The tent was white, the flowers were white, the napkins folded into origami cranes were white, and somewhere behind the main house a string quartet was playing something from Vivaldi that Ethan Cole suspected was meant to evoke gentility but instead evoked the particular tedium of waiting rooms. He had loosened his tie - a deep crimson that his mother had selected for him with the reverence other women reserved for sacraments - at approximately three-seventeen in the afternoon, which was six minutes after the ceremony ended and the guests began their migration toward the cocktail tables set up across the eastern lawn.
He was twenty-four years old. He had just completed his MBA at Wharton. He was reasonably certain he was the least romantic person on the Cole family property, possibly on all of eastern Long Island.
"I'm just saying," he said to Lauren, "that if it doesn't work out, every person who attended today becomes a witness. Two hundred and twelve people who watched you make promises you didn't keep."
Lauren Ashby set her champagne flute down with the precision of someone demonstrating patience at the limit of its endurance. She was beautiful in the specific, architected way of women who understood their beauty as a competitive advantage - her dress was the color of old silver, her hair was the color of expensive honey, and she had, over the two years they'd been together, developed a way of looking at him that communicated an entire emotional argument without opening her mouth.
She was doing it now.
"Andrew loves Cassandra," she said.
"That's not what I said."
"It's what you implied."
"I implied that turning a marriage into a two-hundred-thousand-dollar public performance raises the stakes of failure in a way that seems emotionally reckless. Which is an observation, not an indictment of Andrew and Cassandra specifically."
"I want a wedding like this," Lauren said.
He laughed. He hadn't meant to. It came out before he could stop it - not unkind, just startled - and she went perfectly still in the way she did when she was recalibrating how angry to be.
"That's not a no," she said.
"Lauren-"
"Tarot cards or not?"
"That's not fair."
"You said-"
"I said I found it interesting that Cassandra's medium told her the wedding date was inauspicious and she moved it two weeks anyway. That's not the same as saying I believe in tarot cards."
"You said anyone who makes life decisions based on tarot cards deserves what they get."
"That was about the medium. Not Cassandra."
"Ethan." She picked up her champagne glass again. "Let's just-"
She was interrupted by the arrival of a couple she knew from somewhere, mutual friends of Andrew's from his Yale years, and she turned toward them with the smooth redirect that came naturally to people who had grown up at events exactly like this one, and Ethan was left alone at the round table they'd claimed near the edge of the tent, close enough to the lawn that he could feel the early-July heat pressing in at the canvas edges.
He tilted his champagne glass, watching the bubbles. Beyond the tent's opening, the grounds of the Whitmore estate rolled in the particular manicured way of old Hamptons money - not flashy, just permanent. The kind of lawns that said we have been here long enough not to need to prove it. Box hedges and hydrangeas and, further out, the silver glint of the Atlantic beyond a low dune. The wedding party was still out on the main lawn, photographs, the photographer moving around Andrew and Cassandra like a satellite tracking an orbit.
Andrew looked happy. Ethan allowed himself to think this without complication. Whatever he thought about the spectacle of the thing, Andrew looked genuinely, unguardedly happy, and Cassandra Whitmore - Cole now - was looking up at him with an expression that wasn't performed for anyone. That part, at least, was real.
Ethan looked back at his champagne.
A waiter moved past. On the adjacent table, someone was laughing too loudly about something involving a boat and a governor. The string quartet had transitioned to Debussy. The afternoon had that particular quality of events with long, soft hours ahead - dinner wasn't until seven, it was barely five, and the tent was filling slowly with people who all seemed to know exactly where they belonged.
He was trying to remember whether he'd confirmed Monday's meeting with the analyst team at Cole Capital when he caught, from across the table, the quiet sensation of being watched.
He looked up.
The girl was sitting two seats down from him on his left. The chairs between them were empty - whoever was assigned to those seats hadn't yet arrived, or had drifted to the bar. She was perhaps eleven or twelve, with a round face and dark eyes that were, even from six feet away, notably large - wider and darker than was average, with a slight upward tilt at the outer corners that gave her a look of permanent, mild appraisal. Her hair was dark brown and straight and fell past her shoulders without any particular styling, just cut, or maybe not recently cut, since it seemed to stop at the same length all the way around. She was wearing a chocolate-brown sundress - clean, presentable, but faded at the hem in the way that summer dresses faded when they were worn and loved and not recently replaced.
She was watching him.
He had, apparently, been talking to himself. Or at least moving his lips in the way people sometimes did when they were thinking too actively.
She was not quite smiling. She was working very hard at not quite smiling.
He opened his mouth to say something - something appropriate and adult, something that would establish the correct social register between a twenty-four-year-old and whoever's kid this was - and then he laughed, and then he choked, because his sip of champagne had come at exactly the wrong moment and now he was coughing into his fist with his eyes watering while two hundred guests swirled around him and the girl at the table watched him die with great composure.
He set the glass down. Pressed the back of his hand to his mouth. Got it under control.
"Thanks," he said. "For your concern."
The corner of her mouth moved. Just barely. There was a small gap between her two front teeth, visible for a fraction of a second before she pressed her lips together.
