“Hey.” I poked him lightly. “Non-gender-specific animal do, thank you. And also, I don’t know your name, which is rude because you know mine.”

“I’m an artist,” he told me, “so I’m allowed to be rude.”

“Wow, you really are a friend of Priya’s.”

He laughed. “Sorry. It’s Tyler.”

“And this…” I gestured hopelessly at the sculpture. “This is an art that you did.”

“It is indeed,” he confirmed, “an art that I did. A raw, angry, melancholy art that I did.”

“What were you raw, angry, and melancholy about?”

He lifted one shoulder in a sort of self-mocking shrug. “The Tavistock Centre.”

“Oh,” I said, finally getting a piece of art. “Is that why… Are those calendars?”

“Yeah. Honestly, it’s a slightly pissy piece of protest art, but having to wait four and a half years for an initial consultation is total shit.”

I gave one of those this-is-a-major-problem-that-I-cannot-in-any-way-contribute-to-solving cringes. “I’m sorry. That is…totally shit.”

“Don’t worry about it. I waited, I got my diagnosis, I waited again, I got referred to an endocrinologist. Finally got on T.”

“Yay,” I offered.

“And thankfully,” Tyler added, “I’m not married so I don’t have a spouse who would have a legal right to block my transition. Sorry. Angry statue.” He pointed at himself. “Still quite narked.”

“If it helps”—I leaned in slightly—“you’re hot, free, and single. And if there’s one thing I’ve learned from Priya, it’s that making angry art is a great way to pull.”

He nodded. “Yeah, I just need to work on not going for the engaged guy at the engagement party.”

“For what it’s worth,” I said, “I absolutely would if I wasn’t engaged. Then again, if I wasn’t engaged, I’d probably be a self-loathing prick and we’d have a shit time.”

“Then I’ll take engaged and you not being a self-loathing prick.”

I snagged us a couple of glasses of… Actually we’d gone through the prosecco budget and were now into undisclosed fizzy wine. “And a non-shit time.”

“A non-shit time,” echoed Tyler, raising his glass.

“Of,” I added, “an engaged-person-appropriate variety.”

He nodded. “I was thinking we could drink, dance, lightly flirt on the understanding nothing would happen, and you could get all the art wrong so I could laugh at you.”

“That”—I too lifted my glass—“sounds like my kind of evening.”

Chapter 38

IT HAD BEEN MY IDEA that we go back to Quo Vadis—the restaurant where we’d had our first, disastrous date—some time before the wedding. And, at the time, the day after our non-gender-specific animal parties had seemed sensible. Besides, scheduling anything at the moment was borderline impossible because it meant planning an event inside planning another event. Our life was logistics all the way down.