Phoebe wants to ask what she pretends to be with Gary. But it doesn’t seem right. She’s in a fragile state. It feels like one small pull of the thread, and Lila will unravel. And Lila surely has to go back out to her cocktail party. It’s only eight.

“When does the pretending stop?” Lila asks.

“I’d like to say whenever you want it to,” Phoebe says, but she knows this isn’t true. It’s harder than that. “But I think it stops when you get fed up.”

“Fed up with what?”

“Yourself,” Phoebe says.

“But how long does that take?” Lila asks, as if she’s at the doctor, writing down notes.

“It took me forty years.”

“Well, that’s not promising. Forty is so far away.”

“I mean, it doesn’t have to happen at exactly forty.”

But Lila puts her face in her hands. “Ugh. I can’t believe I have no maid of honor.”

“Maybe Pauline will do it.”

Lila doesn’t smile. She doesn’t seem to like the joke. “Will you do it?”

“I’m not in the wedding.”

“I’m the bride. I get to decide who’s in the wedding. It’s like being the president of your very own country. So ta-da, now you’re in the wedding.”

“But I don’t even know you,” Phoebe says, and as soon as she says it, Phoebe regrets saying it. She knows it’s no longer true.

“You already know me better than most people at this wedding,” Lila says. “Except for maybe my high school guidance counselor.”

“Why did you invite your high school guidance counselor, by the way?”

“Is that weird?”

“It’s a little weird.”

“Well, he’s local. And he was really very kind to me when I was a kid,” she says. “A better mother to me than my own mother. Even gave me his sweater once when I got my period on his office chair.”

“Even stranger.”

“You think so?”

“I think he probably got the invitation and was like, Wait, what? The girl who menstruated on my chair?”

Lila laughs loudly and looks truly happy for a second.

“He probably did,” she says. “Because actually it is a little weird. I finally had a chance to talk to him, and he was so familiar and unfamiliar at the same time, halfway through the convo, I was like, Wait, who are you? Why did I invite you?”

She laughs again and it’s good to hear Lila make fun of herself. But Phoebe is starting to understand that on some nights, Lila is probably the loneliest girl in the world, just like Phoebe. And maybe they are all lonely. Maybe this is just what it means to be a person. To constantly reckon with being a single being in one body. Maybe everybody sits up at night and creates arguments in their head for why they are the loneliest person in the world. Lila has no maid of honor and Phoebe has never been a maid of honor. It has always been a mark of shame for her, that no woman in this world was willing to claim her.

“Anyway. It’s not even like you have to do that much,” Lila says. “Viv already planned everything. You’ll see tomorrow, it’s all in the binder. You just kind of have to like, read the binder and then stand there and do what Viv would have done.”

“You do remember that I came to this hotel to kill myself,” Phoebe says.

Saying it aloud makes her feel very far away from that woman who put on her green dress and came here to die—to think of someone being in that much pain. To think of herself walking in here like she had no other option. Phoebe wants to hug that woman, not hurt her.

Her therapist was right. She won’t kill herself. She is not the type. She has always known this about herself but somehow forgot. Somehow, everything felt so dark back at home, and only now that she is here can Phoebe look back and see just how dark. At the time, the darkness felt like life. Phoebe was too familiar with it, the way she was too familiar with her own house. She could walk to the bathroom in the middle of the night, no problem—she knew the knobs on every door, could feel the walls of her house like they were the walls of her own body. To be stuck inside her house was to be stuck inside herself and all the choices she made over the years.

“I’ll do it,” Phoebe says. Saying it aloud feels like grabbing on to something.

“Yes!” Lila says. She claps her hands and Phoebe starts to feel a tiny bit excited. Phoebe does not have to go back—not yet. “Tomorrow morning, you can join us for the bridal brunch in the conservatory.”

A ridiculous sentence if Phoebe ever heard one. But she’s cheered by the thought.

“Only if you get this shampoo out of my hair,” Phoebe says.

Lila holds the shower head above Phoebe. The water is warm down her back. Phoebe sinks deeper into the tub.

“Have you tried the back scrubber?” Lila asks.

“There’s no back scrubber.”

“They didn’t give you a back scrubber?”

“I don’t need a back scrubber.”

“How else were you planning on scrubbing your back?”

“Do I need to scrub my back?”

“Have you never washed your back before?”

“Maybe not?”

The only time she ever washed her back was when she showered with her husband. At the start of their relationship. Their first trip to the Ozarks, in the little B&B, how they would wash each other. She remembers the feeling of him spreading the soap over her back, his hands sliding down her spine.

“Head back,” the bride says.

Just submit, Phoebe thinks. Put your head back and close your eyes and let the water rush down your body. Let the bride wash the shampoo out of your hair if that’s what the bride wants to do. You’re the maid of honor now.

BY THE TIME Phoebe turns her phone on, it is dark outside. She sits on the balcony and listens to all the messages come in at once. A familiar ding, yet the phone feels foreign in her hand, like some object pulled from an archaeological dig, filled with messages that no longer have anything to do with her.

Bob asking why she took off in the middle of her Intro to Lit class.

Her student Sam who wants her to know that she didn’t come to class today because her grandmother had a bloody nose and her bloody nose got all over Leaves of Grass and she thinks it’s probably a biohazard to bring the book into a public space now, though she knows how Dr. Stone feels about students who do not bring their books, but the syllabus doesn’t mention what to do if the book is covered in actual human blood? This is what Sam needs to know. Thanks!, she wrote.

And then Bob again.