Claudine sat up laughing. Somebody had forgotten to tell her that it was 5:30 in the morning after a day in which she had made six hundred kebabs and gone to bed far later than I had. “Oh, we wanted to make sure to get an early start. All right, everybody, up and at ’em. Let’s go, let’s go!”

When I got downstairs at 5:45, the first thing I noticed was the gray day and the flecks of rain that caught me on the face as I crossed the gravel to the dining room. The second was Claudine, Titi, and the tall, lanky, dark-haired Grégory laying out an elaborate breakfast, complete with full place settings and everything.

“What?” I stumbled to a halt.

“This day, of all days, we had to make sure everyone got off to a proper start.” Claudine beamed at me. “What would you like to drink?”

“Arsenic,” I said. “No, no, don’t get up. I’ll get it.”

By 5:50, everyone was gathered around the breakfast table for a leisurely breakfast of coffee, juice, bread, and jam, to start the day off right.

“This might be it,” I muttered to Sébastien. “This might be the breaking point. I might really not be able to take your culture.”

“Okay, so it’s not bacon, eggs, and biscuits,” he said, offended. “But people have been working really hard, Laura; they don’t have time to prepare an American-style breakfast.”

I looked at him. I looked at my watch: 5:55. “You know, we can speak each other’s languages all we want, but we’ll never understand each other.”

The leisurely breakfast lasted until 6:30, an hour’s sleep for which I would gladly have made do with a candy bar. Properly reinvigo-rated, we launched anew into the wedding preparations, meaning all those things that couldn’t be done until the last minute and all those things that could have but had been forgotten.

“The wedding’s at eleven,” I said to everyone, multiple times. “All I ask is that I get the bathroom at nine and have the next hour to get ready.”

The fourteenth time I said this, my teenage brother-in-law handed me a worry-stone he had brought back from Ireland, a small piece of marble with an indentation where centuries of thumbs were supposed to have rubbed away cares. “No, no, keep it,” Grégory said. “I want you to rub it a lot.”

At nine, I climbed the narrow, worn wooden stairs to the common room and its newly installed bathroom. The door was closed, and the shower was running.

I dove my hand in my pocket for the worry-stone, smooth and cold against my hand. “Who,” I said to Justine, who had taken her shower at 8:30, “is in the shower? And how long has he been in there?”