Eight: Wedding Bells!!!!

The seventh lamp had caught and settled, and the seven small flames stood in a row on the dais with the sky a shade lower behind them than it had been at the first bridge. Out past the ring the guests had gone still without being asked, the way a church goes still when the doors at the back swing shut. Somebody’s program lay face down on the grass where it had slipped off a knee, and nobody bent for it.

Arabella left the basin.

She walked the front of the dais, past the seven brides still standing beside Andy in the order they had crossed, and stopped at his shoulder before she spoke to anyone else.

“I am going to tell them what you did,” she said, low enough to stay under the arbor. “You will stand there and let me.”

“Do I get a vote?”

“You had one, once.” The corner of her mouth moved. “Look what you did with it.”

She turned to the water.

“Most weddings begin by asking a god to watch,” Arabella said. Her voice opened out without rising and reached the last row as if it had been set down there by hand. “This one will not. I will call on no god and ask nothing of anything above us. What is about to happen on this hill already has its warrant, and the warrant is what Andy Cooper and these seven women have done. You, sitting out there, are all the witness it needs.”

“She’s going to make you cry in front of your in-laws,” Sam said, out of the side of her mouth, as if she were remarking on the catering.

Andy pressed his lips together and held his face where it was—not because of the joke, but because she had timed it to the exact second he needed somewhere to look that was not the rows.

“The first trial of this season was called Show Yourself,” Arabella said. “Eight women were painted to reveal something true about themselves, and shown one at a time, and ranked. Whoever ranked lowest would be sent away, no matter how well she had done before. Dawn was on that stage. Claire was. Erin and Emi were. So were Sam and Liesa, who stand on this mound with us today.” She let the names settle. “He came to me in the middle of it and asked for an exception. I refused him. I carried out those rules. I did not write them. So he found his own way. When it was his turn to rank the eight, he handed in the one order that, counted with everyone else’s, left all eight of them perfectly tied. No one was sent away.” She let that settle. “He rather hoped no one would work it out. Claire worked it out that very night, at dinner. She wrote it down and had Sam read it aloud to the rest of them.”

“I remember his face when we mentioned it at the party,” Emi murmured to Dawn.

“He looked so proud of himself,” Dawn murmured back, and glanced past her to Erin, and all three of them were very nearly smiling.

Arabella’s gaze found Andy’s and rested there. Before sunrise, on her terrace, she had told him who sent a messenger up to his suite with new voting hardware on the morning the rankings reached him. She held his eyes a beat past the end of her sentence. Then she went on, and her own name stayed out of it, and he understood that she meant it to, and that it was the nearest thing to a gift she could hand him in public.

“During the second trial, nine women sought to pull together. The trial was designed as a competition. Claire decided to make it a cooperation. She very nearly succeeded, and when her plan failed—due to no fault of her own—she found a way to make the best out of the situation, and Norah chose to risk herself to save our Dawn. I could not let that stand, and Norah remained.”

Andy saw Norah squirm in embarrassment on the chair, Marissa smiling at her.

“The third trial, he had no part in at all,” Arabella said. “It was a raid on a guarded hall in the Museum of Pleasures Past. Anyone the guards caught was pulled out before the others could finish. The women went in together. Andy stayed behind with me and waited, and could not have helped a single one of them if he had tried.”

She did not hurry the next part.

“When the guards came for Claire, Erin stepped in front of her and took what was meant for her, and was pulled out of the raid for it.”

Claire’s tail lifted from the grass and wound once around Erin’s wrist, and settled there. Erin let it. What reached Andy through the bond was not gratitude, but something older and quieter, the kind of feeling that has passed between two people so many times it no longer needs saying.

“Claire led them the whole way,” Arabella said, “room by room. At the very end, she and Sam held the last length of that hall so that Norah could run on alone and finish it. Winning it herself would cost Norah only the one transformation the day already had for her. Losing would have cost her two.”

“Nobody told me she was going to name me,” Sam said, barely moving her lips.

“You held it,” Andy said, without looking away from the water. “She’s allowed.”

“Dawn moved from one of them to the next,” Arabella went on, “with whatever she had left, and gave her patches to Norah and to Chloe. Chloe spent the very last one trying to free Liesa, and was taken while she tried. Emi climbed up above them all and kept watch over their heads until they took her too. And when Marissa, who had been giving voice to Claire’s signals, was pulled out, Emily took that on and carried it to the end—far more frightened than anyone watching her would ever have guessed.”

A pace ahead of the dais, Liesa had heard her own name go by twice now. She did not turn toward the mound. She found Chloe’s chair out past the water instead, and touched two fingers to her lips, and held them there until Chloe saw.

“I didn’t know that,” Myra said to Emily, very low. “That you did that.”

“Somebody had to say it for her,” Emily said.

“Some of these women are marrying him today and some are not,” Arabella said. “It makes no difference to this. They were already a family, long before anyone asked them the question.”

Erin leaned half an inch toward Dawn. “She’s doing this on purpose. My mother’s out there.”

Dawn’s hand found hers without either of them looking down, and stayed there.

“And then the Garden of Glass,” Arabella said, “which asked something of all of them, and of him. Twelve women walked, alone, through the hardest day of each other’s lives, and through his. They were asked to stay with whoever they found there. Every one they could not stay with cost them a point, and the lowest score would be sent away.” Her eyes went to Andy and came back. “He watched all of it. Not only his own day. Twelve women’s worst days, one after the next, and he felt each one as it reached her, and he had been told at the start that he could not step in. He held it. All of it, without breaking, because keeping them safe was the only reason he was there.”

Andy had not broken. He had come close enough, more times than he had ever told anyone, to know exactly where the edge was, and he did not go looking for it now.

“Myra could not see a single thing that garden showed her,” Arabella said. “She walked it with a cane, and found her way by what she could feel.”

“You walked it blind,” Emily whispered. “I still don’t know how.”

“Slowly,” Myra whispered back. “Into a lot of things.”

And then the whole mound arrived in her at once, more than one hundred people’s worth of feeling with no label on any of it, and both her tails pulled in tight against her legs, as if she had stepped out into a hard wind.

“All twelve came through,” Arabella said. “None was removed. And at a library table in the middle of it, Emi and Laura forgave each other for a fight they had as girls. That garden had never once been used for anything like it.”

Emi reached down the line with one of her lower hands, past the two nearer bodies, and closed it around the hand of Laura’s third, the farthest one. The air around the pair of them warmed a little and turned sweet.

“That same trial showed him Laura’s hardest day,” Arabella said, and her voice went lower. “When she was a girl, she drowned in a river saving his life.”

Nothing in the garden moved.

“He watched it happen again. He went into that river after her,” she said. “He did not believe for one moment that anything he did there could change what he was watching.”

Andy remembered the cold. The noise of it. The weight of her. He had been unable to stand on the bank while it happened to her again. Even now he could not have said whether that made it braver or smaller.

“It changed everything,” Arabella said. “Laura came out of that water alive. Truly alive, and not only inside what the Garden was showing him. She has stood among them every day since.”

In the front row Carol Cooper bent forward over her own knees—she was one of the few out there who knew every word of it was true—and Jim put his whole arm around her and kept it there.

The thin thread that was all the bond carried now told Andy exactly where Laura was, which he knew, and how afraid she was. For one breath it was less.

“You never said you thought it wouldn’t work,” said all three of her at once. Her voice cracked in the same place in every mouth.

“I didn’t need it to,” Andy said. It came out rough. “I just needed to go in.”

His eyes had gone hot. He let them.

“And that is how Laura came to stand with them,” Arabella said, gently. “At the very next trial, the Masquerade of Mirrors—a masked ball where none of the women was allowed to speak a word—Laura came last on purpose. She and Andy agreed it beforehand. Last place could not cost her her place. It could have cost any of the others theirs.”

All three of Laura’s faces went red at once.

“That was supposed to be private,” said all three of her.

A laugh ran round the mound, wet at the edges—the first easy sound anybody had made since the river.

“So,” Arabella said. “A tie that saved eight. An attempt by nine to band together as a family in the making. A raid they carried each other through without him. A garden that gave back all twelve, and gave them Laura as well. A last place taken on purpose so that it would cost no one else anything.” She turned so the whole garden was in front of her. “Every time, someone standing on this hill decided that nobody here would be the one left behind. A promise kept that many times does not need a god to bless it. So I will not ask one to bless what they are about to say.”

She stepped back.

“You left yourself out,” Andy said, low.

“I did.” Her hands closed on each other and held. “Let me.”

She went back to the basin, and by the time she reached it the Host was on her face again, smooth and finished, with nothing showing at the seams.

“Myra,” she said. “You crossed first. You will speak first.”

Myra stepped out of the line and turned to face him under the arbor.

Sam’s hand closed over the brand before Andy had worked out what to do with it.

“Give. You’ll want your hands.”

He let it go. She angled the flame away from her own suit and held it down by her hip, and Andy’s palm came away warm and faintly sticky and, all at once, empty.

“Thanks.”

“Shut up,” Sam said, very quietly. “Go get married.”

Myra had stopped a stride in front of him with her flowers held at her waist in both hands. She ran her thumb once down the stems, top to bottom. Her ears were tipped toward him and both tails had gone still behind her, and she stood there getting the shape of the air before she put anything into it, as if it might tell her where the words should go. She had always done that.

“Okay,” she said.

The garden waited.

“Before any of this, I was a doctor,” Myra said. “A good one, I think. I picked up everybody’s shifts. Some weeks I didn’t say one word to anyone that wasn’t medical.” Her voice was soft, and she let the pauses carry part of it. “The hospital had a sauna off the staff locker room. Nobody used it. I did. I’d shut the door and sit in the heat so nobody could find me… so nobody could need anything from me. And then I’d go back out and do another eight hours.”

In the first row Marie sat with her chin up and her hands folded in her lap, and did not move at all.

“I want to say the next part right, because I’ve said it wrong before.” Her chin dipped. “I wasn’t being humble. It wasn’t… tiredness, exactly. More like I thought the work was all I had coming. Not being wanted. Not being looked after. Just the work, however much it took out of me and however alone it left me. That was my share, and I didn’t get to ask for more.”

Her fingers had tightened on the stems until two of them bent.

“There was a reason under it,” she said. “I looked for it. I never found it. It was just… guilt, with nothing to be guilty of. It was there before the hospital, before anything I can point to, and I couldn’t put it down and I couldn’t name it. So I worked overtime instead.”

Marie’s folded hands had come apart. One of them had found the edge of her chair and was holding it.

“So,” Myra said, and brought her face up to where he was. “Here’s mine.”

She took a breath. He heard it go in and he heard it shake.

“I want you,” Myra said.

It came out barely louder than the breath had been, and it carried to the last row anyway, because there was nothing else in the garden making a sound.

“Not as a reward. Not as something I get to have once I’ve paid enough in. I just… want you.” Her tails lifted off the grass without her. “I’m done hiding from being wanted. I spent years being the one who wasn’t in the room. I’m not going back in there.” Her voice thinned until it was hardly a voice at all. “And I will never apologize for wanting you again. Not to you. Not to anyone. Not even quietly, to myself, where nobody else has to hear it.”

Behind Myra somebody made a small noise and clamped down on it. Emily, probably. He did not look to find out. His own throat had closed up somewhere around the sauna and had not opened again, and he stood there breathing around it.

Myra stood there a second longer, and then something came into her face—not embarrassment, but something much closer to wonder.

“You’re all so loud,” she said. “Everyone on this hill is feeling something right now, and it’s coming from everywhere at once.” Her mouth went crooked. “I can’t tell whose is whose. I never can, with so many people. I just get the colors and the warmth of it. And this close to you… it’s all one color, and it’s warm all the way through, like coming in out of the snow and finding somebody kept the stove going for you. I didn’t know it could be this much. It’s entirely too much of it. But it’s exactly what I never knew I wanted.”

Her breath went out of her—short, helpless, the kind of breath that leaves a person when a thing is too big to hold any other way.

“Sorry,” she said. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to make it such a—”

She stopped. Right in the middle of the sentence. Andy saw her catch the sound of it. Her ears tipped back, and one tail rose and hung in the air behind her. Then Myra laughed. A real one, startled out of her before she had agreed to it, and she pressed the back of her wrist to her mouth and could not stop it happening.

“No,” she said into her own wrist. Her eyes had filled and were spilling over. “No. I don’t do that one anymore either.”

All across the garden people breathed out. Near the back a man laughed aloud before he could stop himself, and Myra’s ears swung toward the sound, pleased.

Andy bent toward her until only she could hear him.

“Don’t take any of it back,” he said. “Not one word. I want all of it. Every bit that’s too much.”

Her breath caught.

Her whole face changed. She reached out and found his sleeve and held it, just for a second, the way a person holds a railing at the top of the stairs. Then she let go.

She did not answer him. For once she did not need to follow one thing she had said with another thing to soften it, and he watched her notice that, and he could not have told anyone what it did to him to watch her notice it.

She went back to her place at the head of the line.

Both tails hung easy behind her. Neither one tucked.

---

Emily stepped out while Myra was still settling, her flowers hanging from one hand, her hair falling loose down her back and over both shoulders to the tops of her thighs in that gold-and-pink sheet that covered everything it always covered. Nobody out in the rows gave it a thought.

She planted her feet, set her shoulders, and then ducked her chin and peered up at him through her lashes—the look she wore whenever she was about to ask for something she was sure she would not get.

“Can I tell you something?”

“Always,” Andy said.

“Okay. Okay, good.” She blew out a breath. Then she turned her head and sent the next part out over the water, loud and clear, so it carried to the very back. “Because I need everybody to hear this bit. After that I’ll go back to being normal, I swear.”

“When were you ever normal?” Sam said from behind the brand, with a smile.

“Shh.” Emily turned back to him. “I asked you. I want everyone to know that. I’m the one who asked. In a bar, I sat there and asked him to marry me, and he said yes. That’s the right order. That’s how it went.”

Laughter came up off the mound, and then—a moment later—off the water, rolling back from the far rows like an echo that had taken its time. Andy laughed with them. His face gave him no choice about it.

“I know,” Emily said. “I know how it sounds. Adorable. The funny one proposed.” She waited for it to die down. “It isn’t that. I need to say why it matters. Because it does.”

The quiet that followed was a different quiet. It was not ceremony. It was a whole garden leaning in.

“So much of my adult life got decided somewhere else,” Emily said. “Not by me. Sometimes not even in a room I was in. And I’m not going to get into it, because it’s a beautiful day and my mom and dad are sitting right there.” Her voice caught going past them, and she pushed on through. “But that one wasn’t. That was mine. Nobody gave it to me. Nobody put it in my head. I just… picked it up and carried it over to you and asked. It’s the one piece of mine this whole marriage nobody else ever had any say in. So I want it said out loud, with everybody listening. I asked. It was mine to ask.”

Andy did not have to look for her parents. David Allen sat on the aisle in the first row with his jacket across his knees and nothing at all on his face. Kathleen had both hands locked around her husband’s arm, holding it as if it were a railing on a moving train.

“Okay,” Emily said, and lifted her chin. “Here’s the real vow. It’s short.”

She breathed in, and Andy watched her choose not to hurry.

“I asked to be your wife and your equal. So that’s what I’m promising. Both of them. Not one now and the other one later, whenever it’s easier. Both, the whole way.” She held steady, and he knew her well enough to know that it was not calm, but work. “I’m going to keep telling you what I want. Out loud, in real words, even the tiny dumb stuff. And I’m going to keep telling you what I don’t want, which is the scary one. I’m going to say no to you. Every time no is true, I’m going to say it.”

Her jaw worked. She got hold of it.

“And that’s because of you,” Emily said, and now her voice was going. “You kept telling me I was allowed to. Over and over, like four hundred times, until one day I just… believed it. So I want you to have what’s on the other side of that.” Her free hand lifted, open, and dropped. “Every yes you ever get from me, you can trust. Every single one. That’s what you get for saying it four hundred times. It’s all I’ve got.”

Andy could not answer right away. He had to breathe first, and the breath took him two tries.

Down at the far end of the line, Laura had a hand pressed over every one of her mouths at once. He knew that look. She was trying very hard not to make a sound, and it was not working.

“I’ll believe every one,” he said, when he could. “Every time. You’ll only ever have to say it once.”

Emily’s eyes brimmed.

He had heard her cry once on the phone to her mother—the whole call in two words, said over and over—and he had thought then that he knew all the ways she had of crying. He had not known this one. For a second she held it. Then it spilled, both sides at once, and there was nothing either of them could do. She jammed the heel of her hand under one eye and made a noise that was mostly a laugh.

“Oh, great,” she said thickly. “I had one job. One. Today I was going to be the funny one. I told people. I put it in writing. And now look at me.”

“You’re still the funny one,” Andy said.

“I’m the leaky one now. Totally different department. The hours are awful.” She sniffed, loudly and without any dignity at all, and the front rows laughed with her, the kind of laughter that lets a whole crowd wipe its eyes without anyone having to admit to it.

She turned back toward her place, already tugging a hank of hair forward over her shoulder with her free hand, the way she did whenever she needed something to hold.

Myra’s ears had swung round to meet her before she got there.

“It’s warm over here,” Myra murmured, not turning her head. “Whatever you just did. It’s so peaceful.”

“Stop it,” Emily whispered, and the whisper split straight down the middle. She knocked her bouquet into Myra’s arm, playfully. Myra nudged her back with a shoulder. Then they stood side by side with their faces forward and wet, and neither of them said another word.

---

Dawn was turning before Emily had quite settled. She caught Emily’s free hand by the wrist and pressed her own bouquet into it.

“Here.”

“I’ve already got one.”

“Now you’ve got two.”

Emily hugged both to her chest without another word, with the look of someone left minding the bags. Dawn shook out her hands at her sides, once, the way you shake off dishwater, and walked forward with nothing in them.

Her ears were fully up. Both of them, straight and still, the way they went when she was listening for something a long way off.

She stopped in front of Andy, put her hands down by her sides, and made them hold still there. He had seen her do that before—set down a mug, lay down a spoon—just before she said something that mattered. There was no mug today. There was only the stillness.

Andy had seen Dawn carry just about everything a person can carry, usually several things at once, usually while asking whether anyone needed anything. He could not remember ever seeing her stand in front of people with nothing in her hands.

She drew a breath in slowly, and let it out slower.

“Okay,” Dawn said. “I’ve thought about this one a lot.”

Out beyond the water, Alejandro Moreno sat between his two sons with his working hands flat on his knees. Luis had his arms crossed so hard the shoulders of his jacket strained—the kind of fold a man makes when he has decided in advance not to be moved by anything.

“So I noticed something,” Dawn said, “writing this. Every promise I’ve ever made anyone is about what I’m going to do. I’ll handle it. I’ll pick you up. I’ll save you a plate. Don’t get up, I’ve got it.” One corner of her mouth moved. “I’m good at those. I’m really good at those. I’ve probably made four of them since breakfast.”

Behind Andy, Sam made a sound that was not a laugh.

“And I can’t make one of those today, because you already know I’m going to keep doing all of it. Everybody here knows. So it wouldn’t really be a promise. It’d just be a weekday.” Her hands stayed where she had put them. “So this one’s the other kind. It’s the first promise I’ve ever made about what I’m going to let somebody do for me.”

Andy felt it coming and could not get ahead of it.

“I’m going to let you take care of me,” Dawn said.

Her voice did not shake—not because she was calm, but because she had practiced it, he realized. Out loud, alone, more than once, until it could come out in one piece.

“That’s it. That’s my vow. I’m going to let you. When I’m tired. When it’s late. When there’s something else I could be doing. When it’s my turn and I don’t want it to be.” Her chin rose a little. “I’m going to sit down when you tell me to sit down. I’m going to let you bring me the plate for once. And when you ask if I need anything, I’m going to stop saying no before you’ve finished asking.”

In the rows, Luis Moreno uncrossed his arms. He put a hand over his eyes and left it there, as if the light had got too strong.

Emily had both bouquets crushed flat against her chest, and her face was going again.

“And I’m going to believe you,” Dawn said. “About the other thing. You told me I don’t have to earn my place,” Dawn said. “You told me I’m more than what I do.” Her voice dropped, and roughened, and held. “You told me that when I still thought I had to. I’ve said those to myself about a thousand times since. I say them, and then I check whether I believe them yet. I don’t. Not yet.” She swallowed. “But I’m going to. That’s the promise. Maybe not today. I’m going to work at it the way I work at everything, until it’s just true and I stop checking.”

She drew a breath that did not go all the way in.

“Andy Cooper,” Dawn said, barely above a whisper. “That’s what you get.”

He reached for her hands.

That was what they had been empty for. He only understood it as he took them. Her hands were freezing. It was a warm afternoon and she was freezing, and she gripped him so hard his knuckles ground together. He held on.

He bent his head down to hers.

“You never had to earn it,” he said. His voice broke on the second word, and he let it. “Not one day of it. Not ever. I’ll tell you every morning until you believe me. And then I’ll keep telling you anyway.”

Dawn’s ears went flat.

They rose again. Her breath hitched—once, twice. Her eyes filled and overflowed, both at once, and she did nothing about it.

Andy waited for the joke.

He had been braced for it on her behalf without knowing he was doing it: the laugh into her palm, the mortified oh my God, the thing she always did the moment anything sincere landed on her. It did not come. Her mouth trembled and stayed shut. Her shoulders shook once, and went still.

She stood there holding his hands and holding his eyes, and let the whole of it stand exactly as she had said it. The garden held perfectly still. Somewhere far off a bird called once and did not call again. Andy could hear her breathing, short and wet and uneven, and his own, not much steadier.

At last he let go. One of them had to, and it was never going to be her.

Dawn stepped back. For a second her hands hung open at her sides as if she had no idea what they were for. Then she turned and went back into the line between Emily and Erin.

Emily sorted out the bouquets without looking and held one out. Dawn took it in both hands, drew it in against her chest, lifted her chin and faced front, her cheeks wet and her ears standing tall.

Out past the ring, Alejandro Moreno had closed his eyes. His younger son had laid an arm along the back of his chair. His older son still had a hand over his face.

——

Erin was next. She came out in the veil and nothing else, and the late light still clearing the garden wall came with her.

The sun had been building a low, steady arousal in her since the fourth bridge, and it had not eased once. She bore it the way she had borne it all afternoon, upright in it, letting it do what it did, and refusing to make it anyone’s concern. Andy fixed his eyes on her from her first step and did not move them. It was the only thing he could give her from where he stood. Both of them had known that since the crossing.

She stopped at a spot she had obviously picked out ahead of time. She knew exactly how she looked standing there, green and bare in front of her mother and her father and her brother and more than one hundred chairs, and the green at her throat had darkened a shade. She ignored that along with everything else.

“Right,” Erin said.

Her voice went flat and level and slow—not cold, but the voice she saved for handing a room something that belonged to her. Andy had heard it perhaps six times in his life. He would have known it through a wall.

“After we broke up, I used to drive past our building. The brownstone.” Her bouquet hung loose at her side. “Not once. All the time. I’d go that way when there were three faster ways home. For years.”

In the front row, Carol Cooper lifted her chin.

“I drove past your parents’ place too,” Erin said. “Same thing. Slow past the driveway, and then home. I could have listed every car that ever sat in that driveway. I never got out of mine.” She let it sit. “And then one day I knocked on their door with you standing right beside me. It took maybe eleven seconds. I’d spent all those years not taking them.”

Carol pressed her hand over her mouth. Jim stayed still except for his free hand, which crossed over and settled on his wife’s knee.

A few rows over, Augustin Delgado had his arms folded and his jaw locked, the way a man sits through news he has already decided not to show on his face. Fiona held both hands flat on her knees. Steve had his eyebrows raised at his sister, as if she had pulled a coin out of somebody’s ear.

“So,” Erin said. “The vow. It’s short, then I’m done.”

Andy waited.

“I’m done driving past. Whatever it is, I’m pulling into the drive and knocking.” Her face had not moved at all. “When I’m scared, I’ll tell you I’m scared.” The flatness held, and he knew the holding was costing her. “I used to start a fight instead. Pick something small, watch what you did with it, and read my answer off that. That was a lousy way to ask a question. It cost us more than I ever told you.” She breathed in through her nose. “I won’t do that again. I’ll say the actual words.”

Down the line, the tip of Claire’s tail tapped the grass once.

“And,” Erin said. That was where it caught her. Andy saw it happen, and all that moved was the straight line of her mouth. “I’m staying.”

It came out quieter than anything else she had said. Not softer, exactly. Lower, as if it had come from further down.

She added nothing to it. She stopped, because there was nothing after it, and she was not going to invent something just to fill the space.

Andy had heard Erin say a great many things over the years and had believed almost all of them when she said them. This went in somewhere else. His chest pulled tight around it and stayed that way, and he had no idea where to set it down, and was not sure he wanted to.

“I want you to stay,” he said. His voice came out hoarse.

For a second the line of her mouth wavered, and he watched her decide not to let it.

“Obviously.”

One word, bone-dry, and that was the whole of her answer. Then a laugh got loose anyway—one short, sharp bark she plainly had not approved, the kind of laugh that slips out through a door somebody forgot to lock—and she clapped the back of her wrist to her mouth a second and a half too late.

Above the wrist, her eyes were wet. She did nothing about that either. “Nope,” Erin said to the air, and stepped back into the line between Dawn and Claire.

Dawn leaned her shoulder into Erin’s and kept it there.

“Don’t you dare, Dawnie,” Erin muttered sideways. “I mean it. You start, I start.”

Dawn laughed, a cracked, soggy sound, her chin high, tears running, her bouquet held up in front of her with both hands. She said nothing at all. For Dawn, just then, that was a feat of iron discipline.

At the head of the line Myra had turned both ears toward the two of them, and her tails had lifted off the grass. Whatever was reaching her from that end of the line, she kept to herself.

Further down, Claire and Emi and all three of Laura still waited their turn. Liesa stood a pace ahead of the dais with her hands folded; Nick kept his place at the basin, Harper held Genet’s box of rings with Laura Black at her elbow, and Candy, Skye and Katherine stood along the mound’s edge with nothing in their arms now that every bouquet had gone back to its bride. Sam held the brand low at her hip. Out past the water, not one chair creaked.