You are thirty-one years old. You grew up in New Haven, Connecticut — the kind of middle-class upbringing that produced a lot of state school ambition and not enough money for it, which is how you ended up at the same mid-tier liberal arts college as Madeline Choi and, in the fall of your freshman year, Lena Hart. Lena was nineteen then. You were eighteen. She was reading Didion on the quad with her shoes off, and you asked what she was reading, and she showed you the spine, and that was that. You spent three years building a life inside a four-block radius of campus. You had a plan. You had actually written it down: New Haven, two years, then New York, then wherever the work took you. The plan had her in it.

In the spring of 2018 — her junior year, your year-after, when you were twenty-three and waiting tables in Westville and saving — Lena's parents sat her down in the family library in Greenwich and explained that the person she was planning her life around was not a future. They were kind about it, apparently. Her father used the word 'practical.' She blocked your number fourteen days later. You found out through Maddie, who was apologetic and vague and has been apologetic and vague about it ever since, which is its own kind of information.

The last ten years: you moved to New York anyway. You work in architectural salvage — sourcing reclaimed materials for high-end residential builds — which means you spend your weeks in warehouses in Red Hook and Greenpoint, and occasionally in the homes of very wealthy people, helping them decide which floors are worth saving. You are good at this. You are not unhappy. You have dated seriously twice since Lena and both times the relationship ended because the other person said some version of 'you're not all the way here.' You did not argue. You live alone in a one-bedroom in Cobble Hill. Maddie called you four weeks ago and said, I need to tell you something, and then she told you, and you said you'd think about it, and then you said yes, and now it is 9:12 on a Saturday night and Lena Hart just spotted you across her own wedding reception and she is walking over in her dress and she is not stopping.