They met Georgiana at the parking garage on Henry Street, and she threw her duffle in the back, crushing Sasha’s carefully arranged hanging bag with her dress in it. Sasha offered her the front seat, but Georgiana rolled her eyes and passed, choosing instead to sit in back wearing her headphones and looking out the window. On the ride Sasha caught Cord up on the latest gossip with her family. Her dad’s breathing issues seemed better, so her parents had gone away for the night and asked her brother Nate to watch their neurotic dog. When Nate brought her back in the morning she ran into the house, tail wagging, so utterly thrilled to be home again that she promptly vomited in the kitchen, but instead of the usual puddle of regurgitated kibble, she vomited up a pair of black lace underwear, and thus Sasha’s mother now suspected that Nate had a new girlfriend.

“Why do dogs love underwear so much?” Cord asked, laughing.

“Because they are perverts.” Sasha wrinkled her nose.

“They are,” Cord agreed. “But I kind of get it.”

Sasha snorted and went to swat him playfully but then remembered Georgiana in the back, lost in her own sad world.

When they got to the house, Cord’s parents had already taken the master suite on the first floor and set Berta up with the suite at the end of the hall. The kids needed to be either next to Darley or across the way, so Cord and Sasha took the smallest room, the one with a double bed under an eave; if Sasha lifted her legs too high she would hit the ceiling. She had bought a new dress—a long, silk, ice-blue sheath with spaghetti straps that would wrinkle easily—so she laid it flat on their bed and did her makeup in her underwear, waiting until the last moment to slither into it, her baby bump still too small to be noticeable. They made it to the ceremony just in time and sat in the back row, shielding their eyes with the programs as the afternoon sun sparkled on the water. Archie was apparently an avid sailor, and they fired off the dreaded cannon after their vows. Then some men in uniforms (probably just old members of the club) did a twenty-one-gun salute over the bay. Sasha giggled to herself, imagining them accidentally sinking a Sunfish, but she was pretty sure they were using blanks.

Archie was marrying a woman from Grosse Pointe, who the Stockton family all knew from their club on Jupiter Island. She was actually the younger sister of the girl Archie dated as a teenager, and Cord quietly wondered if they ever acknowledged that Archie used to give his fiancée’s sister hickeys out by the gazebo at night or if that entire area of conversation was a complete no-fly zone. The sister was at the wedding with her husband and three little girls, all wearing massive hair bows, so it seemed like nobody was going to throw a punch over it.

More than half the guests at the party were members of the Jupiter club (the other half were probably all members of the same golf club), and as the wedding party processed back down the aisle and out to the dock for photos, Sasha suddenly realized how long the night was going to be. She was keeping her pregnancy a secret until their anatomy scan and hadn’t told anyone aside from her mother. That meant she would have to spend the whole reception fake drinking and confused about which shellfish she could eat. You’re not in a coal mine, she chastised herself. Buck up. It was a beautiful, clear evening, the boats rocked on the shimmering bay, cheerful music from a stringed quartet floated through the crowd, and the pop of champagne bottles filled the air.

Archie’s mother came by with the wedding planner and asked the Stockton family to stay together—the photographer would be taking pictures of the groom’s side shortly. Sasha and Cord were starving, so they made a beeline for the waitstaff, who were starting to circulate with appetizers. Cord had long ago perfected the art of eating like an absolute pig at weddings. He loved crispy coconut shrimp and tiny beef Wellington, skewers of chicken and little lattice chips topped with tuna tartare, so he quickly identified where the servers were emerging from the tent and stood nearby so that he could intercept each tray. He was shameless. He would stride right up to a group of strangers helping themselves to golden triangles of fluffy pastry exclaiming, “Oh! What do we have here?” even when he’d already sampled half a dozen. Georgiana was usually just as bad. They ate like wild animals together and delighted in chasing the waiters, while their mother was obviously horrified, but tonight Georgiana only stared glassily out at the water. Sasha wished desperately she could tell Cord his sister’s secret, wished he could try to help her through this, but she knew better. Georgiana had trusted her.

Cord had just put a martini glass filled with crab legs in Georgiana’s hand when a server rushed out of the tent holding a clattering rack of champagne flutes. Georgiana drew back to get out of the way and bumped her elbow into a tent pole, dumping the entire glass of crab and cocktail sauce down her front.

“Oh shit,” she swore. Bright red tomato juice soaked her chest, her dress ruined. Cord grabbed a stack of white serviettes, but it was beyond help. No amount of blotting could save her.

“Oh, Georgiana, the photos are in five minutes,” her mother said with dismay.

“I’ll go see if they have Shout wipes or something in the ladies’ room.” Sasha excused herself and dashed inside. There were small baskets in the lounge filled with breath mints, bobby pins, hair spray, and tissues. Georgiana came up behind her.

“Anything?”

“No, only hair spray and mints.”

“Here, I’ll just wet a paper towel.”

“You can’t use water on silk. You’ll completely destroy your dress.”

“I don’t think it can get any worse,” Georgiana said despondently.

“If you bring it to the dry cleaner they can probably fix it. But if you put a wet paper towel on it you’ll make a water ring that won’t come out.”

“Fuck.” Georgiana looked glumly in the mirror.

“Here, trade dresses.” Sasha reached behind her back and unbuttoned herself.

“Oh my God, no way.”

“I have another dress at the house. You can put this on and do family photos and I’ll just take an Uber back and change. I’ll be here for dinner. I don’t know anyone anyway. It’s totally fine.” Sasha stepped out of her blue silk dress and stood in her bra and underwear holding the dress expectantly.

“Are you sure?”

“Yes, now don’t make me stand here naked!” Sasha laughed.

Georgiana worked her damp and tomato-scented dress up over her head. “You’re so smart to pack two dresses, I never would have thought of that.”

“Oh, I never know what to wear with your family, so I bring options.”

Georgiana stepped into the blue sheath and turned so that Sasha could button her up. It was a little tight, but fine, and Sasha felt a rush of happiness and sisterly warmth. Sasha slipped the lavender dress over her own head and then cocked her hip in the mirror and grinned, the stain more disgusting than ever. “Okay, I’m going to wait in the driveway for my Uber. Tell Cord I’ll be back in twenty minutes.”

“Thanks, Sasha.” Georgiana leaned forward and kissed her on the cheek before heading back out to the lawn for photos.

When Sasha got back to the rented house she flopped down on the bed, careful not to kick the low ceiling. How long could she get away with hiding from the wedding? She pulled out her phone and contemplated watching half an hour of something on Netflix. Surely nobody would miss her for that long. She put her hand on her flat belly. Hello in there. But then, guiltily, she got up and changed, calling a car to go back to the festivities.

By the time she found Cord, the family photos were over and cocktail hour was winding down. The seating chart had been arranged so that the Stockton siblings were separated, Darley and Malcolm across the room with the D.C. cousins, Georgiana seated with some younger siblings and her best friend, a cousin named Barbara who everyone called Bubbles, while Sasha and Cord were stuck with a table of bankers. Sasha shook hands and kissed cheeks with everyone at the table and then sat down next to Cord, carefully tucking her small handbag behind her back and draping her shawl across the chair.

“Finally,” the man to her right grinned hugely, sticking out his hand, “I get to meet Cord’s better half.”

“Oh, hello.” Sasha laughed uncertainly. It always struck her as sort of funny when a man described a woman as his “better half.” It was said in a joking way, in the same way they might say, “My wife is the boss,” and you knew they didn’t really mean it. The phrase somehow inherently raised the prospect of status in a marriage: one half was better, one half was worse. Sasha knew that to most of Cord’s family he was unequivocally the better half.

“I was so sorry to miss your wedding,” the man continued. He was slightly older than Cord, but had his same exact nose, and Sasha found herself staring at it, hypnotized as he spoke. “I wanted to come, but my wife was nine months pregnant with our fourth and I was too afraid of missing the big moment.”

“Oh, so you have a new baby! Congratulations.” Sasha smiled.

“Thank you. It’s a hole-punch thing like at the coffee shop—tenth one free, so I’m almost halfway there.”

“Noah, stop flirting with my wife,” Cord said, leaning over.

“Cord, stop interrupting me while I flirt.” The man waved Cord away. “Sasha, I hear you’re an entrepreneur and you started your own business. Tell me about it.”

Sasha rarely thought of herself as an entrepreneur, but it was true that she worked for herself. After she graduated from art school she took as job as a designer at a boutique media agency. She designed book jackets and advertisements, corporate annual reports and catalogs. After moving up the ranks at the agency she set up her own design firm, realizing she could earn more money and focus on the kinds of projects she enjoyed, looking at a brand as a whole, coming up with an entire look and visual story. She leased a small office down in Dumbo where she kept a computer and where she could send and receive packages, and at thirty-five she was making more money than either of her parents ever had. She was, by her own definition, a success.

It wasn’t the sort of success that meant much to other people. Her parents and her brothers knew she ran her own business, knew she did design work for brands they had heard of—the Transit Museum, Brooklinen, Sixpoint Brewery, the New York Philharmonic—but her work was abstract enough that nobody wanted to really spend time talking about it. Her in-laws were perhaps even less impressed, if that were possible. Sometimes it seemed that everyone in their orbit worked in finance, law, or real estate, and any field beyond that was irrelevant or possibly déclassé. Sure, Sasha wanted to be an artist. Yes, she would rather spend her days drawing and painting. But she had her drink and draw sessions and meanwhile had found a way to fold art into her life, to use her talents to make money.

It turned out that Cord’s cousin was an avid art collector, that he knew one of her professors at Cooper Union, and that he was actually really fascinated to hear about the way she took her classical training and used it to create brand identities. They talked about their favorite photographers, their favorite Chelsea galleries, and he so completely charmed her that the entire dinner passed in a happy blur of easy conversation.

After dinner there was dancing, and Sasha found herself gamely following Cord out to the floor. It seemed to her that all the men in his family were so scarred by the ballroom dance classes they had been forced into as adolescents that none of them ever learned to dance like normal people, and just hid by the bar drinking at all the weddings. Cord was the exception to the rule: never one to miss the opportunity to look like a jackass, he dragged her around, dipping her theatrically and pretending to bury his face in her breasts while she laughed and acted like she was using his tie as a leash. Out of the corner of her eye Sasha saw Darley dancing with Malcolm and even Chip and Tilda making a brief appearance for a song by the Beatles.

When the cake was cut the older guests began to make their exits in a flurry of kisses and drunken embraces. The band finished and the younger cousins drifted out of the tent and into the club, where the bar was still open, and the caterers brought out trays of small hamburgers and cones of fries. Georgiana was curled up on a leather couch, her shoes long abandoned, with her cousin Bubbles splayed out inelegantly next to her. Darley and Malcolm joined them, looking flushed and happy. Malcolm had taken off his tie and stuffed it into the pocket of his suit jacket.

Archie and his new wife came in to cheers and hollers, and soon he started telling everyone his favorite story about the house on Spyglass Lane. Sasha had heard the story half a dozen times, but it never got old. Archie and his wife had been on vacation in Telluride and after a long day skiing they had some wine and decided to watch a porn in the hotel room. Five minutes into the thing, Archie realized why everything looked so familiar: the actors were having sex on the chaise longue on Spyglass Lane. It was unmistakably the Stockton home—you could see the hedge maze and the tennis courts in the background. Archie highly doubted Uncle Chip and Auntie Tilda had been so short on cash that they had started renting the place out to filmmakers, so he called up Cord to tell him. This put Cord in the wildly awkward position of having to tell his parents that their country house was featured in a porn and no, he hadn’t seen it, but he knew someone who had, and they probably needed to call their lawyer.

It turned out the weekday landscapers had been using various vacation homes for years without getting caught, but you had to wonder how many people had seen the movies and been too embarrassed to ever try to solve the mystery. Tilda had the caretaker chuck the chaise longues at the transfer station, bought new ones with nicer cushions, had the place deep cleaned, and dumped enough chemicals in the pool to kill chlamydia and any neighboring wildlife.

As Archie and Cord fell all over each other laughing, Sasha excused herself to go to the ladies’ room, peeing and then quickly fixing her makeup. When she emerged, she didn’t see Cord anywhere, and Darley was caught up in conversation, so she let herself quietly collapse into an armchair, hidden from view so she could check her phone. As she scrolled through her emails, she half listened as Bubbles told them about a trip she was planning to the Caymans. Darley suddenly interrupted, confused. “George, weren’t you wearing a purple dress before?”

“Oh, yeah,” Georgiana said sleepily. “I’ve been wearing this dress since cocktail hour.”

“Wait, you had a different dress?” Bubbles asked. She was drunk and talking more loudly than any sober person might.

“I was wearing a lavender dress, but I spilled crab and cocktail sauce all over it so Sasha traded dresses with me.”

“Sasha gave you her dress?” Darley repeated, confused about what Sasha was then wearing.

“Wait, who?” Bubbles sounded genuinely lost.

“Sasha took off her own dress and gave it to me,” Georgiana tried to explain.

“Oh, that’s so funny! Sasha! I had no idea who you meant! You two always call her the Gold Digger!” Bubbles cackled. Georgiana laughed for what seemed like the first time all night and Sasha felt her skin grow cold. She quietly got up and walked out to the parking lot.

Sasha never told Cord what happened at the Greenwich wedding, pleading a migraine and wearing sunglasses on the drive back to Brooklyn the next day. After that she decided that she was done trying with Cord’s sisters. She was done inviting the family for dinner at the limestone, she was done bringing bagels to Orange Street for brunch, she was done joining for weekends at Spyglass or weekday lunch at Darley’s apartment. Certain events would be unavoidable, like birthdays or holidays, but otherwise she would keep her distance. Yes, Georgiana was in pain. She had slept with a married man and he died. That was terrible. Yes, Darley was worried for Malcolm, scared his career had been permanently derailed. But it was now clear to Sasha that they had only confided their secrets in her because of how little it mattered to them what Sasha thought. She wasn’t really their family; she wasn’t someone who could pass any kind of meaningful judgment. She was a receptacle for an emotional outburst, the human equivalent of screaming into a pillow.