Fleur was always in charge of parties. Always threw the best parties, the ones that people who have long since moved out to the wealthier suburbs—Newton, Sudbury, Lincoln—still talk about, the parties that took days in darkened rooms to recover from. Fleur was, in her twenties, thrifty, ruthless, psychologically astute. Able to wring maximum fun, maximum exhausting whimsy, out of all gatherings. And now Fleur has not only filthy improvisatory cunning, but money. Who is paying for all of this? Fleur’s fiancé David’s family owns the island. He does something that Fleur is vague about. Travels. There is family money. His family is in snacks. A van picks up Harper and Thanh, two other couples, and two women from Chula Vista. Friends of Fleur. Fleur moved out to Point Loma a few years ago, which is where she met David doing whatever it is that he does. The women are Marianne and Laura. They say David is nice. Good with his hands. A little scary. They don’t really know him. They know Fleur from Bikram yoga. The air-conditioning in the van isn’t working. The wedding guests are taken in the van from the tiny regional airport where everyone flew in on tiny, toy-sized prop planes to an equally tiny pier. Everything snack-sized. The boat that goes over to Bad Claw Island has a glass bottom. How cute, Marianne says. The pilot, a black guy with the greenest eyes Thanh has ever seen, is gay. Indisputably gay. Down here the Atlantic is softer. It seems bigger. But maybe that’s because everything else is so much smaller. There’s a cooler on the boat; in it, individual see-through thermoses filled with something citrusy and alcoholic. In a basket, prepackaged snacks, crackers, and cookies. Fleur spent her twenties as a bartender in various Boston bars. She and Thanh met at ManRay. ManRay has been closed for a long time now. Thousands of years.

Han has sent Thanh a text. Everything is fine. Okay? Fine! Great! She and Naomi are watching Bollywood musicals. Eating Belgian fries. Naomi wants to know all about Thanh and Harper when they were young and dumb. (Not that this is how Han puts it. Nevertheless.) Don’t tell her anything, Thanh texts back. I mean it.