“How interesting, wife.”

“Are we going to talk like this forever, husband?”

“No way, wife.”

They looked up at the ceiling and said nothing.

“What about Ella’s speech!” said Alice.

“I think it was meant to be touching.”

“Ah.”

“What about your Aunt Whatsie’s dress!”

“I think it was meant to be, um . . . stylish.”

“Ah.”

They snickered quietly.

Alice rolled onto her side and said, “Imagine,” and her eyes filled with tears. She always got emotional when she drank too much champagne. “Imagine if we never met.”

“It was fated,” said Nick. “So we would have met the next day.”

“But I don’t believe in fate!” whimpered Alice, reveling in the luxurious feeling of hot, wet tears rolling down her cheeks; those triple coats of mascara would be streaked all over her face. It seemed truly frightening that it was only by sheer chance that she had met Nick. It could so easily not have happened, and then she would have had a shadowy, half-alive existence, like some sort of woodland creature who never sees sunlight, never even knowing how much she could love and how much she could be loved. Elisabeth once said—very definitely and severely—that the right man didn’t complete you, you have to find happiness yourself, and Alice nodded agreeably, while thinking to herself, “Oh, but yes he does.”

“If we’d never met,” continued Alice, “then today would just be like any other day and right now we’d be watching television in separate homes, and I’d be wearing tracksuit pants and, and . . . we wouldn’t be going on honeymoon tomorrow.” The full horror of what could have been struck her. “We’d be going to work! Work!”

“Come here, my darling inebriated bride.” Nick pulled Alice to him, so that her head was resting beneath his shoulder and she breathed in the scent of his aftershave. It was much stronger than usual; he must have slapped on extra that morning, and the thought of him doing that was so unbearably sweet, it made her cry even harder. He said, “The important point here is this—wait for it, it’s a very important and intelligent point—you ready?”

“Yes.”

“We did meet.”

“Yes,” conceded Alice. “We did meet.”

“So it all turned out okay.”

“That’s true,” sniffed Alice. “It all turned out okay.”

“It all turned out okay.”

And then they had both fallen into a deep, exhausted sleep, with Alice’s Ivory Silk Duchess Satin wedding dress swirled all over them, and a single red dot of confetti stuck to the side of Nick’s face, which would leave a red circle that would stay there for the first three days of their honeymoon.

“We must have just had a bad argument,” said Alice to Elisabeth. “We’re not actually divorcing. We would never divorce.”

That word—“divorce”—was so ugly; her lips pursed together like a fish on the second syllable. Dee-vorce. No. Not them. Never, ever them.

Nick’s parents divorced when he was a child. He remembered everything about it. Whenever they heard about a couple divorcing—even a trashy, laughable celebrity couple—Nick always said, sadly, like an Irish grandma, “Ah, that’s a shame.” He believed in marriage. He felt that people gave up on their relationships too easily. He once said to Alice that if they were ever having troubles in their marriage, he would move heaven and earth to fix things. Alice couldn’t take it seriously because heaven and earth wouldn’t need to be moved; any troubles in their relationship could always be fixed with a few hours in separate rooms, a hug in the hallway, the quiet sliding of a chocolate bar under an elbow, or even just a gentle, meaningful poke in the ribs that meant “Let’s stop fighting now.”

Divorce was like a phobia for Nick, his only phobia! If this were true, then he would be devastated, crushed. The thing he feared most had happened. Her heart broke for him.

“Did we have a really bad argument about something?” Alice asked Elisabeth. She would get to the bottom of it, she would put a stop to it.

“I don’t think it’s just one argument. I guess it’s probably a whole lot of little issues, but to be honest, you haven’t really told me that much about it. You just rang me the day after Nick moved out and said—”

“He moved out? He actually moved out of the house?”

It was mind-boggling; she tried to visualize how it could actually happen, Nick throwing stuff into a suitcase, slamming the door behind him, a yellow taxicab waiting outside—it would have to be yellow, like an American cab, because this could not be real, this was a scene from a movie with a heart-wrenching soundtrack. This was not her life.

“Alice, you’ve been separated for six months, but you know, once you get your memory back, you’ll realize it’s okay, because you’re fine with this. This is what you want. I asked you just last week. I said, ‘Are you sure this is what you want?’ and you said, ‘Absolutely sure. This marriage was dead and buried a long time ago.’”

Liar, liar, pants on fire. That could not be true. That had to be a fabrication. Alice tried to keep the rage out of her voice. “You’re just making that up to make me feel better, aren’t you? I would never say that. ‘Dead and buried!’ That doesn’t even sound like me! I don’t talk like that. Please don’t make stuff up. This is hard enough.”