“Yes, but we’d never see your family! And your brothers are crazy.” He said that with great pleasure just before spewing champagne hit him right between the eyes. He ducked, grabbed my hand, and ran. We crouched behind a table, his eyes streaming.

“And your family’s sane?” I checked.

“I think I got some up my nose,” he said. “Either wait here or go for the bottle Titi’s got.” He leapt up and headed at a run for Bruno.

“It is true we’d get to eat better in France, though,” he said later, when things had calmed down again. “Unless we go to Annette’s every weekend. It’s too bad it’s such a long drive.”

Guests wandered, picking champagne-spewed plums and eating them off the trees. The wheat sheaves now dangled in places, and the latticework arbor had a man’s tie looped through it. A swing drooped askew to the ground, one side broken.

“Bruno, Jean-Charles, and Titi all climbed into it together around five in the morning,” Claudine explained.

“Ah.” I glanced at the scorched earth that ringed a couple of the grills and at the greatly reduced number of bales of hay. “Well, all’s well that ends well.”

“Well. Begins well, really.” She sat down on the grass beside me. “Isn’t it wonderful the way you two got us, and even Mamie, traveling on the other side of the world, and your family over here, and all of us together?”

I smiled. “We might have started it, but we could never have predicted how far our families would take it.” I had, in fact, predicted exactly the opposite reception from both sides: not an enthusiastic embrace of the other but arms folded in cold aloofness.

“I saved some wedding favors for your mother because I know she hated to miss the wedding here. You have to tell her all about it.”

I handed her the sapphire necklace she had lent me, instead of ejecting me from the family, during my fit of hysterics the day before. I was still surprised they were speaking to me after the way I had behaved. But Sébastien’s family seemed to have accepted me so wholeheartedly that the ties they had formed with me wouldn’t be easy ones to break. Kind of like real family. “Thank you. Really. Thank you.”

I sat down on the edge of the algae-covered pond, feeling fuzzy. If I had just finished a marathon, I would have aching muscles. Since the marathon hadn’t been so much physical as mental and emotional, I didn’t have sore muscles but the spiritual equivalent. I kind of liked the feeling. I felt as if I’d been stretched so much bigger, I could barely recognize myself, let alone my weird, wonderful, so much richer life.