Page 23

"He will, Gregory. Blaine's a litigator. It’s literally his job." Lance pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes, very carefully, the way you do when a face is also worth millions. "Blaine already knows, doesn't he? Not about me. About that faker."

"He knows."

"Then it's finished. It's over before it starts. He'll say something at dinner and that's—"

"Blaine isn't going to say anything at dinner." I heard how certain I sounded and hated it a little. “Blaine can't. He'd have to burn his mother and his father and the wedding to do it. He's already run those numbers and the answer came back no. That's why he put me at the table instead of in a car. He's going to host me to death. Blaine told me so in the kitchen like it was a threat, and Lance, I’ve never in my life been so—"

"Do not tell me you enjoyed it."

"I'm not going to tell you that."

"You enjoyed it." The disgust on Lance’s face made me take a step back.

"Blaine cross-examined me and never once raised his voice. At the end of the interrogation he told me where to sit." I shrugged. "Fine. Yes. I enjoyed it. It was the best four minutes of the last two years, I know precisely how sick that is, and I'd like a moment alone with it before you take it away from me."

Lance looked at me for a long time. Down in the meadow a man dropped a stack of chairs and swore.

"You know he's not leaving Steven," he said, more softly.

"I know."

"You don't know. You think you know, and you've got a version of this week in your head where he—" Lance stopped. Started again, quieter, in the register that isn't for sale. "I love you both. That’s my entire problem and it has been my entire problem since the last time the three of us were in the same room. So I'm going to do the one thing I'm actually capable of, which is go to dinner, lie to my friend Blaine by omission all night, hate myself, and not tell him about that fraud."

"Lance—"

"And that isn't because I'm on your side."

"Then why?"

"Because I've watched him for two years," Lance said. "And I would rather he got hurt than went on the way he's been going."

Then Lance turned and walked the last of the path up to the house, and left me alone above the meadow with Mabel's opal glowing green on my hand in the last of the light.

* * *

Dinner was on the terrace. A live-edge walnut slab that seats fourteen and had, per Harold, "chosen its own shape." Candles in hurricane glass. A gong on a teak stand at the far end that had not been there eight years ago and was rumored to have belonged to the last emperor of China.

Harold was pouring something orange. Rhoda sat across from me wearing every bracelet she owns, with the expression she has plainly rehearsed in mirrors — I am serene and also SOMETHING WONDERFUL IS HAPPENING.

Benny Longworth was at the far end with his iPad face-down beside his plate, like a weapon he'd been asked to check at the door and hadn't. Lance studied his bread with the composure of a man eating his last meal before execution. Zephyr sat on my left. Blaine's seating, honored to the letter. My fake guru beside me as a message.

And Blaine was at the foot of the table in a navy suit with no tie, wearing his grandfather's cufflinks. Running the entire evening with his eyes and never once looking directly at me.

Two of us at that table were wearing dead people’s jewelry on our hands. Only one of us noticed.

Beside him, filming the whole tragedy on his phone, was my replacement.

I want to be fair here. I’d built him in my head across four thousand miles, and what I built was a villain. Polished. Predatory. A sleek social-media apex creature who circled a wounded man and closed in for the kill.

I’d prepared arguments. I had, God help me, prepared lines.

Then Steven Ellis Bland lowered his phone, saw me, and lit up like a municipal Christmas display.

"Oh my God," he said. "Oh my God! You're Gregory Normand."

My mouth opened. Nothing came out of it for a full second.

"Yes," I managed. "I — yes. I am."