“One hundred and thirty of whom I’ve never met and who are already probably thinking that the bride is a barbaric, clumsy American who can’t do anything right,” I précised.

“French.” The curé watched my lips move as though I was a ventriloquist’s puppet. “Amazing.”

“And you think you can change their minds by doing the wedding right?” Sébastien grinned.

I massaged my neck and glared at him. “Can we at least go over the ceremony and the vows?”

“Vows?” said the curé. “What vows?”

My massaging hand paused. “For the wedding at the ceremony you agreed to officiate at the weekend after next.”

“But you’re already married.”

“Didn’t the bishop explain all this?”

“I thought we’d just do a Mass and pass out the collection plate,” the curé told Claudine. He seemed a bit put out when Claudine didn’t turn and translate that into English for me, as if she was taking the ventriloquist act too far.

I squeezed my neck like a stress ball. “I would rather not have a collection plate, please; we’ll be happy to make a donation to the church.”

“Of course you will,” said the curé. “I already told your mother-in-law how much it would cost.”

My jaw dropped, but I supposed an eighty-two-year-old priest was entitled to be direct. “And no Mass, please; we would prefer just the wedding service. Not everyone attending is Catholic.”

Sébastien ground his foot into my toe.

“She’s Catholic, isn’t she?” the priest asked Claudine suspiciously.

“Yes,” I answered.

He started as if I had never spoken before. “She seems to understand me. Astonishing.” He cleared his throat. “Baptized?”

“Yes,” I said. Claudine repeated my words in the same language, just to reassure him.

“Communion? Confirmed?”

“Yes.” Before they met, my father had wanted to be a monk and my mother a nun, fantasies they sometimes mentioned when their seven kids were squabbling across twenty acres. My mom read Canon Law for pleasure. I’m not kidding.

The curé nodded and turned as an afterthought to the man by my side, French and therefore trustworthy. I don’t know why he felt this way. The French had deserted religion in droves over the past half century, and church attendance here was down to about 10 percent. “And you, young man?”

Sébastien the atheist smiled blandly at him. “Of course.”

I took a step back because in the Bible Belt where I grew up, you got struck by lightning for lying to religious representatives, but nothing happened. French atheists had it easy.

“Baptized, at least,” he corrected himself to be safe. His parents could have baptized him as a baby and never taken him to church again, a fairly common occurrence, so he wasn’t actually claiming to have any knowledge of Catholic ritual that way. “Never practicing.”

“You should practice,” the curé said severely.