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"It's a big deal to the kind of people who need to be told Town and Country is a big deal," I said, which was cruel. He didn't catch it, which made it crueler. I took the magazine anyway, because a beautiful man was handing me something, and two years of drifting around the globe in a boat hadn't yet killed the part of me that reaches for what's offered. They'll bury me and my hand will still be coming up through the dirt for something shiny.

He flipped it open across my forearm to a spread of himself on a horse he was plainly afraid of, and while he narrated I made all the right sounds. The opal on my finger threw a little violet spark across the glossy page, and I turned it — turned toward the front of the magazine, idly, past the perfume strips, the watches, the people photographed being effortless at parties. That's where they've always kept the announcements. Weddings. Debuts. The small formal notices that a certain kind of American family still believes constitute a public record of joy.

I don't know why I turned there. I'd like to tell you it was instinct, a producer's nose for the scene, some subterranean part of me that already knew. But honestly I think I was just bored, and turning pages is what my hands do when the rest of me has left the room.

And then I saw the picture, and it felt like a fist slamming into my gut.

There's a particular photograph they use for these. You'd know it if you saw it. The couple, angled slightly toward each other, that lighting that makes everyone look like they've been forgiven for something. And I knew the man on the left the way you know your own name shouted across a crowded room. I knew the specific architecture of that jaw. I knew the way he held his shoulders — squared, faintly braced, like a man about to object to something.

My Blaine.

Except the caption underneath said he wasn't. It said, in that fussy little serif they've been using since before Mabel was born:

Blaine Solstice Cauthorne and Steven Ellis Bland are pleased to announce their marriage.

Then a date.

Then a place I could have drawn from memory with my eyes shut. A compound in the redwoods full of incense and tofu and the most expensive chakra enlightenment money can buy.

Twenty years ago that serif would not have printed two men's names without the magazine losing four hundred subscriptions in Connecticut. I'd like to report that I felt something civic about the progress. What I felt was that the world had finally gotten around to being decent specifically so it could do this to me.

The bar went quiet.

Not actually. Dash was still talking. I could see his mouth moving, could see the horse, the watch, the whole shimmering apparatus of him. But the sound had dropped out of the world the way it drops out right before the music comes back up.

I've cut a hundred scenes on that exact beat.

Steven Ellis Bland.

I didn't know him. He had the unbelievable audacity to be marrying my ex-husband anyway.

For two years I'd been avoiding Blaine, and our life together, letting the whole Bay Area go soft and out of focus at the edge of my attention, because looking at it directly cost more than I had.

And while I wasn't looking, somebody named Steven Ellis Bland walked into the frame and stood exactly where I used to stand.

And Blaine let him.

Blaine, who never let anybody take anything. Blaine, who once made a studio head cry over a misplaced comma. Blaine, who wouldn't let a valet park the car and wouldn't, for six years, let me finish an apology.

That Blaine had stood next to Steven Ellis Bland and held still for a stranger with a light meter until they came out looking like an actual couple.

"Mr. Normand?"

Kimo's voice, very quiet, from about six inches away.

I looked down. I'd knocked over the Martini. I don't remember doing it. There was gin all over the bar and down my sleeve and one olive on the floor, rolling in a slow circle.

"I'm fine," I said, in a register I have not used since puberty.

"You've gone cherry red."

"I'm fine, Kimo."

He didn't argue. He just laid a bar towel over the gin and stood there being solid, which is the single most useful thing anybody did for me that entire day.

"Oh my God, are you okay?" Dash had his hand on my arm. "You look like you saw a ghost."

"Worse," I said. "I saw my ex-husband's wedding announcement."