“But that’s not how it works!” said the event planner. “It’s a dance for the father and the daughter who got married.”

But Lily was already striding toward Scott. Joey watched Lily give their father a hug and then whisper something. Joey walked very fast to the door before she’d have to witness the look on her father’s face.

She floated through the remains of the cocktail hour she barely even saw. Past the bathroom where Leo stood in her stall, telling her he loved her. She took off her one-inch block heels that nonetheless she couldn’t believe she was still wearing. She needed fresh air. Fuck the rain.

She remembered an outside door by the room where she got ready. The makeup artist had gone through it for a smoke between layers of airbrush foundation spray. Joey burst into the night. A canopy shielded her head from the rain, but the ground was a muddy flood. Her lovely dress swished in the muck, and she didn’t care. She reached to the back of her dress and unzipped it as far down as she could force it. She sighed as the first sip of unrestricted oxygen hit her lungs.

That’s when she saw the figure hunched over in the rain. That’s when she saw the back.

*  *  *

Joey sat on the curb beside him. Leo lifted his face, all red and wet.

“You don’t have to console me on your wedding day, Jonesey.”

“It’s not my wedding day anymore.”

The hope that flushed Leo’s face was heartbreaking in its infancy—like a first press of grapes, their sweetest production. “What are you—?”

By the thread of her hand through his, he quieted. She looked at their hands woven together. If hands could be a home, she knew that hers was here. They were both sweating, or one of them was, or else it was the rain filling in all the cracks. She’d lived so long avoiding the rain that she’d forgotten how good it felt when it met her in the dark places of herself. In punctuation, the rain turned torrential, like God kicking up the dial.

You can take it, the sky was saying. Let’s fall apart together.

Joey’s whole body was humming with aliveness. Every molecule inside her felt cozy and in its right place.

Leo looked into her eyes, and she met him there. So many questions sprouting, morphing, waiting. The answers in hers, insufficient.

She could say: I’m terrified, Leo. You consumed me once, and the greatest void I’ve ever known was the absence of myself when I no longer had you.