The bride’s pale forehead wrinkled.

“I’ll fall on my face if I wear these, I swear.”

Noa felt a flicker of agitation that the bride did not see the absurdity of the whole situation, not even a little. Seeing a pair of old canvas sneakers kicked off at the foot of the bed, she pointed.

“How about those?”

The bride began to laugh. Her eyes were shining. She gave the impression of being vaguely crazy. She kicked her feet free of the high heels, hitched up her train, and, restored to her natural agility, leaped across the room. Her muscular body, trained to swim leagues and exert dominion over horses, to win and never to lose, gave the impression of knowing itself better than her mind. She slipped her feet into the sneakers without bothering with the laces, and danced over to the mirrored closets. But as she surveyed her reflection, the laugh disappeared from her twisted mouth.

A long silence passed. Then the bride met Noa’s eyes in the mirror.

“You’re not with the caterer,” she said darkly.

Noa said nothing.

“I can tell from the dirt under your nails.”

It was true: the moons under her fingernails were black. It was like that all summer, the potting soil washed clean only when she swam.

Noa shrugged, unbothered by being caught out in a lie. An inner sense of her own abundant reason often led her to see others as lacking in the same, a quality she had inherited from Leonard, and which Gabe had often pointed out was a form of superiority. But wasn’t everyone convinced of their own unimpeachable reason? Not everyone, Gabe had said; most leave open the possibility that they might be wrong, and at the very least that other ways of thinking are not lunacy. Noa accepted his point, if only to demonstrate her openness to other people’s thinking. This, too, was not original to her: Leonard, when accused of obstinacy, could be magnanimous for the rest of the day, until he forgot and became himself again.

“I didn’t want to raise your fury about the flowers. Your mother said you wouldn’t like the bouquets. There’s no lilac, and they’re too small and need to be redone. We’re waiting for the owner to deliver more flowers.”

“My mother,” the bride groaned, as if she’d just been reminded of bad news. But she didn’t say more, and, called back to the task at hand, lifted a mass of gauzy material from where it lay on her bed and handed it to Noa. The veil was attached to a tortoiseshell comb, and the bride turned her back again, this time so that Noa could see where to slide it into the coiffed hair, half gathered up with bobby pins. It was stiff from spray, and Noa had to push hard to work the teeth of the comb into the mass. Finally it was secure, and the bride turned back around and lowered her chin solemnly, waiting for the veil to be lifted over her face. Taken by the power of the ritual, she closed her eyes. Her features turned soft and vague as they disappeared behind the lace, and Noa felt a shiver, too, as if she really were to be the last to look upon the bride’s face as it was then, before whatever was to happen—the undertaking of grave responsibility, the induction into secret wisdom—that would change it afterward. Slowly the bride turned to look at herself in the mirror, and Noa turned, too, surprised at her own reflection, tall and lanky, with flat chest and dirt under her nails, suddenly boyish, as if all her femininity had been stolen by the bride in virginal white lace.