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"You're clearly aware."

I took the corkscrew out of the second drawer and set it on the island between us with as much authority as I had left.

"You're staying," I said. "Not because I believe one syllable of what you have just told me. Because removing you costs more than keeping you. My mother gets her healer, and my father gets his hope. The wedding proceeds exactly as scheduled."

Gregory didn't say anything.

"And you get to find out what it is to be a guest at my wedding. You'll be pleasant at the rehearsal dinner. You'll sit somewhere in the middle, next to your so-called Zephyr. On Saturday you will watch me marry Steven Ellis Bland. Then Martin will drive you back down that driveway, and that will be the goodbye you came thousands of miles to say."

Outside, a gong sounded once, tentatively. My mother shrieked with joy.

"Are the terms clear?" I crossed my arms over my chest.

"You've thought about where I'd sit." A slow smile spread across his face.

"I'm sorry?"

"The middle. Next to Zephyr." Something switched on behind Gregory’s eyes, and I recognized it, and I had specifically instructed myself not to feed it. "You've rearranged your wedding around me, and I’ve been on this property for—" he checked his watch "—eleven minutes."

"Get out of my kitchen."

"Technically it's your mother's—"

"Out!"

He lifted the corkscrew off the island on his way past and spun it once around his finger, because he has never in his life left a room without taking something to hold.

At the door he stopped, but he didn't turn around.

"It's good to see you, Blaine."

All the production came off his voice. What was underneath it, I heard maybe five times in six years, and I built the entire architecture of the last two specifically so that I would never hear it again.

"It's so good to see you I can barely breathe," he whispered.

Then the door swung shut, and his footsteps went off down toward the gravel and the gong and my delighted family, and I was alone with my hand closed white-knuckled around the edge of a butcher block in a kitchen with bad flow.

Three drawers were still open.

I closed them. One at a time. Slowly, until every front sat flush and the line of the run was unbroken.

Then I went back out onto the porch to watch my mother fall in love with a fraud I couldn't prove.

Chapter Eight

Gregory

The Cauthorne guest house is a charming cottage full of reclaimed everything. This includes a sleeping loft, a wood stove nobody has ever lit, and a bathtub carved from a single block of stone that Harold shipped from Kyoto at a cost he described to me, eight years ago, as not really the point.

Zephyr Amaranth Aeolian stood in the middle of it holding a linen shirt against his chest, turning slowly toward the window like a man checking his light.

"Which one says I have released the grief of a Saudi prince? This one, or the ecru?"

"They're the same shirt."

"They are not remotely the same shirt."

Did I hire a method actor?