Sidney’s wedding day doesn’t go quite as he’d planned. When he’d bothered to imagine it at all, he’d thought of a nice June wedding in Nova Scotia, outdoors with the sun streaming down. He hadn’t imagined this hurried affair on the tarmac on a rainy and unseasonably cool day in early September, a month after his twenty-fifth birthday.

It’s actually his father who suggests it. “Take the rest of the summer for yourself,” he says. “Do something fun.” “Fun,” Sidney repeats blankly.