She has thrown the drink in Stanford’s face—he even gets a drop-taste of citrus in his mouth—but it is not clear if this was her intention, as Nina has twirled to face the door and perhaps merely tossed her drink sideways. The bastard! is for Reynard, who stands rumpled and blank in the doorway. All this has happened in the gap between songs. The Vic’s system allows you, between tunes, to fade-through, segue, or pause, and Ben has spent a few evenings customizing, Rachel tense and patient on the sofa across the room. This is a pause, enough time for the room to move to astonishment. Tech or no, the male guests aren’t able-willed enough to be of use, and Nina parts them, tearing toward Reynard in one long scream. Forty drunk people and just about nobody knows who she is. She gets to a folding chair and, wow!, brandishes it at Reynard, straight out front like a lion tamer, as he turns tail and goes right out. “Fucking prick!”

“Guess it’s not the first time,” Martin says, looking around to catch Padgett’s eye. Her sweeping up the glass, next to him, is Martin’s thought, but she is nowhere too.

“Goddammit Reynard!”

Nina rages after him—Mahatma?—and when the screen door slams shut the broken glass is the only evidence that something in this long-jolly room has been at all amiss. Everyone hears another crash outside, they’re pretty sure, but it coordinates with the new song, starting bright, but not so happy as to make things garish. Martin sees Ben pattering over to mute the music and waves at him like the guys on airport runways. “No, no,” he says. “Keep. The party. Going.”

The words are loud enough that some people laugh and then this shadow has passed, like a train in the countryside, tracks laid for the story the happy couple will tell about the officiating vicar, who’d so charmed them at another wedding, fighting with his wife at theirs. Fiancée, Ben or Rachel will take turns correcting each other, but now the car is peeling out and Nina is pounding at the windshield. It’s Reynard’s car, vintage and gleamy in the small lot by the clubhouse, revving up the road loudly and slowly toward the city, with Nina keeping pace and trying to get in. “Let me in, you bastard fuck,” she says, and the door falls open, by Reynard or by a weak latch she does not know. She lands on the passenger seat, buckles in and buckles up. “You spoil,” she says, “everything.”

“Nina,” Reynard says tiredly. Petulantly. Ass—Nina thinks in fury—holishly. “Nothing happened, calm down. You need to calm down when you get like this.”

“Fuck you. I want, I wanted, to marry you if you said you would stop, or even just be fucking honest.”

“Nina.”