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I finished the nettle tea, walked up the punitive gravel, and went into my parents' eleven-million-dollar barn.

And I still didn’t look at the meadow, which by then was the single most strenuous thing I had done all day.

Chapter Six

Gregory

We turned onto the driveway and I felt the gravel in my back teeth. Harold Cauthorne has never paved that driveway and never will. Every stone says the same thing it has always said.

You are entering a place where money has evolved past needing to look like money. You will be humbled now, please and thank you.

"Speed bumps for the soul," I muttered.

"I believe that is the intended effect, Mr. Normand."

Martin took the drive at a reverent crawl. Beside me, Zephyr Amaranth Aeolian — who had been Billy Truman as recently as the Richmond Bridge — sat with his eyes closed and his palms upturned on his knees. Deep in preparation, or dead asleep. I could not tell which.

That, right there, is why I hired him.

Then the trees opened, and I stared at the meadow. I want that on the record. Whatever else gets said about me, and plenty would be said by Saturday, I did not flinch at the geography. There it was, off to the left. The long green shoulder running down to the redwoods. The exact patch of God's real estate where I stood eight years ago with a ring in my pocket and my heart pounding like a hummingbird's.

I looked directly at it, the way you make yourself look at a scene that's over budget and behind schedule.

There was scaffolding on it now. White structural bones at the tree line. A tent frame. A platform. The skeleton of somebody else's altar. They were building the new wedding set on my old location.

I'd known that since the announcement. Knowing it and seeing it are two separate taxes. I paid the second one silently, with the window glass between me and the acre, and then the drive curved and the meadow slipped away behind the trees.

I let it go and checked myself in the window, because grief is grief, but this was also technically a premiere.

"Billy. Wake up. We're on."

His eyes came open — Billy's eyes, quick and worried. "What if she asks me something in Mongolian?"

"Rhoda Cauthorne does not speak Mongolian. Nobody speaks Mongolian. That is the entire strategic value of Mongolia."

"What if there's a real one here already—" His eyes went darting around the property, hunting for professional competition. “You know, a healer.”

"Then he'll be too polite to say anything. That's what makes him real."

"But what if—"

"Billy." I took his shoulder and turned him to face me, and I gave him the speech. I’ve given that speech in a hundred trailers with forty crew members burning money outside the door.

"You are not auditioning. The audition is over. You got the part. The part is yours, Billy. Nobody else alive can play it."

He nodded.

"The people in that house have spent forty years and several hundred million dollars trying to feel one true thing, and they cannot do it. It's made them hungry in a way food doesn't fix." I let go of his shoulder. "You're not going in there to lie to them. You're going in there to be the most interesting thing that has happened to them in a decade. Give them the version of the moment they were hoping for."

The trapdoor opened.

I watched it happen. Billy drained out of his own face like bathwater, and something serene and ancient and entirely fabricated rose up to fill the vacancy.

Zephyr rolled his shoulders once and adjusted his linen shirt.

"The moment they are hoping for has already arrived," he said, in the warm-honey voice. "It’s simply waiting for them to notice."

"God, you're good." I meant it entirely. "One rule. Don't touch anybody without asking. That includes hands, faces, and chests."