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"So you're forgiven by me as well."

There was a silence in that kitchen I would pay money never to hear again. Lance was staring at the floor with his hand over his mouth. And Blaine stood by the door and looked at his parents the way you'd look at two people who had suddenly started speaking a language you had never heard them use.

"That's it?" he said.

"Sol—"

"Gregory told you he threatened a man who lives in his car." His voice was perfectly steady. "He told you he studied you. Both of you. Then he sat down with an actor and told him how to manipulate you."

"Yes," said Rhoda. "He did."

"And you've forgiven him."

"Yes," said Harold. "We have."

"How?"

And my former mother-in-law looked at her son with enormous tenderness and said the worst sentence anybody said all day.

"Because it doesn't cost me anything, sweetheart," said Rhoda. "I only lost a week. You're the one who'd have to risk something by taking him back."

Blaine spun around and left the room. He didn't slam anything and he didn't say another word. He simply went out the door to the hall and up the stairs.

Harold picked up the paper and put it down again. He didn't seem to know what to do with his hands.

"You'll want to make this right," he said. "Gregory. You need to apologize to Billy."

"Yes, sir."

Chapter Twenty-Six

Gregory

I sat down on the end of the bed. I'd like to tell you I cried, but I didn't. What I did was sit there with my hands hanging between my knees and go back through the best week of my life.

Because that's what it was. That's the part nobody would believe.

Blaine laughing at me across his own wedding cake with frosting in his hair. His hand coming up to the back of my neck while a string trio played Taylor Swift to an empty reception tent. Walking up the path afterward holding hands like a pair of teenagers, wearing each other's shirts and not noticing for hours.

And waking up with Blaine on Sunday, which was the best thing that has ever happened to me. Never in my life have I been that happy. And every hour of it had been standing on something I built. My finest production.

That's what I couldn't get past, sitting there. Not that I'd lost Blaine. That he is never going to be able to remember any of it again without wondering how much of it I planned in advance.

And underneath that, something else was bubbling up. Something I'd been circling since Rhoda let go of my face in that kitchen, and I could feel it getting closer, and I couldn't quite —

Somebody knocked.

Lance came in with a bottle of Harold's expensive wine and two glasses upside down between his fingers.

"Don't talk," he said. "I've had quite a day."

"You've had a day." I almost smiled. "Mine beats yours hands down."

"I sat outside Blaine's door for an hour." He put the glasses on the table. "He wouldn't open it. He said one word to me through the wood and it was my name. And he sounded like my third grade teacher, a cranky old woman named Mrs. Carmichael."

"Lance—"

"So I've come to sit with you instead, and I'm not leaving, so don't start." He dropped into the good chair. "Have you eaten anything?"