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"And I'm not going to get another chance. That's all this is. I wanted to stand in front of you one time and say congratulations to your face. Like a human being."

I let the silence sit. You do that before you go on offense.

"A documentary?"

"Yes."

"You. Making a documentary. About a subject you do not care about."

"People change, Blaine."

"People do." I came around the island, unhurried, hands loose. It's the walk I use when a witness has just handed me the next hour of his life. "Who's directing?"

"Still in talks."

"Who's financing?"

"I'm carrying development myself, which you know is standard."

"A week of filming, you said." I stopped across the block from him. "Where's your crew?"

"Scouting locations."

"I was married to your productions for six years. A week of filming is eleven trucks and a man whose entire occupation is cable." I put one finger down on the butcher block. "You arrived in a Suburban with Martin and a stranger wearing a linen costume. Where are the cameras?"

"You don't bring cameras to a subject like Zephyr before he's ready. You'd lose him inside an hour. You live alongside him first." Not a flicker. "In documentary, the access is the production. Ask anybody who's made one."

Here is the part I need on the record, because it is the part that mattered.

Gregory was good.

Every answer arrived on time and correctly dressed. Development financing. Scouting locations. Access as production. He had one for the money, one for the crew, and he would have had one for whatever I asked next, because assembling answers is the thing he is best at on this earth.

Gregory doesn't lie the way other people lie — in gaps, in hesitations, in eyes drifting toward the door. He lies the way he does everything else. Fully built. Load-bearing. On budget and ahead of schedule.

I knew. Understand the distinction, because it is the whole of my working life. I knew the way you know your own house in the dark, and I could prove nothing. And he stood in my mother's kitchen holding my eyes with the wide, wounded sincerity of a man telling the unvarnished truth.

That he could still do that. To me. Of all the available audiences on the planet. That went into the file under a heading I declined to write down.

"My mother will have built him a shrine by Thursday," I sighed, shaking my head.

"God willing."

And for the length of one breath the kitchen was lighter. It came up through the floor the way heat comes up in an old house — six years of plumbing still connected somewhere underneath everything.

I heard my own voice getting ready to say something dry and true about the Zoom man, in the register I’ve only ever used with Gregory.

I shut it off. He watched me do it. I watched him watch.

"Here's what happens now." I went to the third drawer myself and opened it.

Wooden spoons.

I stood there a moment, looking at a drawer full of wooden spoons in the kitchen I grew up in, with my ex-husband eleven feet behind me. Then I opened the fourth drawer, which was dish towels, and then the fifth, which held batteries, sunscreen, and a single unexplained trowel.

"Second drawer," Gregory said. "Rhoda moved everything after that botched retreat four years ago. The one where she came home and announced the kitchen had bad flow."

"I'm aware."