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"Thank you," I said.

"Can I say one more thing?"

"Yes."

"Your family is so weird about this stuff." He said it fondly, without a trace of malice. "Like, your mom asked me to film Zephyr doing some kind of ground blessing this morning. And then Lance acts like I'm the paparazzi." He laughed. "Anyway. Sorry. I'll be good."

He kissed my cheek and went out.

And I stood alone in my parents' dining room and could not, for the life of me, locate the thing he had done wrong.

That is what I want on the record. I ran it three times, and every individual item came back defensible. Steven asked Lance for something and Lance said no. Steven accepted it with a smile. He’d waited on Zephyr because Gregory asked him to. My mother had in fact asked him to film a blessing.

There was nothing there. Nothing you could put in a filing.

So why was my jaw aching?

* * *

The fitting was at two.

Ines set up in the west bedroom with three assistants, a steamer, and a light she had shipped in from somewhere. I stood on a low round box in the middle of it for the better part of two hours.

The suit is hand-loomed hemp silk. I've described it. Unstructured, in a white so unbleached it reads as an apology, woven by a collective outside Kyoto that my mother describes, with no detectable irony, as doing important work.

On me it looks like a very expensive pair of pajamas a monk might be buried in.

"Turn," said Ines.

I turned.

I’ve sat through a great many depositions, and I have developed over the years the ability to be entirely absent from a room while remaining upright and responsive in it. I deployed it. Ines turned me and pinned me and had a conversation with an assistant about the drape at the shoulder. And while that was happening I stood on the box with my arms out and ran the argument one more time.

Marrying Steven is the correct decision.

I have never pretended otherwise to myself. That is the entire point of it. He is kind and uncomplicated and he is never going to leave me at home while he works in New Zealand.

Steven let me sleep in this morning.

He turned off my alarm and left me a note.

He apologized to Lance without being made to.

I cannot find fault with him.

"Turn," said Ines.

I turned.

And somewhere underneath the argument, in a drawer I had decided not to open, my ex-husband stood in a driveway and did not move while I kissed him.

The door opened.

"Oh," said my mother.

She stopped just inside it with both hands coming up to her mouth, and her eyes went immediately and unashamedly wet, because my mother has never once in her life declined to feel something in front of a room full of people.

"Oh, darling. Look at you."