After all the rain they had a beautiful night. The ground was muddy, but the stables were paved and covered and strung with fairy lights. There was no dancing—dancing was canceled, because it had been planned for the field and the field was muck. “Like the Somme,” observed Michael Valert to Sadie, daring her to get the reference, which she did not. There was no seating plan, just long tables laid out. It had been a small wedding.

Eloise was weeping. She had seen the guest book that Jack and Sadie had bought.

“It’s nicer,” she said to her father.

“No, it’s not, I’m sure it’s not.”

“It is!” she said. Then she was crying into his shoulder, and Fiona was there, too, and they were all comforting Eloise, whose grown gawn children hadn’t come.

“It can be a different kind of guest book!” said Fiona. “Yours is lovely.” She looked at Sadie. “They’re both lovely!”

Michael Valert had to play MC at the dinner, because Piet’s best man was a small shy Dutch woman named Kick who’d refused. Jack and Kick went off to smoke a cigarette, but Michael Valert didn’t care: he assumed his position at the microphone, and offered a toast that referenced, among other things, the morning shit that hadn’t flushed, a number of jokes about the Dutch, one about the French—it turned out that Eloise’s long-ago divorced husband had been French—and an unarmed American, who Sadie realized, with surprise, was her. “To the bride and groom!” said Michael Valert. She was at a table with the unmarrying sisters and their families. The two blond twins played mumblety peg with a butter knife and their sweet blue hands.

“Which one’s Pie?” Sadie asked.

“They both are,” said Katie. “Easier that way.”

Instead of a cake there were three Dutch cheeses in graduated sizes. Where was Jack? Michael Valert announced into the microphone, “The bride and groom will now cut the cheese.”

Now, that, thought Sadie, was funny, and she burst into delighted laughter.

That was how she discovered that the euphemism was only American, and she the only American there. Jack was American, too, no matter how he denied it, but Jack was elsewhere. When Sadie realized that everyone in the stables was looking at her, she began to laugh harder. Her laughter was not silent. She could hear herself shriek.