Gideon came back four songs later, decidedly less steady on his feet. He was holding two glasses of champagne and spilled a little when he gave her one.

“Gideon, you’re drunk!” She never thought she’d see the day.

Gideon rubbed his face. “I’ve had some shots. Tom made me. I can’t remember how many.”

A couple in matching purple and white leis danced over and tapped Gideon on the shoulder. Their names were Nettie and Hilton. They were from Ann Arbor. When Gideon introduced Ivy, they both shook her hand with two firm pumps and the same aw-shucks grins. It was something Ivy had noticed throughout the evening: how the couples at the Crosses’ wedding resembled each other, in their speech patterns, coloring, temperament, if not directly in looks.

Nan used to talk about qìzhì, as in: “That woman has the best qìzhì among her siblings,” or “You can’t buy good qìzhì no matter how rich you are.” Nan meant that this elusive quality was not something one could learn or imitate, but an aura you unconsciously emitted. Ivy didn’t know if couples could grow to have the same qìzhì—like developing a similar taste for exotic foods—or if they purposely found partners with similar qìzhì, like how the most attractive man and woman in a room will instinctively gravitate toward each other. Then Ivy wondered whether her and Gideon’s qìzhì matched—or did people see a couple who didn’t quite fit together?

An old Grove alumnus came and said goodbye to Gideon. Ivy was reminded of the girls of her youth. Like faces from a storybook, she saw once more the svelte daisy-haired Satterfield twins, creamy-skinned Liza Johnson with the wide lips and catlike eyes, only they didn’t seem like fourteen-year-old girls but fully formed women entirely capable of inflicting upon the present Ivy the loneliness and embarrassment she’d felt throughout her preteen years.

“Are you guys still friends with Nikki and Violet?” she asked Gideon. “And Liza Johnson. Didn’t she date Tom for a while?”

Gideon’s eyes went perfectly round. “That’s right—you don’t know.”

“Know what?”

“They’re dead.”

Ivy said stupidly, “Who’s dead?”

“Nikki and Liza.”

“What? How?”

Gideon stopped jiggling his legs. “It was right before high school graduation. A freight truck came out of nowhere and T-boned their car. Jordan—Jordy, he’s here somewhere—was driving. Chris was in the car, too. They were going to Panera. The guys were okay, but both the girls…” He gripped her shoulder. “Sorry, I thought everyone knew by now… The whole town came to the funeral. Nikki had an open casket but Liza’s face was too badly mangled… Nikki, you remember, had that long, blond hair? It was woven in braids around her head. Before they lowered her, Violet placed a flower crown on top of her hair. She looked like an angel… I’m sorry, that was morbid. Were you close friends with the girls?”

“No,” said Ivy, “I barely knew them… It’s so sad.” A sensation like little icy feet pattered across her heart. Just seconds ago, she’d been jealous of them, these imaginary rivals. But these girls were dead now. Had been dead for years, for no reason at all.

“What about Una Kim?” she said. “What happened to Una?”

“Who’s Una?”

Ivy shook her head. “Never mind.”

Gideon was watching her with his head cocked. “You’re a nice person. One of the nicest I’ve ever met.”

“I’m not nice at all,” she said, turning away.

“Well, I think you are.” He mussed the top of her hair. This gesture felt so tenderly protective, so brotherly, that she was struck with the impulse to tell him everything. Her strong, dignified Gideon who would never hurt or disappoint her, who would know exactly what to say, and whose benevolent dignity would perhaps atone for her own mistakes and depravity. She would tell him she loved him, had always loved him, he’d been her idol and our childhood idols are evergreen. She was lonely, and sorry, and she wanted—wanted—

“I don’t feel well,” said Gideon. He placed one hand on his stomach, took a step back, and puked his dinner all over her patent leather Ralph Li-Ping stilettos.

* * *

THE NEXT MORNING, Gideon was in poor shape. He apologized profusely for his poor behavior, insisting that he would buy her the same pair of shoes when they got back to Boston, as she had thrown out the ones he’d puked over—the smell had been too offensive to pack into her carry-on. Then he choked down two Advils with a bottle of Perrier and slept the entire flight home.

After landing at Logan, he kissed her goodbye and took a cab straight to the office, as if in penance. Ivy waited until his cab rounded the corner before hopping in her own cab. “Astor Towers, please. On the corner of Summer and Hawley.” She turned on her phone and called Roux.

She thought he would pick up on the first ring, having waited breathlessly all week for her call, but in fact, her call went twice to voicemail and she almost told the cabdriver to change destination before he finally picked up on her third try.

“Where were you?” he snapped.

“Hawaii.”

“You don’t have time to go on a trip with me but you have time to fly to fucking Hawaii?”

“I’m coming over,” she said.

Tendrils of clouds drooped from the sky like shaggy gray sheep. From her cab window, she saw a woman in an arctic winter coat walking beside a teenager in a cropped jean jacket. March and April in Boston was a strange in-between time when people fell sick, dogs barked furiously at the sky, one day it was sunny and hot and the next, a blizzard was coming. She checked her phone’s calendar. Sixty-nine days.

“Here’s fine.” She got out at the florist shop two blocks from Astor Towers. With great care, she selected one stem after another, the owner stating the names of each flower as if they were the names of her children: freesia, lisianthus, white spray chrysanthemums, pennycress, eucalyptus, pittosporum.

“Sixty-nine eighty-six, please.”

Ivy pulled out a hundred from her wallet. It was Roux’s money, the money she’d stolen from him, which would now be used to buy his own consolation flowers.

He opened the door before she even rang the doorbell. “I saw you coming into the building,” he said wanly, a cigarette stub hanging from his cracked lips. Brushing past him, she smelled the familiar rank odor of a hangover, and something foreign and fragrant. Roux was shirtless and wearing, of all things, blue hospital scrubs for pants, the ends of the cotton drawstrings hanging down to his thighs.

“Where’d you get those?”

He glanced down. “The hospital.”

“You were in the hospital?”

“No.”

“Then whose are they?”

He shrugged.

Then Ivy understood the reason for his odd, disheveled manner. She’d thought the strange fragrance came from the flowers but now she realized the scent wasn’t one bit floral but entirely synthetic and distinctly female, like the smell of a department store makeup counter.

“Wild night?” she said.

“Why haven’t you been answering my calls?”

“What’s her name?”

He refused to answer.

“I guess you didn’t ask. And here I was going to console you.” She thrust the bouquet at him. He didn’t take it. “Let’s stop this, Roux,” she said. “It’s not fun anymore. I’m getting married in sixty-nine days. You’ve obviously moved on as well. Let’s call a spade a spade.”

He eyed her with bleary exhaustion. “Calm down.”

“I am calm.” She placed the flowers on his coffee table and went to the kitchen to fill a vase with water. He followed her.

“I was drunk last night.”

“You’re always drunk.”

“I don’t want to fight this early in the morning.”

“It’s not a fight. It’s goodbye.”

He opened the fridge and poured himself a glass of orange juice, drinking it in large gulps with a little bit trickling down the corners of his mouth.

She couldn’t believe she had ever found this man attractive.

“I mean it,” she said. “I never want to see or hear from you again. It’s over. I came here to tell you that in person. For the sake of our friendship.”

He wiped his lips on the back of his hand. “Our friendship? We’re back to that? When are you going to stop lying—”

“You knew I was marrying Gideon—”

“I thought you would leave him!”

Ivy opened her mouth, closed it. “When have I ever said that?” she said finally.

“Last summer. At the Speyers’ house.”

“That was before I was engaged.”

“You came to me a month later. You couldn’t stay away. You hate your life. You bitch about the Speyers, about their goody-goody friends. You wanted me to save you.”

“That’s ridiculous,” Ivy snapped. “I’ve never asked you for anything besides sex. I thought we were in agreement about that part.”