“I’ve never noticed that,” Neck Pillow says.

“That’s because I don’t smile all the way.”

“This entire time I’ve known you, you haven’t been fully smiling?”

“Not since high school.”

The line moves forward, and Phoebe looks up at the coffered ceiling, which is so high, she starts to wonder how they clean it.

Another “Oh! You’re here for the wedding!” and Phoebe begins to realize just how many wedding people there are in the lobby. It’s unsettling, like in that movie The Birds her husband loved so much. Once she spots a few, she sees them everywhere. Wedding people lounging on the mauve velvet bench. Wedding people leaning on the built-in bookcase. Wedding people pulling luggage so futuristic it looks like it could survive a trip to the moon. The men in burgundy pile it all into high, sturdy towers of suitcases, right next to a large white sign that says WELCOME TO THE WEDDING OF LILA AND GARY.

“Your rule is definitely not true about Lila, though,” Neck Pillow says. “I mean, I seriously can’t think of one way she’s ugly.”

“That’s true,” High Bun says.

“Remember when she was chosen to be the bride in our fashion show senior year?”

“Oh yeah. Sometimes I forget about that.”

“How can you forget about that? I think about how weird it was once a week.”

“You mean because our guidance counselor insisted on walking down the aisle with her?”

“I mean more like, some people are just born to be brides.”

“I actually think our guidance counselor is coming to the wedding.”

“That’s weird. But good. Then I’ll actually know someone at this wedding,” Neck Pillow says.

“I know. I pretty much don’t know anyone anymore,” High Bun says.

“I know, ever since the pandemic, I’m like, okay, I guess I just have no friends now.”

“Right? The only person I know now is basically my mom.”

They laugh and then trade war stories of their terrible flights here and Phoebe does her best to ignore them, to keep her eyes focused on the magnificence of the lobby. But it’s hard. Wedding people are much louder than regular people.

She closes her eyes. Her feet begin to ache, and she wonders for the first time since she left home if she should have brought a pair of sensible shoes. She has so many lined up in her closet, being navy, doing nothing.

“So what do you know about the groom?” Neck Pillow whispers.

High Bun only knows what Lila briefly told her over the phone and what she learned from stalking him on the internet.

“Gary is actually kind of boring to stalk,” High Bun says, then whispers something about him being a Gen X doctor with a receding hairline so minor, it seems like there’s a good chance he’ll die with most of his hair. “How did you not stalk him after Lila asked you to be a bridesmaid?”

“I’ve been off the internet,” Neck Pillow says. “My therapist demanded it.”

“For two years?”

“They’ve been engaged that long?”

“He proposed just before the pandemic.”

They inch forward in line again.

“God—Look at this wallpaper!”

Neck Pillow hopes that her room faces the ocean. “Staring at the ocean makes you five percent happier. I read a study.”

Finally, they are quiet. In their silence, Phoebe is grateful. She can think again. She closes her eyes and pretends she’s looking at her husband across the kitchen, admiring his laugh. Phoebe always loved his laugh, the way it sounded from afar. Like a foghorn in the distance, reminding her of where to go. But then one of the Jims yells, “Here comes the bride!”

“Jim!” the bride says.

The bride steps out of the elevator and into the lobby wearing a glittering sash that says BRIDE so there is no confusion. Not that there could be any confusion. She is clearly the bride; she walks like the bride and smiles like the bride and twirls bride-ishly when she approaches High Bun and Neck Pillow in line, because the bride gets to do things like this for two or three days. She is a momentary celebrity, the reason everybody has paid thousands of dollars to come here.

“I’m so happy to see you!” the bride cries. She opens her arms for a hug, gift bags hanging from her wrists like bracelets made of woven seagrass.

Neck Pillow and High Bun were right. Phoebe can’t identify one thing that is ugly about the bride, which might be the one thing that’s ugly about her. She looks exactly how she is supposed to look—somehow both willowy and petite in her white summer dress, with no trace of any undergarment beneath. Her blond hair is arranged in such a romantic and complicated tangle of braids, Phoebe wonders how many tutorials she watched on Instagram.

“You look beautiful,” High Bun says.

“Thank you, thank you,” the bride says. “How were your flights?”

“Uneventful,” Neck Pillow lies.

They do not mention the surprise flock of seagulls or the emergency landing because the bride is here. It is their job for the entire wedding to lie to the bride, to have loved their journeys here, to be thrilled by the prospect of a Newport wedding after two years of doing practically nothing.

“When do we meet Gary?” High Bun asks.

“He’ll be at the reception later, obviously.”

“I mean, obviously,” Neck Pillow says, and they laugh.

The bride hands out the seagrass bags (with “emergency supplies”) and the women gasp as they pull out full-sized bottles of liquor. All different kinds, the bride explains. Things she picked up when she and Gary were traveling in Europe last month.

Scotch. Rioja. Vodka.

“Oh, how fancy,” High Bun says.

The bride smiles, proud of herself. Proud to be the kind of woman who thinks of other, less fortunate women while traveling Europe with her doctor fiancé. Proud that she returned a woman who knows what to drink and not to drink.

“Here you go,” the bride says to Phoebe with such intimacy it makes Phoebe feel like she is a long-lost cousin from childhood. Like maybe once upon a time, they played checkers together in their grandfather’s dodgy basement or something. She hands Phoebe one of the bags, then gives her a really strong hug, as if she has been practicing bridal hugs the way Phoebe’s husband used to practice professorial handshakes before interviews. “Just a little something to say thank you for coming all this way. We know it wasn’t easy to get here!”

It was actually very easy for Phoebe to get here. She didn’t stop the mail or line up a kid in the neighborhood to water the garden or get Bob to cover her classes like she always did before vacations. She didn’t even clean up the crumbs from her toast on the counter. She just put on the dress and walked out of the house and left in a way she’s never left anything before.

“Oh, I…” Phoebe begins to say.

“I know, I know what you’re thinking,” the bride says. “Who the hell drinks chocolate wine?”