Chapter Five: After
The restaurant staff removed the scorpion with the combination of speed and professional composure that speaks to good training and possibly prior experience. Someone found a specimen jar — someone always, inexplicably, has a specimen jar — and it was captured intact, because the staff understood instinctively that the guests would find this more reassuring than the alternative.
How it had arrived on the parquet of a banquet hall in the middle of a wedding remained, for some time, a matter of vigorous speculation. A delivery of flowers from a garden supplier two days before, possibly. A gap in the old stone foundation that no one had ever had reason to address. One of the kitchen staff, who had grown up in a region where such things were common, said it was simply the season for it and was met with the blank, unsatisfied looks of people who want a more narrative explanation.
The restaurant manager came personally to Sophie and Marcus and was so sincerely distressed that Sophie, who was still shaking slightly, found herself reassuring him, which was not how she had imagined spending this portion of her wedding.
The guests, after the initial recalibration of alarm to understanding to something approaching awe, became very generous with their feelings about the whole thing.
David — Marcus’s friend, who had driven eight hours — was the first to start clapping, which set off the rest of the room. It was the kind of applause that has gratitude in it rather than just enthusiasm; the sound of people expressing relief through their hands.
Marcus’s father cried again. He would later say, to anyone who asked about the wedding, that this was the part that got him.
Sophie’s grandmother, eighty-three and seated near the front, turned to the woman beside her and said: “Well. You know something about a person when you see how they react.” She said it with the satisfaction of someone whose opinion has been confirmed.
In the corner of the hall, Marcus was holding Sophie with both arms, his chin at her temple, his eyes closed. She could feel his heart, which was still going faster than usual. She could feel him making the deliberate decision to slow his breathing — she knew this rhythm, had witnessed it in him before, in smaller moments of stress — and she stayed still against him and let him.
“I was looking at your face,” she said, after a while.
“I know.”
“I didn’t see it at all.”
“It was behind you.” He exhaled slowly. “It was right there.”
“You just — you moved so fast.”
“I didn’t think about it.” He pulled back enough to look at her. “I just moved. I didn’t —”
“I know,” she said. “That’s the thing. You didn’t think. You just moved.”
He looked at her and she looked at him and around them the banquet hall was reorganizing itself, the band conferring quietly in the corner, guests returning to their seats with the careful cheerfulness of people determined to recover the evening, Petra already in motion somewhere with the focused purposefulness that had made Sophie choose her as maid of honor in the first place.
“Do you want to try again?” Marcus asked.
“The dance?”
“We didn’t finish it.”
Sophie looked at the floor — at the clean, empty parquet, the amber light from the east windows, the space they’d been standing in. She thought about the song they’d argued least about, the practiced steps, the way the first minute had felt before everything stopped.
“Yes,” she said. “I want to finish it.”
He took her hand.
The bandleader — a perceptive man who had been watching the couple rather than the room — caught Sophie’s eye, and she nodded once, and the music began again from the beginning, and they walked back to the center of the floor.
This time, both of them were watching where they stepped.
But also, as before, they were mostly watching each other — which was the point of the whole thing, had always been the point, from the moment on the terrace when she had walked toward him through the oak-filtered light and found him looking at her like someone who had been surprised.
The guests were quiet now. Not the frozen quiet of shock, but the held-breath quiet of people watching something they want to see. Phones appeared again, this time without the urgency.
The dance lasted three and a half minutes.
They didn’t miss a step.
