Not because I wished the marriage away, exactly, but because some instinct told me the whole thing was moving strangely, too smoothly, as though it had been arranged rather than fallen into.

My parents, who had spent my sister’s whole life at a careful cold distance from her, might have been expected to raise objections, to interrogate, to worry.

Instead they smiled their polished dinner-table smiles and said Gabriel would take very good care of Gemma.

At the time I found their calm a relief.

I did not yet understand that their calm was the calm of people watching a plan they themselves had set in motion arrive right on schedule.

There is a particular horror, which I only felt in retrospect, in realizing that a wedding I attended as a grieving, self-sacrificing sister was, for two of the people present, the successful closing of a transaction.