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Then she said, "Before we begin, I'd like to ask the two of you to look at each other for a moment. Really look. Don't say anything."

Lance whimpered. My mother said, "Oh, no—"

"I'm aware of the history, Blaine and Gregory," said Anne-Marie. "I've thought about very little else since Saturday. But I believe in this exercise, and I'd like to do it properly this time, if you'll let me."

I looked into Gregory's eyes.

Here is what happened the last time somebody asked me to do that. I stood under this arch in a very expensive hemp silk suit and looked at a kind man I had chosen the way you choose a juror. I saw the next forty years with Steven, and I couldn't do it.

This time I looked at Gregory Normand — who sold his boat, hired an actor, and told a hundred lies in order to stand in front of a man he knew still loved him — and I imagined the next forty years.

And I wanted every single one of them. Including the bad ones.

"All right," I said. "That's a good exercise."

"It's a wonderful exercise," said Anne-Marie.

We hadn't prepared vows, so we made them up.

Gregory went first. He got about four words in and had to stop. Then he said, "Blaine, I love you. I'm not going to build you any more preposterous productions. I'm going to be wherever you are. That's it. That's the entire vow, and I'm going to be extremely bad at it for a while."

"You are," I said. "But we'll work on it together."

"I know." His voice was shaking.

"I'm going to be bad at it too." I wiped my face.

"I know," said Gregory.

Then I said mine, and my voice went too.

"I've spent two years being a man nothing could happen to," I said. "It was a very quiet life. I don't want it. I'd rather have you, and everything that comes with loving you. I'd rather live with your chaos for the rest of my life in a house with you in it than be safe anywhere else."

My mother and Lance were both sobbing openly.

Then Gregory patted his jacket.

His hand went into the inside pocket and came out with something, and he stared at it, and everybody stared at it.

It was a corkscrew.

"That's mine," I said.

"It's yours." He was laughing and crying at the same time. "I took it out of your mother's kitchen the day I got here. I've had it in my pocket for days."

"Gregory. You can't marry me with a corkscrew."

"No," he said. "I know."

He put it back in his pocket, very carefully, and took the ring off his hand instead.

Mabel's ring. Pearl and opal, on the fourth finger of his right hand since he was a teenager. I have never once seen it off him.

It didn't come off easily. He made a noise yanking at it.

"Gregory—"

"It's the only thing I've got on me," he said, and his voice dropped. "Besides your corkscrew. That's not a gesture, Blaine, I need you to understand that — I haven't got anything else. Everything I own is in the back of the Suburban in a hotel car park with Martin. This is all there is."