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"Then what is it?" she said. "Because I’ve been sitting up half the night trying to work out what you're doing, and I cannot get to the bottom of it."

"I'm not doing anything."

I picked up my cup, found it empty, and had a brief and vivid urge to throw it against the wall. I resisted, and set it down in front of me instead.

"You're sitting in a dark kitchen in the wee hours of the morning."

I turned the cup around.

"What you said this afternoon has stayed with me."

"I said a great many things this afternoon," Mom breathed.

"You said forgiving Gregory cost you nothing. That you'd only lost a week." My voice came out very level. "And that I'm the one who'd have to risk something."

"Ah," said my mother. "That."

"Yes."

"That was unkind of me."

"It wasn't unkind. It was accurate." I looked at her. "That's the trouble with it."

I turned the cup again.

"I’ve been telling people for two years that Gregory broke my heart. It's a very good story. Everyone accepts it immediately. He left me the slow way, always finding a new project on another continent, and eventually I asked him to go. Then I got on with my life."

"That's what you told me."

"That's what happened. It's also not the interesting part." There was pressure building behind my eyes. "The interesting part is what I did afterward. I sat down and worked out how to make sure it could never happen again."

My mother didn't say anything.

"I didn't fall in love with Steven. I want to be honest about that." My throat wasn't cooperating. "I selected him, choosing him the way I'd choose a juror. He was kind, and steady, and he was never going to leave me — and the reason I could be certain of that is that I never once let him near enough to my heart to find out."

"Blaine, sweetheart—"

"Let me finish." My voice was definitely not cooperating now. "I never asked Steven a single question, Mother. In a year. Instead, I stood in your meadow and said it out loud in front of everybody we know, and I said it as though it were his fault." I wiped my eyes with the back of my hand. "It wasn't his fault. Steven was engaged to a man who’d made certain there was nothing in it to lose."

"That's a very hard thing to say about yourself, dear." Mom shook her head slowly back and forth.

"I have to face the facts. Unfortunately for me, those are the facts."

My mother reached over, took my hand, and said nothing at all for a while, which is the only occasion in my life I can remember her doing that.

"So it isn't that I can't forgive him," I breathed. "I forgave him about an hour after he told me, and I've been furious about it ever since."

"Then what are you going to…”

"It's that if I go down that hill, I don't get to keep it." I blurted out.

"Keep what, Blaine?"

"The thing I built." I looked at her. "I’ve spent two years being a man nothing bad can happen to. And it works, Mother. I don't lie awake wondering where anybody is. If I go down there tonight, all of that goes out the window, and I'm right back to being somebody Gregory Normand can destroy."

"I don't think he's leaving," she said. "Not until whatever this is between the two of you is settled." She drank the last of her tea. "He sat in the grass at the top of the meadow for an hour this afternoon. I watched him from the landing. I couldn't work out what he was doing."

"Planning something, presumably. It's all he's capable of."