The dress was a Monique Lhuillier — not her most flattering — from three seasons earlier. Jillian had found it in the sample sale rack because the regular-price version had been closer to fifteen thousand, which she could not afford. The dress was beige-ivory. The lace was heavy. The sleeves were three-quarter length and had a pattern that, on a person with Jillian's specific neck length and collarbone width, did an optical thing that made her look like a woman about to go to a lunch at her parents' country club in 1994. It did not look bad, exactly. It did not, precisely, make her look ugly. It just — it did not look like

the gorgeous, radiant, electric version of Jillian that I had been best friends with for seventeen years. It looked like a version of Jillian, about ten years older, in a dress she had inherited. And every single time she tried it on, Jillian had looked in the mirror and said, "I don't know, what do you think?" And every single time, I — along with Colette, Abby, and Rory, her other bridesmaids — had said, "Oh my God, Jilly, you look amazing." We had all lied. We had lied in coordination. And we had told each other, on group texts we thought she could not see, that we thought the dress was a disaster.