“Well, excuse me, but I was worried you might be dead!”

“Oh,” Phoebe says.

It honestly didn’t occur to Phoebe that Lila might still be worried about her, since Lila never seems particularly worried about anything but her wedding. Yet Phoebe is softened by the thought. Lila was worried she might be dead. Of course. That’s what happens when you tell people you’re suicidal. They worry about you. They worry about you so much, it makes them angry, too.

“You really want to talk about fair?” Lila asks. “You think it’s okay to tell someone that you want to die, then kick them out of the room, and then act like it’s not going to affect them in any way whatsoever? I’m not a monster, Phoebe. I would care if a woman died at my wedding. I have feelings. But everybody thinks that just because I’m like really fucking blond or something, I don’t have feelings, but you know what? My hair is not even blond!”

“It’s not?” Phoebe asks. “It’s impressively natural seeming.”

“Well, it’s brown, just like my father’s! And my grandfather’s! We’re Italian!”

“You are?”

“Like, a quarter! My dad’s dad was Italian,” she says. “My name is actually Lila Rossi-Winthrop, a hyphen that my parents fought over their entire lives. My father was so proud to be Italian, never really forgave my mother for not taking his name, even though he’s a total hypocrite. Because when I grew out my dark hair in college, do you know what my father said? He said, I liked you better as a blonde. And so now I am here, with super blond hair, because not even my own father likes my real hair. Which is really just his hair. The man gave it to me, then acts like it’s my fault for growing it!”

Lila stands up.

“Everybody in my life is always telling me I can be anyone I want, but then whenever I do one thing they don’t like, they act like I’ve ruined myself,” Lila says. “And so I come up here, because you’re the only person at this wedding who doesn’t seem to give a shit what I do.”

None of what Lila says is a surprise to Phoebe, yet it’s a surprise to hear Lila say it. Phoebe looks at Lila, a bride still in her white silk reception dress. It has cherries on the trim. It makes her look a few years younger than she is. It must have taken her hours to get ready for the reception, carefully considering each decision, and yet, she is not even at the reception. It makes Phoebe feel suddenly tender toward Lila, like Lila is the old Phoebe now. Lila is the one hiding in the library or in the dark of her room because she feels most comfortable there.

“That’s really why you’re here?” Phoebe asks.

“Yes,” she says. “And also because my maid of honor, Vivian, just called to say she’s not coming. I was upset.”

They laugh.

“Shit,” Phoebe says.

“Her son has Covid.”

“Double shit.”

“But does she need to really be there if he has Covid? Like, can’t Max take care of the kid for once?” Lila wonders. “Max is seriously the worst, by the way. I mean, he’s the best in the worst kind of way.”

“You lost me.”

“He researches endangered jaguars or something. They like, fell in love on some research trip trying to save the last living jaguar in South America. But now that they have a kid, she is always at home, while he’s traveling the world counting up all the jaguars, I guess. Needless to say it’s very … annoying. For Viv, I mean. Viv is always stuck taking care of the kid.”

“Maybe she’s not stuck. Maybe she likes it.”

“Nobody likes that.”

“Some people like it.”

“I try to like it,” Lila confesses. “But most nights, Gary doesn’t make it home in time from work and it’s always just me and Mel at dinner. Sometimes, it’s okay. Sometimes we just watch a movie or something. But sometimes, when I make her sit at the table, it’s excruciating.”

And she doesn’t know if this is Juice’s fault or her own.

“She hardly ever speaks to me,” Lila says. “And I never know what to say to her. I ask her about school, about her friends, about why she wants to be called Juice now. But she’s just like, It’s none of your business, which means that it has something to do with her mom, but she won’t say it. She’s just like, Because my name is Juice now, and so I’m supposed to just start calling her Juice?”

She sighs.

“I don’t know. Maybe I’m just not very good at being around children. My mother was right. I didn’t even know how to be a child when I was a child. And sometimes I wonder if the people who say they love being around children are lying. It’s like people who claim to like raisins. They just want to be people who like raisins.”

“I like raisins.”

“Well, of course you like raisins.”

“My hands are like raisins,” Phoebe says, holding up her pruned fingertips.

“You should probably get out of the tub,” Lila says.

“But I haven’t even washed my hair yet. To be honest, it’s actually really hard to bathe in this thing. I’ve decided it’s one of those things that looks more romantic than it is.”

“Like chocolate,” Lila says.

“And cross-country skiing in the forest.”

“And paddleboats. I loathe paddleboats.”

The thing she is starting to love about Lila is this: She begins to shampoo Phoebe’s hair without a word and continues her angry chatter in such fixed tones, it becomes soothing to Phoebe.

“Do you think it’s weird that you’re the only one I can tell all this stuff to?” Lila asks.

“I wouldn’t say weird,” Phoebe says. “But maybe it’s a little sad.”

“It is sad,” Lila admits. “It’s really sad. And how did that happen? How did I end up becoming a person who has nobody?”

“You have Gary.”

“But I can’t be honest with Gary,” she says. “I can’t tell him that I’m not sure I really like his daughter. That I pretty much hate his sister. That I’m sick and tired of hearing about his dead wife.”

“What about Nat and Suz? You could tell them.”

“Not really.”

Lila admits she does not do the best job of keeping in touch with her friends when they are no longer right in front of her face. She has no idea what’s going on in their lives, really. She knows that Viv is somewhat responsible for repopulating the Atlanta Zoo with the giant panda. She knows that Nat is married to the third violin in the Detroit Symphony. And she knows that Suz has a baby, and she thinks it’s weird how she calls the baby a little worm, but also maybe it’s cute. The point is—Lila doesn’t know. She wishes she could ask, but they don’t ask each other real things like that anymore.

“When my father died, none of them called,” Lila says.

They just sent texts. Heart emojis. They said, We’re here for you, Lila, and Suz sent a picture of the Little Worm like she was the moral support. And it weirdly made Lila feel like she couldn’t call them. All she wanted to do was sob in their arms like she had once in high school. But the time for that seemed to be over.

“Ever since I arrived here, I’ve had this feeling that we’re just pretending to still be friends. Reenacting the friendship the way it used to be, when we were actually close,” Lila says.

That was how Phoebe felt at the end of her marriage. They reenacted the beginning—went on date nights, invited each other to things. Matt was always saying, Sure, yes, come to happy hour. But she could feel how he didn’t really care if she came. Her presence had somehow become irrelevant to her own husband, and how are people supposed to tolerate that kind of pain? How are you supposed to go from being the center of someone’s world to being irrelevant? To sobbing in your best friend’s arms unthinkingly to being afraid to call them after your father dies? Phoebe doesn’t know. She, too, was caught unprepared by that kind of loss.

“That’s sort of how it is with everyone here,” Lila says. “Like I’m pretending. Acting out this idea of what we once were or what we could be.”