“I’ll admit,” he said, massaging his temples, “I prefer being in a pleasant stately home at the wedding of an affable but harmless man I’ve met more than once to being in a tunnel full of loud music and cultural markers I’ve always found alienating. I don’t think that’s especially wrong of me.”

On one level, it wasn’t. On another—and maybe it was the not sleeping and the being soft-arrested and the rain and the field of liquid cowpats, but I was feeling a difficult mix of drained and antsy. “I’m not saying it’s wrong of you,” I began, even though I was about to, a bit, “but those were kind of, y’know, my people?”

“They used to be your people,” Oliver corrected, and I wasn’t sure I was in a mood to be corrected. “Your people are Bridge and Tom, Priya and the James Royce-Royces. And, well, and me.”

When he laid it out like that it felt really…really small all of a sudden. Not because I didn’t love my friends—I obviously loved my friends—but because I’d always felt my friends represented, somehow, a connection to something larger? “I guess I just… It still kind of confuses me that you’re totally down with a ceremony that celebrates a God you don’t believe in, gender roles that went out of fashion in the 1950s, and a version of marriage you literally can’t be part of”—I took a deep breath; this was getting way more intense than I’d intended—“but you’re freaked out by a ceremony that celebrates your actual identity.”

“Lucien.” Like me, Oliver was standing slightly unsteadily, and like me he was hiding behind a pillar to stop what was now, undeniably, an argument spilling over the rest of the party like the world’s most disappointing balloon drop. “I’m not sure what you want from me here. We went to a wedding for somebody you hated, and you clearly wanted me to be harsh about it, so I was harsh about it. We’re now at a wedding for somebody you like, so I’m trying to help things go smoothly. And apparently that’s upsetting to you.”

Oh no, was this a me problem? This was probably a me problem. I mean, let’s be honest, most things were me problems.

Except, hang on. On this one occasion, maybe incorrectly because self-awareness was never exactly my best feature, I was pretty certain it wasn’t a me problem. Yes, if I was being fair—and who wanted to be fair in the middle of a fight—Oliver could play the taking-my-cue-from-you card for some bits of Miles’s wedding. But he knew how much I loved dunking on rich people, and if he was really that committed to having my back, he’d have totally joined in.