But there was no time to study the changes in themselves further, because the voice of the bride’s mother, shrill with the anxiety of imperfection, or still deeper than that, of losing her only child to loyalties greater than the one to her, rang out from the bottom of the stairs. Their eyes met in the mirror, and much passed between them in that moment that Noa didn’t fully understand. She offered a mumbled good-luck to the bride, and hurried out of the bedroom, hiding out in the bathroom until the mother of the bride had passed before making her way downstairs again and out to the van.

By the time they got back to the florist shop, it was already three o’clock, but there was more work to do. The fires hadn’t put much of a pause to the passion, longing, grief, or simple desire to mark anniversaries, it seemed, all of which called for flowers. Short of staff, Noa’s boss, Ciara, asked her to stay on until all the orders were complete at well past seven. The radio spilled news of the fires nonstop: two more firemen had lost their lives, and hundreds more homes had been evacuated. Ciara, who years ago had lost a son to brain cancer and was used to variance between her private life and the celebrations of others, worked silently alongside her at the cutting table. When Noa had finished the last bouquet, a tropical affair with fronds and gaudy birds of paradise, she rinsed her hands in the enormous metal sink. Scrubbing her nails, she thought of the bride, who must already have been married by now.

Only when she got into her car did she see the envelope from the Supreme Court lying on the passenger seat, and remember her promise to the rabbi. She was exhausted, and the sadness that had been welling in her chest now begged to be relieved by the familiar smell of home, where she could collapse on the sofa and watch TV. But the rabbi was leaving for Poland tomorrow, and without the necessary paperwork, nothing would be final. He had wanted everything to be in order: the disorder of what had been broken and upended, annulled and canceled, transformed magically into order by the simple filing of the paperwork in the official archives of the Jewish court. And though Noa had no desire to aid and abet this granting of order to what she knew would long remain, might always remain, a disorder in her heart, she also did not wish to be the one to stand in its way. She entered the address the rabbi had given her into her phone, ignoring the missed calls and texts that had come from her parents earlier in the day. She had repeated her decision, and eventually they’d had to accept it. Being late where they were, and the fires no closer, each must have gone off to sleep, since her phone had been quiet for hours. Now she saw that the address, in an unfamiliar neighborhood, was only twenty minutes away, not far from the synagogue where the rabbi had performed—if performed was the right word—the get. And though she knew it might take longer if the closure of roads had caused more traffic than predicted, she turned the wheel in the direction the GPS instructed.