile she could feel all the way through, and she let the three of them argue over the flowers around her, and didn’t look at the time.

---

Michael hadn’t touched his coffee.

That was the first thing anyone who knew him would have noticed, and nobody here knew him, so nobody did. He had carried the cup out of the lobby a good twenty minutes ago, black, the way he took it at six in the morning behind the counter at the Blue Bean, and it had gone from hot to warm to room temperature in his hand while he stood at the edge of the lawn and didn’t drink it.

He wasn’t usually a stand-at-the-edge guy. He was a work-the-room guy. Give him a crowd this size and a tray of anything and he’d have known half their names by now, and their orders, and which ones were going to cry during the vows. But this wasn’t his room. It was Sam’s room, and Coop’s, and he’d figured out within about five minutes of getting here that the best thing he could do for either of them was not make it his.

So he stood by a low hedge with his coffee and watched.

It was a good crowd to watch. Families, mostly, in their good clothes, the kind of good clothes that still had the fold lines in them from the suitcase. An old couple getting walked very slowly toward the chairs. Two big-shouldered brothers coming up from the gardens, arguing about something, with an older man behind them carrying a coffee cup he wasn’t drinking either. A lot of people looking at the ocean like they suspected it of something.

And then, maybe forty yards off, across the grass, a young woman laughed.

That was what did it. Not how she looked, or not only. The laugh. It carried, clear and delighted and not the least bit embarrassed about itself, and Michael’s head turned toward it the way it turned toward the door chime at the shop, before he’d even decided to look.

She was short, perhaps five feet even, and had white hair.

Not blonde—white, bright white, catching the sun, and she was standing with her weight on one foot and one hand on her hip, talking to a couple of people Michael didn’t really look at. He couldn’t have told you afterward a single thing about them. She was laughing at something one of them had just said, head tipped back, and then she said something back, and whatever it was, it landed, because she laughed again, harder, at her own joke. Michael liked that about her immediately. He liked a person who laughed at her own jokes. It meant she thought they were good, and she was usually right.

She was, he thought, extremely pretty.

He thought it in exactly those words, and then he thought it again, in case the first time hadn’t counted. He stood there with the cold coffee and didn’t move.

“Okay,” said a voice at his side. “Who is it?”

Michael jumped about an inch, and a little of the cold coffee went over his knuckles. Sam was standing beside him, hands in her pockets, following his line of sight across the lawn with the specific, delighted interest of a sister who has just found something she can use. He had no idea how long she’d been there.

Something about her face was different. Not upset. Rearranged, somehow, as if somebody had taken all the furniture out of it and put it back an inch to the left. He clocked it, and filed it, and didn’t ask. Not yet.

“Who’s what?” he said.

“Who,” Sam said patiently, “are you staring at.”

“I’m not staring at anybody.”

He said it too fast. He heard it come out too fast. He took a long, casual sip of his coffee to cover it, and it was cold and awful, and he swallowed it anyway, and kept his face perfectly still.

“I wasn’t staring,” he said. “I was looking at the ocean.”

“The ocean’s that way, Mikey.”

“I was looking at the ocean in my peripheral vision.”

“Uh-huh.” Sam rocked back on her heels and looked across the lawn at the woman with the white hair, and then back at him, and then across the lawn again, very slowly, making a whole production of it. “White hair. Laughs at her own jokes. Loud. Mikey, she’s you. She’s you with better hair.”

“I don’t know who you’re talking about.”

“Sure. So here’s what I think is happening,” Sam said. “I think you’ve already picked somebody out for the reception. I think you’ve been at this wedding for an hour and you’ve already got a plan, and I think the plan is that girl, and I think it’s been the plan since about four minutes ago.”

Michael opened his mouth to deny that too. Then he closed it. He looked across the lawn. The woman was listening now, nodding along to whatever was being said, and as he watched, she pushed a strand of that white hair back behind her ear and grinned at something, and the grin was a little wicked, a little smug, like she already knew how the story ended and thought it was funny.

“Yeah,” he said.

Sam turned and looked at him properly.

“Yeah,” Michael said again. It came out plain. He didn’t dress it up. “I’m going to go talk to her. Later. At the reception, once things settle down. Not now. Now’s not the time. But later, yeah. I’m going to go say hi.”

He waited for the joke. Sam always had one. Sam had had one ready for every girl he’d ever mentioned since he was fourteen.

It didn’t come. Sam just looked at him for a second, and something in her face went soft, and she smiled, not the teasing smile, but a different one, the one she almost never let anybody see.

“Good,” she said. “Go for it. Seriously. You should.”

“You know who she is?”

“No idea.” Sam glanced across the lawn again. “Never seen her before. Which, at this thing, means nothing. Might be Skye’s daughter, maybe.” She knocked her shoulder into his. “Go get her, dummy. After.”

“After,” Michael agreed.

He looked at her sideways. The rearranged thing was still there.

“You good?” he said. “You look—I don’t know. You look like something happened.”

Sam was quiet for a second, which for Sam was a long time.

“Liesa’s dad got here,” she said. “It went fine. It went really, really fine.” She shook her head, as if there were more to it and she hadn’t found the end of it yet. “I’ll tell you later. It’s a good later. I promise.”

“Okay,” said Michael, and meant it, and let it be.

She squeezed his arm once and headed off across the grass toward the lobby doors. Halfway there, Sam turned her head and looked back, once, not at him but at the woman with the white hair, a long, curious, measuring look. Then she went on.

Michael looked down at his coffee. It was undrinkable. He drank some more of it anyway, because it was something to do with his hands, and he looked back across the lawn.

The woman was still there. She hadn’t noticed him. He didn’t know her name, or where she was from, or who those people were with her, or whether she’d laugh at his jokes the way she laughed at her own. He didn’t know anything about her at all.

He found he didn’t mind that. He figured he had until the reception to work on it.

---

The wedding was even better than the bachelorette party, and Poppy had not thought that was possible.

It was bigger, for a start. The party had been a roomful of fascinating subjects. This was a whole lawn of them, spilling down toward the water in good clothes and bad shoes, and more coming up the path every minute. She had already filled one memory card. She had shot a family crowded onto a single bench under a pergola, all talking at once, which was a composition problem she had solved by lying flat on the flagstones. She had shot a table of very old-fashioned people on the terrace who laughed like they had known each other for about a thousand years.

She darted between knees, ducked under the end of a buffet table, and climbed a planter for an overhead angle. Nobody ever noticed her doing any of it, which was the point.

Then she came out from behind a hedge at the very far end of the garden, well past where the crowd thinned out, and stopped.

It was her.

The woman from the party. The one with the eyes.

She was sitting on the grass with her back pressed against a low stone wall, knees drawn up, dark hair pooled around her like spilled ink, in jeans and a plain blouse. She was sitting exactly as she had at the bachelorette party, as if she had simply carried the wall along with her. Poppy had thought about that wall a surprising amount since then. She had thought about the blink, and the head tilt, and the moment the woman had moved her gaze from Poppy’s right eye to her left, and how clearly that had meant I see you, and I am paying attention to the other half of you too. It had not been small talk, but the real thing, and Poppy had never had a conversation go that well in her life.

She had not, at any point, learned the woman’s name. It hadn’t come up.

Poppy raised the camera an inch, out of habit, and then lowered it again. Something was different.

Last time, the woman had been perfectly still. She was not perfectly still now. Her hands were moving in her lap, one over the other, palm across back, back across palm, slow and exact, the way someone wipes wet paint off their fingers. There was nothing on her hands. Poppy watched the motion go around ten times, and then twenty, and did not count after that.

Poppy looked back over her shoulder at the lawn, at all that open, noisy, shouting width of it, bigger than anything the party had been. Then she looked at the woman, pressed against the one wall in the whole garden that was as far from all of it as a person could get.

Oh, Poppy thought. Oh. She knew that one—she had sat in the back of a lot of loud rooms.

She let the camera settle on its strap against her chest. She did not walk over the way she had walked over last time, straight on, stopping in the middle of the woman’s view. She came in from the side, at the edge of the woman’s sight, slowly enough that nobody could mistake her for being in a hurry. The dark eyes found her about halfway there and tracked her the rest of the way in, the way they had at the party, steady as a level.

Poppy did not stop in front of her. She went past her by one step, turned, and sat down on the grass at the woman’s side, a little forward of her, so that her own small body was between the woman and the lawn.

It didn’t block much. Poppy was three feet tall. But from where the woman sat, low against the stones, Poppy’s shoulder and the side of her head now took a neat slice out of the crowd, and Poppy put her back to the wall and made herself as wide as she could, which was not very, and held still.

Holding still was easy. It was the kind of skill that got you the shot nobody else got, and after focus and exposure it was the thing Poppy was best at in the whole world.

Beside her, the hands slowed.

They made one more pass, slower than the others. Then half of one. Then they stopped, and lay one on top of the other, and stayed there.

Poppy turned her head a quarter of an inch.

The woman was already looking at her.

Poppy gave her a slow blink. It was a hello, and a me again, and also, if she had done it right, a small I noticed the hands, and I am not going to say anything about the hands.

The woman blinked back at once.

At once. Last time it had taken her somewhere between one minute and ten. Poppy felt it go through her like good news. They were past the small talk. They were on to the part where you didn’t have to wait.

She let her gaze drop, deliberately, to the woman’s hands, and then come back up to her face, and she tipped her chin a fraction to the left. Better?

The woman looked at her for a long moment. Then her head moved. Not much. A degree, maybe two, downward and back up again.

It might have been a nod. It might have been the breeze. Poppy decided, with great confidence, that it was a nod.

After that they sat.

Poppy took the camera off her chest and laid it in her lap and folded her hands on top of it, and did not touch it again. She did not need anything to do with her hands. She had never been a person who needed something to do with her hands. The wall was warm through her waistcoat. The grass smelled cut. Out on the lawn, the noise came and went like surf, and none of it came past Poppy’s shoulder.

Minutes went by, five or more. A breeze came off the water and moved a long, heavy strand of the woman’s hair against Poppy’s ankle, and left it there. Poppy did not move her ankle. She considered it a form of handshake.

At one point the woman’s gaze drifted from Poppy’s face to the crowd, and her shoulders drew in by a hair. Poppy shifted six inches to the right, to cover it. The woman’s gaze came back to Poppy, as if it had been checking the fence and found it mended. The shoulders came down.

Poppy had to press her lips together to keep from smiling. It was going so well.

When the woman moved again, it wasn’t her hands.

It was her eyes. They dropped, slowly, to the camera lying in Poppy’s lap. They stayed there. Then they came up to Poppy’s face and held, level and dark and completely unmoving.

Poppy knew that look. She had invented that look. At the party she had lifted the camera an inch, and the woman had looked at it, and looked back, and that had been the whole question and the whole answer.

Nobody had ever asked it the other way round.

Poppy waited one beat, then two, in case she had it wrong. The woman’s gaze did not waver. It did not wander off to the lawn. It stayed on Poppy, patiently, the way a person waits for an answer they already know they are going to get.

Poppy picked up the camera.

The first thing she did was reach up and turn the shutter to silent—no click. She saw the woman’s eyes follow her thumb to the dial, and back, and she felt, very strongly, that this had been appreciated. Then she brought the viewfinder up, and framed the woman against the pale stone, the dark eyes, the dark hair, the light coming through the palms in pieces, and took one picture. Only one. She didn’t need two.

Last time, she had lowered the camera and walked away. This time, she turned it around.

She held it out, low, in both hands, with the screen facing the woman, and tipped it against the glare until the picture came up clear.

The woman looked at it.

She looked at it for a long time. Her eyes moved over the little bright rectangle: the wall, the light, her own face. Poppy did not breathe. Then the woman lifted one hand from her lap, the same hand that had been wiping nothing ten minutes ago, and reached out, and touched the edge of the screen with the tip of one finger. Just the edge. She kept it there.

And the corner of her mouth went up.

It was very small. Anyone else would have missed it. Anyone else would have said it wasn’t a smile at all. But Poppy was eighteen inches away, and Poppy had spent her whole life looking at faces for exactly this kind of thing, and she saw it happen, and she saw it stay there for as long as that fingertip stayed on the screen.

She did not take a picture of it. Some things you just kept.

When the woman finally took her hand back, Poppy lowered the camera into her lap, and they went back to sitting against the warm wall, not looking at anything in particular, as you do with someone you don’t have to explain yourself to.

It was, Poppy thought, the best conversation she had ever had. Possibly the best conversation anyone had ever had. She had come to this island knowing hardly anyone, and now she had a best friend. She was almost completely sure of it. They had a whole language. They had a wall.

She still didn’t know her best friend’s name. She found she didn’t mind. It would come up.

She stayed until the noise from the lawn changed, all that loose, wandering sound pulling together into something with a direction: chairs scraping, somebody calling for people to find their seats, music starting near the front. The ceremony was close. There was a whole wedding out there that wasn’t going to photograph itself.

Poppy got to her feet without hurrying, hung the camera back on her chest, and brushed the grass off her trousers. Then she turned, and looked down, and waited until those dark eyes came up and found hers.

She blinked, once, slowly. See you later.

The woman blinked back. At once.

Poppy turned toward the crowd with her heart going far too fast for someone who had spent twenty minutes sitting on grass, lifted the camera, and went to work, already wondering where her best friend would be sitting for the ceremony, and whether it would be rude to take the seat next to her.