While they carried the flower arrangements in from the van, the bride’s mother came out of the house and called out to the wedding planner, who didn’t hear her, busy giving instructions over the phone. The mother of the bride wore high heels that clicked anxiously across the wooden dance floor. She stopped to examine the flowers Noa had just set down. As she fingered the petals, her fallen face fell further. Her front teeth were stained with lipstick. The arrangements were too small, she said. They had expected lilac. Her daughter would not be happy.

Noa looked down and again felt the heat rising at the back of her neck. Who did these people think they were? To shout about flowers? To celebrate while a few miles away people were losing their homes and dying in the brutal fight against the fires? She felt that if she answered now, she might not be able to control what came out, and so she called Nick and retreated to the van.

Inside the cool interior, she closed her eyes and exhaled. Her anger had been at a constant low boil for months, always ready to spill over. Before they’d broken up, she’d started fights with Gabe over nothing, overreacting to the smallest things. She wanted to be left alone, and then once he was gone, she was furious at him for leaving. Or she would curl into him like a child, but when he’d utter some offhand comment that rubbed her the wrong way, she’d turn away, cold and injured, and even when she wanted to reach for him again, she couldn’t. She hadn’t agreed to have sex with him. He’d done it before, and she had never, and this imbalance bothered her. It wasn’t that she was romantic about her first time. More that she was too aware of how the moment would be differently valued in each of their lives, not just then but always. The other girl, his first, would be remembered after Noa might long be forgotten, whereas she would be promising to remember him forever. “Make up your mind!” he shouted at her before they broke up, when once again she’d gone from warm to cold, and given him her back. But aside from whether or not to sleep with him, what had been up to her, really? He was leaving for college in August. He would find someone else, a girl more easygoing than her, lighthearted and beautiful. She told him as much, and when he protested, she insisted, calmly, practically, as if she were invulnerable.

Had she always been this way? Her independence was a matter of pride. Monica and Leonard claimed she’d been like that since she was a baby. One of the earliest stories they told about her was how, when she was only two, she had walked into the first day of preschool without looking back. She’d climbed onto the rocking horse and screamed when any of the other children wanted a turn. She’d sat astride the horse, stubborn and imperious, and used her lung power to keep the others at bay. Noa had never really questioned this telling of the story, how it had come to be used, like all of the earliest stories parents tell children about themselves, as proof of character. But why hadn’t she hung back and clung to her mother? Mustn’t there have been a need for independence long before it became the story about her, and a point of pride? Wasn’t the pride only vulnerability masquerading as strength, until at last it had become one? But as with all strengths that grew out of need, its foundation had never been solid. It was built on top of a hole. Wouldn’t she have held tight to her mother if Monica had been a mother she could reliably cling to, rather than the comfort of a rocking horse?