At seven o’clock, Lena moseyed toward my desk—she’d been there a year longer than I had, and her boss actually had a social life, unlike Hilary.

She pressed her hands on the edge of my desk, leaning forward and looking both ways like she was about to spill a secret worthy of DeuxMoi. “Want to get a drink?” she asked, shimmying her shoulders at the offer. “There’s a new bar opening in SoHo. A friend from college is the mixologist and there’s a soft opening tonight.” I glanced behind me at Hilary, slumped behind her computer, so close to it her pores were reflecting the blue light.

Lena followed my gaze and let out a disgruntled huff. “It’s not your fault she hates her husband and never wants to go home. You shouldn’t have to suffer.”

She was right. And she was right about a lot of other things as we slowly became friends. Lena isn’t easily impressed, but I knew if I kneaded her enough she’d become exactly what I needed her to be. And she was.

Lena adjusts herself at the wooden table, sitting up straighter than she already had been. “Before she gets here,” Lena begins, drifting forward, the thin white silk of her top hugging her braless breasts. “I have a question.”

I knew she was going to ask. I feign obliviousness well, all those years of practice really paid off, and I smile at her kindly, openly, like a friend you can say anything to. She started dating her girlfriend—I’m sure they’re using that word already—three months ago. I knew when we received her RSVP, which had been addressed to Ms. Lena Cunningham and Guest and returned as Ms. Lena Cunningham, that she was going to eventually find a woman to bring. It was a waste of everyone’s time to pretend Lena, this Lena, wasn’t going to show up with a model on her arm to my conservative fiancé’s family’s home, wearing something my future mother-in-law would comment looked “modern,” which to her meant “tawdry” or “wanton” or just plain “ugly.”

“I’d like to bring my girlfriend to the wedding,” she says. In typical Lena fashion, it wasn’t so much a question as a statement, one for me to approve or disapprove but, by the way she was looking at me—eyes wide, half her mouth lifted in a smile—there is no way I can say no, and she knows it. “Shocking, I know,” she continues. “I, too, didn’t think I was a bring-the-girlfriend-to-a-wedding kind of person. But this girl tells me I am, so I believe her.”

“What’s her name?” I ask, flattening the napkin on my lap.

“Jess.” The word drifts through her lips, lingering on the slithery sss like some ASMR podcast. The bartender from my engagement party. Perfect.