The morning after their fight, Ivy received a same-day FedEx package with no return address. Inside was a black velvet box holding a pair of earrings. They were shaped like origami cranes, each the size of a thimble. The lines of the crane’s beak, the right angles of its wings, the jutting plane of its tail, were all molded in forward movement, as if the bird was about to take flight. She knew immediately who’d sent them. What frightened her was how Roux had gotten her address. She glanced across the street to where the men with the SUVs stood smoking in their usual spot. She’d seen them come in and out of the house and thought they must be running some kind of business from there. Now she wondered if Shen had been right when he’d called them gangsters. And if they were gangsters, might they be associated with Roux? She hurried inside and drew the curtains.

Roux called every day the following week, asking to see her. She picked up at first, making excuses about having her period, prior engagements, car troubles. He accused her of lying—You’re fucking pathological, you know that? She accused him of being a savage woman-hater. She finally demanded that he stop calling; when he refused, she threatened to block his number. “Do that and see what happens,” was his chilling reply.

She sold the crane earrings he gave her to a pawnshop. With the money, she went to an upscale boutique in Back Bay and bought a cocktail dress of pink organza, patent leather Ralph Li-Ping stilettos, and a crocodile-skin clutch. It would be her outfit to the Cross wedding, an event she had dreaded for months but which she now looked forward to as a means of escape from Roux. Now that he knew her address, she lived in perpetual terror of his showing up on her doorstep when Andrea was home, or, more disastrously, when Gideon was over. The city itself seemed to press against her, hostile in its harsh noises, the drills of construction sites, police sirens. Every night, she crossed off another day on her calendar. May 22, her wedding day, was circled with a red heart. Only seventy-two days away, she told herself. She said it like a prayer: Seventy-two days. Seventy-two days. Seventy-two days.

* * *

IT’D RAINED THAT morning in Kauai when they landed but by early afternoon, the sun was streaming through the stained-glass windows of St. Mary’s Cathedral. Sitting beside Ivy in the dark cherrywood pew was Marybeth’s aunt, the one whose ranch they’d visited in New Hampshire last year. She kept bumping into Ivy’s elbow as she raised her compact mirror to powder her face with an almond-scented bronzer. “Are you a friend of the bride or groom?” she whispered, and Ivy almost said, Neither. She said she was the fiancée of the best man. “The splendid blond one?” the aunt asked. Ivy nodded with pride. Standing at the altar with the other groomsmen was Gideon, looking splendid indeed in his tailored gray suit, his hands clasped somberly in front of him. Certainly he looked better than the groom, who wore his tux like a straitjacket, his arms rigidly pressed against his sides.

As Ivy waited for Marybeth to walk through the doors, she felt her phone vibrating inside her clutch. Marybeth’s aunt adjusted her hearing aid, looking around for the source of the noise. The organist began playing Mendelssohn’s “Wedding March” and the crowd stood. Ivy followed suit, a second late as she silenced her phone. A gasp of delight rippled through the room. Dripping from head to toe in lace and pearls, Marybeth looked like a Pre-Raphaelite painting with her burnt-orange hair rippling under a sixty-two-inch ivory silk tulle veil, the culmination of a thousand hours of Chinese labor hand-embroidering all those cascades of delicate flowers. Her gloved arm was threaded through her father’s, a jolly-looking man with round blue eyes spaced very close together. Tears were already streaming down his face into the bow tie around his fat neck. People said that daughters wanted to marry men like their fathers and Ivy could picture how in twenty years or so, Tom could develop the same thick neck, the red freckled cheeks. But age would never soften Tom to jolliness. He was one of the most unhappy people Ivy had ever met. Yet she couldn’t pity him. His unhappiness, unlike Andrea’s and Austin’s and even Roux’s, contained malice. It had the need to hurt others. In that way, Tom Cross and Nan Lin were alike.

Ivy had once asked Marybeth what it was about Tom that had first attracted her to him. Marybeth said, “He hates dumb women, loud women, flirtatious women, fat women, Catholic women, Jewish women, women who snore, women who can’t drink… you get the idea. I thought, ‘At least I’ll never have to worry about him running off with some bimbo.’ The opposite, actually. You should see the stack of HR complaints against him from his secretaries. Anyway, when he kept on asking me out, I thought there must have been something special about me. So I decided to give him a chance. I’ve always wondered, though, why me? I guess I’m marrying him to find out.” Ivy thought of this now, watching Marybeth float down the aisle in a daze of serene happiness. What a reason for marrying someone. But then again, plenty of people got married for less.

The ceremony was tedious—there had already been the processional when they’d arrived at St. Mary’s, and they still had to sit through the biblical readings, exchange of vows, exchange of rings, another prayer, the nuptial blessing, more prayers, singing. When Ivy wasn’t looking at Gideon, her eyes kept returning to Tom’s father, whose deep baritone voice was the loudest in the room as they sang “Ave Maria.” During mass, he closed his eyes but his lips fluttered continuously without sound; every so often, he’d gesture at the ceiling as if conducting an invisible orchestra. When giving his speech at the reception, the elder Cross spoke about his son’s devotion to God, his faith in the sacred matrimony in upholding God’s will, his expectations for Tom in remaining a leader for the parish. Not once did the elder Cross mention Marybeth, who had long drained her champagne and was chewing ice cubes from her empty water glass.

“That was beautiful,” Ivy whispered to Gideon as everyone clapped.

“It was lovely,” Gideon said unsmilingly.

Then Gideon made his best man’s speech—a short, lighthearted roast followed by funny stories showcasing Tom’s finer traits. Near the end, Tom’s face scrunched up like a dried apricot. Ivy thought he would start weeping again but he didn’t. The guests laughed. Clapped. Toasted. As soon as Gideon took his seat, white-gloved waiters served their appetizers out of heated gold platters. Contemporary American food with a Hawaiian twist. The portions were tiny, meant to take a backseat to the exotic garnishes: sprigs of emerald green, bright fuchsia spirals, a cluster of unnatural aqua-colored beads—“liquid nitrogen,” someone explained to his neighbor. After they finished eating, the younger guests milled onto the makeshift dance floor on the sand, surrounded by real torches, as a seven-piece band powered through rock renditions of traditional ballads. The star of the show was the Hawaiian pahu drum, played by a thickset Hawaiian woman in a grass skirt with two coconut shells for a bra and a pink-and-white lei swaying over her voluptuous breasts. It was as if she had looked up on the Internet what she was supposed to wear to look the part of who she was.

Ivy went to use the bathroom. A headache was forming as a result of mixing her liquors, and the pain throbbed harder with each beat of the drums. When she came back outside, Gideon handed her back her clutch. “Your phone’s been buzzing this entire time,” he said. “I was worried it was an emergency so I checked who was calling. Someone named Kang Ru?” Ivy nearly fainted from her idiocy. “It’s one of my college friends,” she said quickly. She took the phone from Gideon—twelve missed calls. She said a short prayer of gratitude that Roux wasn’t the texting type. “I’ll call him back later,” she said, and turned off her phone. “Let’s dance.”

They joined the others on the dance floor. Gideon took off his jacket. Underneath he wore a light gray vest with satiny black buttons. She placed her hands lightly around his neck. They swayed slowly, foreheads pressed together. The last time they’d been this intimate was in the rooftop bathroom at the Gonford. It was another one of those things, like her LSAT score or Ted Speyer’s first wife or Dave Finley’s philandering ways, that they would never speak of. People like Roux and Nan thought love was speaking your mind—in the most forceful, unrestrained manner, the more unrestrained, the more loving—but Ivy had been with Gideon long enough to understand how delicate silence and restraint, that careful distillation of one’s most unseemly thoughts, was the most loving and respectful gesture one could make toward one’s spouse. Once upon a time, she’d found his careful control unsettling; now she found it not only admirable but also heroic. Anyone can lash out from anger. But it takes a special kind of man to gently declare to his fiancée: “I like everything about you,” and devote his life to upholding the principle.

A group of Tom’s cousins came and pulled Gideon away for a photo. Ivy saw Marybeth’s aunt on the dance floor, twirling in circles. Ivy walked over, took the withered hands in her own, and began a jig. Through the terrace doors, she heard the chants of shot, shot, shot, shot and glimpsed Gideon’s blond head tipping back. She glanced around the tables. There was no one else she knew at the wedding besides the bride and groom. This old white-haired woman who smelled of almonds was her only friend here.