“Sure, yes, please do come in,” Phoebe says.

The bride’s hand is wrapped in gauze, and Phoebe wonders who wrapped it. Gary, the groom with the barely receding hairline? Her loving mother? Is the bride the kind of woman who has a loving mother? Yes, Phoebe decides. Phoebe has become good over the years at detecting who has a loving mother and who does not, because Phoebe believes a loving mother gives a person a kind of confidence to exist that Phoebe never quite had. Phoebe could never burst into someone else’s room and give orders like it’s her own.

“You can’t smoke,” the bride says.

The bride talks louder than she needs to, the way actors on the stage are present but locked and preserved behind the fourth wall, and for the first time, Phoebe wonders what the bride actually does for a living. Is she an actress? Or maybe she is an airline attendant, good at announcing things to forty-seven passengers.

“Actually, it’s one of the few things left that I can do,” Phoebe says.

As if to prove this, Phoebe walks back out to the balcony.

“Actually, no,” the bride says, following her. “This is a nonsmoking room.”

“Good thing I’m out here on the balcony, then.”

“How did you get a real balcony, by the way?” the bride asks, like this is the real betrayal. “My balcony is just like, the suggestion of a balcony.”

She pauses to study the view.

“I mean, you can see the whole ocean from here! Why on earth wouldn’t Pauline put me in this room? I specifically requested a shoreline room.”

“Well, a shoreline room presumably faces … the shoreline.”

“But I thought shoreline meant … that you could see the shore.”

“Shoreline refers to the line where the ocean meets the land.”

Phoebe waits for Lila to blush, but she doesn’t get embarrassed. She just gets angrier.

“Who on earth would want a shoreline room then?” Lila asks. “Why would they even advertise a shoreline view like it’s something special? If I wanted to look at houses, I’d just stay home and look out my own window at houses. You know?”

Phoebe lights another cigarette, hoping the smoke will make the bride leave. But she doesn’t budge.

“The balcony is part of the room, by the way,” the bride says. “So you can’t actually smoke on it.”

Phoebe feels the sudden urge to argue. She has a contrarian impulse that stirred within her during class or at a party when anybody had the audacity to talk in absolutes. She never acted on it, though, because she never wanted to be accused of talking in absolutes. Those people were her least favorite.

But what does she care now? Might as well go out showing the world what she got from all those years of studying.

“The word balcony is borrowed from Italian balcone,” Phoebe says. “Derived from medieval Italian balco, which originally meant ‘scaffold.’ And that comes from a Proto-Germanic word balkô, which probably meant something like ‘beam.’”

The bride stands there, confused.

“So, taken all together, we know that the word balcony originally referred to the beam or structure that holds up the balcony.” Phoebe releases a long, slow exhale of smoke before her final conclusion. “That’s how far outside the room it is. The balcony is not even the balcony.”

“Who are you?” the bride asks.

The bride sounds genuinely impressed, and Phoebe will admit that she has not lost the capacity to enjoy this kind of moment. Knowledge is power, all her teachers told her as a kid, which is why she spent the best part of her youth in quiet corners of libraries, reading books as quickly as she could. She wanted to be stronger, bigger. She knew that she would never be taller than her father, never be bigger or stronger, and that this was the only way to one day see beyond her father’s house.

“I’m a Victorianist,” Phoebe says.

“Huh?”

“A nineteenth centuryist,” Phoebe rephrases, thinking it might make more sense to the bride.

“I still don’t know what that means,” the bride says.

“I research nineteenth-century literature.”

“And people pay you for this?”

“Not well.”

“And the nineteenth century is really the 1800s?”

“Right.”

“I always have the hardest time with that.”

“A lot of my students do.”

“But I’m twenty-eight. I work at an art gallery,” the bride says. “I should know that.”

Phoebe is surprised enough by this new information to want to ask her first question of the bride.

“Are you a curator?” Phoebe asks.

“That’s my mother,” the bride says. “I’m her assistant. But one day, I’m supposed to be the curator.”

Lila waits as if Phoebe should ask follow-up questions, but Phoebe doesn’t want to know anything more.

“Though honestly, after I get married, I think I’m going to quit,” the bride says. “I’m just not very good at it.”

She confesses to getting Bs all the way through her art history degree in college.

“I never understood why my mother was so obsessed with art. I studied it for four years, and honestly, I get it even less now. Like seriously, what’s the point of it?”

Again, the bride looks at Phoebe and waits.

“Are you asking me?” Phoebe asks.

“Have you never been in a conversation before?”

“It’s been a while, actually.”

“I can tell.”

“And to be honest, I’m not sure I get the point, either.”