Page 110

"I chose Steven," I began.

"Blaine—"

"Don't help. You'll want to. Don't." I got my hands into the cardigan pockets. "I didn't fall in love with him. I chose him, the way I'd pick a juror. He was kind and steady and he was never going to leave me, and I could be certain of all of that because I never let him close enough to find out anything else. I did not ask that man one real question in the entire time I knew him."

Gregory didn't say anything.

"And I stood in that meadow on Saturday and said it out loud in front of all those guests, and I said it as though it were something he'd done to me." My voice went flat. "It wasn't. Steven was engaged to a man who had made very sure there was nothing in it to lose."

"That's not—"

"It is, though." I looked at him. "You’ve spent this entire week being the liar. Christ, Gregory. You invented a healer and a documentary and drove the whole production up my parents' gravel driveway. Everybody knows what you are now. It's been established."

"Yes." He hung his head.

"But nobody has established what I am."

My throat was closing. I forced myself to keep going.

"So here it is. I have been telling people for two years that you broke my heart, and you did. It's a very good story. Everyone accepts it immediately. And what nobody has noticed is what I did afterward."

He was completely still.

"I built something. Same as you. I simply built mine on the inside, where nobody can see it." My chest hurt. "You produce things so that nobody can get near you. I don't let anybody know me at all. That's the only difference between us, Gregory — though I'll grant that your method of avoiding your feelings is considerably more expensive and involves more people."

He made a sound like he'd been winded.

"We're the same," I said. "We have always been the same. You manage the outside and I manage the inside, and in eleven years neither of us has once been caught out by anything. I used to think that meant we were well matched."

"Blaine—"

"My mother and I had a long talk at two o'clock this morning, and here's the part I couldn't say to her." I held his eyes. "I'm not frightened that you'll leave me again. Everybody thinks that's what this is. It isn't."

"Then what?"

"I'm frightened that you'd stay," I said, "and that I'd still be waiting for you to vanish. Every day. Reading your face at breakfast for the first sign. And that I'd do to you exactly what I did to Steven, and one morning you'd work out that you'd married a locked door." My eyes were stinging. "And it would be me who left. I'd simply do it without going anywhere."

Gregory stood up.

"Right," he said. "Okay. Here's what we do—"

"Gregory."

"No, listen, because I've thought about this—" He started to pace. "Lance and I are making a film called The Quiet One. It shoots in the spring, and it's a stage picture — almost the whole thing happens in one room, so it can shoot anywhere. I'll shoot it in San Francisco. I'll find an apartment there. I'll be minutes from your office, and I'll turn down anything that means being gone more than—"

"Gregory."

"—and I'll tell you every time. That's the actual answer, isn't it? I'll tell you before I take a job instead of after, and if you say no then I don't—"

"Gregory."

He stood in the middle of that room with his hands still up in the air.

And I watched him hear himself, and I have never in my life loved anybody the way I loved that man in that second.

"Look at your hands," I said gently.

He looked at his hands.