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The words came out of me before I had authorized them.

I heard how they landed. Flat, fast, and about four degrees warmer than anything I had said all evening, which at that table constitutes a shout. My father looked up. Lance set down his glass with enormous care. Benny Longworth, at the far end, wrote something on his iPad.

Gregory did not look at me, and I did not look at Gregory, and for one full second the entire terrace understood something I have spent two years and a considerable amount of money ensuring that nobody would ever understand.

I had approximately one second to correct it.

"He's saying I'm repressed." I picked up my wine and drank some of it. "Which is the second thing anybody says about a corporate litigator. The first is that we're expensive." I turned to the man in the linen costume and gave him the smile I keep for opposing counsel. "You'd have made a fortune in my industry. We call it jury work."

Everyone laughed, gratefully, releasing something. My father said, "He gets that from his mother," and my mother said, "He does not," and Steven said, "Wait, can I ask him about my thing?"

And the scene ended, and I did not have to look at any human being for the remaining forty minutes of dinner.

Zephyr Amaranth Aeolian sat down.

He did not give Steven the satisfaction of a reading. The fraud said that he was tired, which I suspect was the truest thing he said all evening.

* * *

The reading was not the problem.

Here is the problem.

Steven and I had the east bedroom, the one I grew up in. He was talking when we came in and he was still talking when he came out of the bathroom, and he kept talking through the eleven-step routine he performs on his face nightly — a sequence of serums applied in an order he can justify, finishing with a silicone mask that glows blue and turns my fiancé into a man delivering a monologue from inside a neon jellyfish.

I sat on the end of the bed and listened. At appropriate intervals I said things.

"—and I think he's real, Blaine, I know your mom's a little nuts about this stuff, but there's something about him, and the Ascent needs somebody with actual—"

"He has a documentary crew coming," I said. "You may have competition."

"Oh my God, that's true." He turned around with a cotton pad in his hand, thrilled, glowing faintly blue. "Should I get ahead of it? Talk to Gregory tomorrow?"

"I'd start with him."

"You're so smart." He turned back to the mirror. "Your mom cried like four times."

"Five."

"Five." He laughed, delighted. "God, I love it here."

"It's been a good week," I said.

Understand that I meant nothing by it. It was the correct thing to say in the space available. My fiancé was happy, and he had been generous all evening to a man he had no reason on earth to be generous to. Steven was in a room he loved, in a house that has been hostile to him in a hundred silent ways he has never once noticed, and the correct thing to say was it's been a good week.

He came over and kissed me. I kissed him back. It was pleasant, as it always is, and then he went to plug in his phone.

And I realized that the evening's performance had cost me nothing.

Not one unit of effort. I had gone through an entire dinner — my ex-husband eleven feet away, my mother in tears, a fraud with two fingers on his sternum telling me what I keep under mine, and my own voice getting away from me in public for a full second — and then I had said it's been a good week to the man I am marrying on Saturday, and kissed him, and felt precisely what I feel when a brief is well drafted.

Structural approval. Nothing else.

I chose Steven for a reason. He’s a man who cannot damage me, because there is nothing spiteful or vindictive in him, and because it is outside his skill set regardless. He lives on the surface of life and has never once attempted the dive. That was not a thing I overlooked about him. It was his best selling point.

It was an informed decision. I would make it again.

Somewhere below the house a screen door shut. A man laughed out in the dark — Lance, probably, walking the path with Benny or my father — and Steven's phone lit the ceiling as it charged, and his breathing went slow and even inside of ninety seconds, the way it does, because nothing has ever kept that man awake.