“Don’t start trouble on our first night.” I asked him if he truly expected me to hand-wash his father’s and brother’s laundry on our wedding night, and he said his mother had done it her whole life and now it was my turn, and I understood, with a cold clarity, that the man I had married was not in this room and never had been.

“If the laundry matters so much to you,” I said, “you can wash it yourself.” Florence grabbed his shoulder and hissed at him to put me in my place, and Jonathan — who had been drinking heavily all through the reception, his eyes red with it — took a step toward me and seized my arm hard enough that my heels slipped on the floor.

“Don’t you ever talk back to my mother again,” he said.

I told him to take his hand off me.