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Zephyr came in the way he'd gone out, unhurried, closing the door with both hands. And I watched, with the specific helpless awe of a producer whose talent has gone off-script in front of a stranger, as Zephyr Amaranth Aeolian took in Lance Hayworth — the coat, the cases, the face several hundred million people have opinions about — and made a decision.

"You must be the one who is tired," he said.

Lance blinked. "I'm sorry?"

"Not sleep-tired." He came around the chair and did not touch him, because he had listened to precisely one of my rules and it happened to be that one. He stood at a courteous distance and looked at Lance with terrible sincerity. "Everyone in your life is delighted to see you, and not one of them has asked you a serious question in four years. You’ve been carried. And being carried is exhausting, because you must hold very still the entire time, or they drop you."

Somewhere outside, a bird made a completely inappropriate noise.

"Gregory," Lance said, in a voice that had gone strange. "Who is this man?"

"His name is Billy."

"My name is Zephyr Amaranth Aeolian," said Billy.

Lance's jaw set. "Gregory. Come outside."

* * *

The path from the guest house to the main house runs along the top edge of the meadow, and there is no version of that walk that doesn't put the cathedral on your left.

Lance marched. I followed.

Down the slope the tent frame stood half-dressed in white, and men were carrying folding chairs in stacks of eight. The whole thing had stopped looking like scaffolding and started looking like a wedding, which is a transition I hadn’t braced for. It went into me like a fist.

"He read me," Lance muttered.

"Billy does that. He's good at it. It's a cold read, he says the thing that's true about ninety percent of people—"

"It is not true about ninety percent of people that nobody has asked them a serious question in four years."

"Isn't it?"

He stopped walking.

"Don't. Don't handle me. That is how you get everything you want and I’m not doing it this week." Lance pushed both hands back through his hair, a gesture I’ve watched in four films and about nine hundred photographs. "You hung up on me. And then you texted me forty-one times."

"I was keeping you informed."

"Gregory, you were building a record. You hung up so I couldn't argue, and then you narrated the entire crime into my phone for four days so that when it comes apart I'll be an accomplice." He shoved the phone into his coat. "Nobody hangs up on me."

"I'm aware. It's why I did it. If I'd let you finish you'd have talked me out of it, and Lance—"

I stopped too, and made myself say the honest version, because he'd earned it.

"I didn't want to be talked out of it. That's the whole confession. I wasn't calling for advice. I was calling for a door. And you gave me one."

His face did something I have only seen it do once, at the Golden Globes, ninety-seconds after he lost.

"I know I did," he said, looking at his shoes.

And there it was — the thing I'd counted on and hadn’t wanted to look at directly. Lance Hayworth, standing on the ridge above the meadow where he will stand up as best man on Saturday, holding the knowledge that he personally handed his friend's ex-husband the weapon.

The weapon currently being called Zephyr.

"I'm an accessory," he said. "I thought about it the entire drive up from LA. Accessory before the fact. If Blaine ever finds out—"

"He won't."