According to Adnan, the roof leaked directly above the dance floor. The venue had therefore cancelled their wedding. Lejla listened with her phone in her hand, already prepared to call other places. They had two months left and sixty guests. Adnan said perhaps they should accept the sign and postpone everything until spring. Lejla did not believe in signs caused by poor building maintenance. She believed in other venues.
Over the next three days she found four. Adnan found fault with each. One was distant, another too formal, the third small. The fourth had their exact date available and plenty of room. Then he said the whole organisation made him feel sick. Lejla left him to rest and called the first venue to ask whether she could at least collect the seating plan he had previously made with the manager.
The manager knew nothing about them. She checked the date, surnames, and guest numbers. That weekend they had another celebration, booked long before Lejla and Adnan became engaged. The roof did not leak. Lejla thanked her in an excessively polite voice, the kind used to finish a conversation before falling apart in front of a stranger. The seating plan in Adnan's handwriting was still on their fridge.
She waited at the kitchen table. She requested no confirmations or explanations from the manager. She simply asked how long he had been postponing the conversation they now had to have. He admitted never visiting the venue. Whenever he imagined the wedding, he felt he was agreeing to a life he was unsure he wanted. Drawing tables had been easier than interrupting her excitement. He had invented the roof when the invitation deadline approached.
Lejla studied his drawing for a long time. On it her father sat far from the loudspeakers because he found noise difficult. Even in the false plan, Adnan remembered such details. That made everything more painful, not prettier. She said she could accept someone being uncertain whether to marry her. She did not know whether she could accept his letting her live for months inside an answer that was supposedly already settled.
The invitations were never sent. Adnan spent several days at his brother's, and Lejla booked no new venue. When they talked again, for the first time they were not choosing a date. They discussed whether they wanted to continue together at all. She removed the seating plan from the fridge before he arrived. In its place remained an ordinary white surface neither hurried to fill.