I had done the right thing in jumping off that cliff two years ago, in letting go of the bushes I caught on the way down. Sébastien had been right; when you block out a relationship out of fear, you block out life. He had put his money where his mouth was by jumping off that cliff right after me.

I shook my head. “It’s a miracle we ever got through this.”

“A miracle?” said the husband with whom I shared so much in common. “Now you’re getting into that religious fanaticism again. I call it our families.” Our families, our friends, a bus driver, a restaurant owner . . . and ourselves, too, right? We had to give ourselves some credit. Even if one of us had tried to throw her wedding dress out the window.

“They are pretty special, aren’t they?” I agreed, just as Titi, Bruno, and Jean-Charles came out of the house, looking resigned.

“It’s the septic tank, it’s got to be,” Titi said. Sébastien froze. “People started flushing paper towels down it when we ran out of toilet paper.”

Claudine jerked her head up. “Speaking of which, where did that toilet paper in the pot de chambre come from?”

“We’ll have to dig the septic tank up tomorrow after the guests leave,” Jean-Charles said. “Good thing you and your friend Éric are still here to help us out, Sébastien.”

“But I helped dig up a septic tank on my first wedding!” Sébastien groaned.

Eleven o’clock on a Monday morning two days after our last wedding. A bucolic farmhouse in the French countryside. Sébastien balanced over a pit full of sewage, hoping desperately not to have to touch any of it as he helped clean the thing out. The men had decided the septic tank had been overwhelmed and they needed to empty it. Bruno had manfully volunteered to descend into the thick brown soup and bail it out. He now wore galoshes, some kind of yellow plastic pantsuit/raincoat, and dishwashing gloves, and he had duct-taped every possible opening until he looked like an alien in a B-grade film. Sitting at the edge of the fishpond with Colette and Justine, watching the action, I had once again a sense of spiraling back around over a starting point. I wondered why in all the love stories I had read and seen on film, excrement never seemed to have a starring role.

“Is it just me?” I asked. “Do I have some kind of gift?”

Colette shrugged. “C’est la vie. Life is fun, but it’s real.”

Right, I thought. We had had fun, tears, stress, and lots of love and surprises, all of these real. Despite all the problems, everything had worked out all right, too.