HANNAH IS GETTING MARRIED. NATHAN HAS PROPOSED IN A cottage in Cornwall. They have been a couple for ten and a half years. She is having a little gathering at the new flat to toast the announcement, with her best women, Lissa and Cate.

It is February, but sunny and mild as Cate and Lissa walk the small distance from the big house, down Broadway Market towards Hannah’s flat. They stop at the liquor store on the way. “Cava?” says Cate, lifting a bottle. “Champagne,” says Lissa. “Let’s get a bit of Veuve.”

At the bottom of the canal they turn right, where they announce their arrival at a plain metal door and Hannah buzzes them inside. The flat smells both earthy and clean—the interior staircase has been newly covered with sisal. Hannah appears, smiling at the top of the stairs, dressed in simple trousers, a silk shirt. Cate and Lissa take off their shoes and walk slowly up the stairs, the sisal pleasantly rough beneath their feet. The stairs give onto a large, open kitchen and living room, where a long blue sofa sits along one wall.

Cate has seen this flat before—visited often since Hannah and Nathan moved here last year—but tonight it looks different; it is as though the definition has been turned up. Her eyes graze the details of the room: the elegant sofa, a table of lightest wood, a brown jug placed just so upon it, knives arranged by size on a magnetized strip on the wall. They seem to look back at her, these objects, with a cool judging gaze. They seem to ask her how she measures up.

They take their drinks and go through sliding doors onto a large terrace with a view over Haggerston Park where they drink their Veuve and toast their friend.

Hannah carries a particular radiance this spring-like evening as though she herself is the chief exhibit in this backdrop of her own curating, as though all of this—the terrace and the park and her home glowing gently on the other side of the glass doors—were simply there to reflect her radiance, her status as a bride.

After a little while Cate excuses herself—she has to go to the bathroom. In Hannah’s bathroom there is no clutter, there are no bottles on the bathtub or in the shower. Instead, in the cabinet, there are matching jars of brown glass.