“Well, I’m not in your family,” Phoebe clarifies.

“But you have to be in one of our families.”

“No,” Phoebe says. “I’m not in any family.”

It had been a crushing realization, one that started slowly after the divorce, and got stronger with each passing holiday, until she woke up this morning to such a quiet house, she finally understood what it meant to have no family. She understood it would always be like this—just her, in bed, alone. No longer even the sound of her cat, Harry, meowing at the door.

“But everybody is here for the wedding. I made sure of it.” The bride eyes the gift bag in Phoebe’s hands, confused. “This has to be some kind of mistake.”

The bride says it as if Phoebe is the big nightmare she has always been dreading. Phoebe is something going wrong at a time when nothing is supposed to go wrong. Because every little thing during a wedding has the power to feel like an omen—like the high winds through the park that flipped over the paper plates and sent a chill down Phoebe’s spine on her own wedding day. We should have gotten real plates, she thought, something with weight and substance.

“There’s no mistake,” Phoebe says.

This is Phoebe’s happy place. The place Phoebe has chosen out of all the possible places. How dare the bride make Phoebe feel like she’s not supposed to be here.

“But if you’re not here for the wedding, then what are you here for?” the bride asks in a much lower pitch, as if her real voice has finally emerged. Because now in this private space with a person not attending the wedding, the bride doesn’t have to be the bride. She can speak however she wants. And so can Phoebe. Phoebe is not High Bun or Neck Pillow. She is nobody, and the only good thing about being nobody is that she can now say whatever the fuck she wants. Even to the bride.

“I’m here to kill myself,” Phoebe says.

She says it without drama or emotion, as if it’s just a fact. Because that’s what it is. She waits for the truth of it to stun the bride into an awkward silence, but the bride only looks confused.

“Um, what did you just say?” the bride asks.

“I said, I’m here to kill myself,” Phoebe repeats, more firmly this time. It feels good to say it out loud. If she can’t say it aloud, then she probably won’t be able to do it. And she has to do it. She has decided. She has come all this way. She feels relief as the doors begin to open, but the bride presses the button to close them.

“No,” the bride says.

“No?” Phoebe asks.

“No. You definitely cannot kill yourself. This is my wedding week.”

“Your wedding is a week?”

“Well, like, six days, if you want to be technical about it.”

“That’s a … long wedding.”

Phoebe’s wedding was a single night. She had tried not to make a big deal out of it. And why? It seems silly now, to have not celebrated something good when she had the chance. But Phoebe and her husband were a year out of graduate school, trained to live on a stipend with a cheap bottle of wine and a nice tree in the distance. And a wedding was such a spectacle, Phoebe thought. Every time she ordered flowers or sampled another piece of cake or told her friends how happy she was, she got this horrible feeling that she was bragging.

“A week is actually pretty standard now,” the bride says with a tone that makes Phoebe feel old. “And people are coming a long way to be here.”

But Phoebe doesn’t care.

“This is the most important week of my life,” the bride pleads.

“Same,” Phoebe says.

Phoebe presses for the doors to open, but the bride closes them again, and it makes Phoebe angry, the way she gets only when she’s stuck in traffic on the way to work. All those taillights ahead made her want to scream, and yet she never did, not even in the privacy of her own car. She was not a screamer. Not the kind of woman who ever made demands of the world, did not expect the streets to clear just because she was in a rush. She was not like the bride, who stands so entitled in her glittering sash like she’s the only bride to have ever existed. It makes Phoebe want to rip off the sash, whip out her own wedding photo, show her that she had been a bride once, and brides can become anything. Even Phoebe.

But then the bloody tissue falls to the ground. As the bride picks it up, she lets out a half sob, then looks at Phoebe as though her entire life has already been ruined.

“Please don’t do this,” the bride begs, and it gives Phoebe that feeling again, as if she knows her, like the bride is asking from one cousin to another.

“I’ll be very quiet,” Phoebe promises. “I mean, I might put on some light jazz in the background, but you won’t hear it.”

“Are you joking? Is this a sick prank or something? Did Jim put you up to this?”

From her purse, Phoebe pulls out her ancient Discman and a CD titled Sax for Lovers. One of the only things she brought from home. From the first night of their honeymoon in the Ozarks. A small motel on the side of a canyon with a heart-shaped hot tub that made the whole room humid. Her husband found the CD in the stereo. Sax for Lovers, he read aloud, and they laughed and laughed. Well, put it on, lover, she said, and they danced until they undressed each other.

“Oh my God,” the bride says. “You’re serious. You’re going to do it here? In your room? When?”

“Tonight,” Phoebe says. “At sunset.”

She is going to smoke a cigarette on the balcony. She is going to order room service. Have a nice meal while looking out at the water. Eat an elaborate dessert. Listen to the CD. Take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers and fall asleep in the large king-sized canopy bed as the sun goes down. It is going to be quick, beautiful, and entirely bloodless, because Phoebe refuses to make the staff clean like her friend Mia cleaned after her husband Tom slit his wrists. That’s just selfish, Phoebe’s husband said when they heard, and Phoebe agreed, because Tom survived. Because it felt important for a husband and wife to agree on something like that. But also because Phoebe is a tidy person, afflicted by the belief that each book has its rightful place on the shelf and blood should always be inside our bodies, even after death, especially after death, and how awful for Mia, to have to kneel down and scrub her husband’s blood out of the grout.

“There will be no mess,” Phoebe promises.

“No,” the bride says firmly. “Absolutely not. This can’t happen. This can’t be real.”

But her wound is a red circle that keeps expanding. The bride looks at it and says, “How could you do this to me?”

Is Phoebe really doing anything to her, though? If it’s not Phoebe, something else will ruin it. That’s how weddings go. That’s how life goes. It’s always one thing after another. Time the bride learns.

“Believe it or not, this actually has nothing to do with you,” Phoebe says.

“Of course it does!” the bride says. “This is my wedding! I’ve been planning this my entire life!”

“I’ve been planning this my entire life.”

It’s not until Phoebe says it that she realizes it’s true. Not that she’s always wanted to end her life. But it’s been an idea, a self-destruct button Phoebe never forgot was there, even during her happiest moments. And where did this sadness come from? Did her father pass it on like a blood disease?

“Please,” the bride says. “Please don’t do this here.”

But she has to. This is the only place that feels right: a five-star hotel a thousand miles from home, full of rich strangers who won’t be upset about her death and a staff so well trained that they will simply nod over her corpse and then quietly move her through the service elevator in the morning.

But here is the bride, already upset.

“Please,” the bride says again, like a child, and it occurs to Phoebe that that is what she is. Twenty-six. Twenty-eight, maybe? A child the way she and her husband were children when they got married. The bride doesn’t understand yet, what it means to be married. To share everything. To have one bank account. To pee with the door wide open while telling your husband a story about penguins at the zoo. And then one day, to wake up entirely alone. To look back at your whole life like it was just a dream and think, What the fuck was that?

“What about your husband?” the bride tries, noticing Phoebe’s wedding ring. “Your children?”

Phoebe is done explaining herself. She hands her one last tissue.

“Consider it a wedding gift,” Phoebe says. “I hope you two will be very happy.”

The doors open. The top floor. Phoebe is finally here. But of course, it doesn’t really matter where she is. She can be on the top floor, by the ocean, or in the small bedroom of her house. There is no such thing as a happy place. Because when you are happy, everywhere is a happy place. And when you are sad, everywhere is a sad place. When they went on those terrible vacations in the Ozarks, they were so happy, they laughed at nearly everything. And the towels were so shitty and short, but it was fine, because they revealed her husband’s athletic legs up to the thigh. You’re scandalizing me, she said.

“Lila!” High Bun shouts from the end of the hall.