Reynard grins, You caught me, and makes a gesture with his hands that would go better with a cane and a straw hat. “A beer is as close as I can get to not drinking right now.”

She can’t help laughing, just a little, like the tip of a foot in the door. Reynard hopes he has kept his eyebrows from rising. “I know it doesn’t look like it, sitting here like this, but I’ve reformed.”

“Does the school know?”

“Are you going to turn me in?”

“So, no,” Rachel says, ice smacking her nose.

“They noticed a hole in my résumé,” Reynard says.

“And you filled it with lies. I thought kicking drugs meant making a fearless inventory.”

“I’m not fearless,” Reynard says. “Just sober, basically. Plus it wasn’t that kind of program.”

“How did you beat it? Hypnosis?”

“Spiritual practice,” he says, and this being California, the answer doesn’t get the scorn or even notice it perhaps deserves.

“Nevertheless,” Rachel says, “doesn’t a reformed addict go around apologizing to the people he wronged?”

“I am sorry, sorry about it. I know I wrecked your wedding, the fight and the accident and all that.”

Rachel puts her drink down, slank, as the accident comes back to her. “You went missing.”

“I was on a binge. I was always missing.”

“But you turned up.”

“Of course I did. And reformed. And sorry.”

“It’s OK. It’s a story, really. We tell it to everybody when everybody’s talking weddings.”

“Like getting mugged. Terror becomes anecdote.”

“I don’t know about that,” Rachel says seriously, “but nevertheless. Apology accepted.”

“It really was the drugs and not me.”

“Didn’t you, you know, take the drugs?”

“Sorry, I can say again.”

“I already said accepted.”

“OK,” Reynard says. And it is. The room loosens up enough, according to plan. “So,” he says, “wrecky wedding, but you’re still married?”

But Rachel’s thoughts are broad and at liberty in the long tradition of the first drink’s last sip. “How can you be sure,” she says, “it was the drugs and not you? How do you know that your essence, your real whatever, the spirit of you—is the good, kind part? What if the addiction, the chemicals making you angry and violent, what if those are the real you, and the kindness is the imposter, the disease?”

She’s quiet for the last five seconds of the song, long enough that Reynard thinks he’s supposed to be answering. “Well—”

“Because, you know how they say with love, living with someone, how you can’t believe that you love someone so much, and then sometimes you just want to pummel them with a big wooden plank and watch them break their legs down the stairs?”

“Sure, that sounds familiar.”