I didn’t have the same options. I just had a bunch of friends, all of whom were, in their own special ways, utterly unsuitable. Tom was an ex and technically Bridge’s friend rather than mine, both of which made it weird. The James Royce-Royces came as a unit, and it would have felt unfair to ask one but not the other. I refused to ask any of my coworkers, so that left Bridge and Priya. And Bridge should have been my go-to choice because she’d made me her maid of honour and I was owed some freaking payback. Only something about Bridge didn’t scream best man to me.

She was my best friend, but when I thought of a best man, I thought of someone who I’d gone on the pull with in a disastrous attempt to get over a failed relationship. Or drunk absinthe with at three in the morning. Or ranted to about how awful it was that all our friends were pairing off like a bunch of squares while we were young, free, single, and totally miserable. And that…that was definitely Priya.

Besides, when I called Bridge to break the good or bad news, she’d been in the middle of a major work crisis because the acclaimed author of I’m Out of the Office at the Moment. Please Forward Any Translation Work to My Personal Email Address had vanished overnight somewhere in the vicinity of the Ängelholm UFO-Memorial, leaving only thirty-eight manuscript pages, a cassette recording of Philip Glass’s Akhenaten, and a note saying To the Fairest.

So, yeah, Priya had stepped up. Or at least not told me to fuck off. And was doing a really good job. For a start, she’d totally ignored me when I said I wanted a small, low-key non-gender-specific animal party and instead threw me a massive rager at a friend’s gallery. She’d even got me a rainbow balloon arch, although she did tell me we were going to shoot it with BB guns at the end of the evening because—and I quote—“I love you and respect your choices, but balloon arches are twee as fuck.”

Whatever. It was my twee-as-fuck balloon arch, and I was going to stand under it for as long as possible. Or at least for a couple of minutes because, it turned out, standing under a balloon arch by yourself wasn’t as much fun as I thought it was going to be.