"What's at the top?"
He thought of the altar, of Lauren's palm out, of his own question — why are you answering before she finishes — which had flown out of him like a bird he had not known was in the room. He thought of Claire's handwriting on a cardboard box. He thought of the vows he had memorized and not said, still sitting in his mouth like a stone he had sucked smooth.
"Fear," he said. "Then you. Then her."
"Which her?"
He did not answer that, because the honest answer was both, and the afternoon was already too full of both. He reached over at a red light and set his hand on the gray sleeve, on the bleach-spot constellation, and Emma let him. Ahead of them the house waited, with its porch light out and its kitchen table and its years. Behind them, in another car, a woman in a light-blue dress drove toward the same table, already practicing how to hear her own name in the voice of a friend who would never again be able to explain what she had meant.