“Fine,” I said furiously. I glared at Sébastien. “Fine. I’ll do it. I’ll schedule a ceremony for us in Georgia the day after Christmas. That way at least some family can come, although there’s no point, because this isn’t going to be our real marriage. And I’m not wearing my real wedding dress! This is just a fake, paperwork thing to satisfy our asinine governments. And I hate our governments, and I am not going to be happy about this!”

And, by God, I wasn’t. Sébastien weathered daily crying jags and harangues against governments that continued as we headed down to Georgia to partake in the Christmas festivities. “It kind of reminds me of that time I tried to teach you how to skate,” he said. “Only every day. For a month.”

“You, too?” Fabien said from the back of the car. Missing family but without enough money for a ticket back to France, he had decided to fly down from Québec to join us for Christmas, apparently for the primary purpose of tormenting me. “I was wondering if it was just me. But she’s not always like this, is she?”

“It’s hard to tell,” Sébastien said. “In Paris, it was French immigration and the weather that set her off. But I’m hoping that once things get straightened out, she’ll settle down and become a normal person.”

Fabien looked dubious. “Well, she did act kind of normal the first time I met her,” he offered at last. He thought about it another moment. “Although she washed her hands before eating. In the kitchen sink. Just before I’d caught her trying to sneak looks behind all the doors in Éric’s apartment. Maybe normal is too strong a word.”

“I was looking for a bathroom sink!” I exclaimed, driven. “If you people would put a sink in the same room as the toilet, I would never have been reduced to the kitchen. Besides, explain to me why it’s so bad to wash dirty hands over dirty dishes that will later be washed in very hot water, rather than touching food with dirty hands.”

Fabien pushed his round, geeky glasses up his nose and gazed at me with his brows knit. “You might want to give this for-life decision some more thought,” he told Sébastien.

But Sébastien had stopped listening, absorbed by the sight out his window. “Laura, why is there a giant butt hanging over the road?”

Fabien leaned forward and peered over his shoulder. “Wow,” he said. “And I thought the South was pretty conservative.”