Page 27

Universal, flattering, unfalsifiable, and true of roughly every third person at every table in America. I inclined my head a fraction to encourage him and gave him nothing.

"Not because you enjoy it. Because when you were young you learned that if you didn't handle it, it would not be handled." His eyes moved, briefly, to my father, who was holding a glass of something orange and radiating the specific helpless benevolence of a man who has never once known where the insurance documents are kept. "That is not a criticism of anyone at this table. It is simply the arithmetic of a household."

Observation. Excellent observation, in fact — he had been on the property four hours and had read my father accurately in the time it took to be handed a drink.

Still inference. I said nothing.

"You are very good at your work." His gaze was steady. If nothing else, the man had superb nerves. "You are so good at it that it has become a place you go instead of a thing you do."

I registered a small internal adjustment. The kind you make when a witness turns out to have prepared.

"Your jaw," he said.

"My father has already spoken to me about my jaw. On the driveway, several hours ago." I handed it to him deliberately, to see what he would do with it. "He told me the jaw is where we keep the things we won't say."

"Yes. He was correct. But he stopped too early, because he loves you."

And there it was. The fourth technique of the evening, and the best one.

The fraud hadn’t heard my father say that. He could not have. He was in a car somewhere south of Sausalito at the time. I handed him a sentence, and he agreed with it instantly, without hesitation, and then stepped one pace past it — so that the agreement felt like corroboration and the step felt like insight.

That is not a psychic's move. It is a performer's move. You take whatever the room hands you and you say yes, and.

I have watched actors do it plenty of times. I was married to one of their producers.

Zephyr turned his glass a quarter-turn on the walnut.

And I want it noted that the gesture was Gregory's. The precise quarter-turn he performs on every glass he is ever handed, so that whatever is in it faces him the way he wants it to. This man had been in a car with my ex-husband for a few hours and had picked it up the way you pick up an accent.

"It is a nice sentence," he said. "It is also wrong. The jaw is where you hold the thing shut. What you will not say is lower."

"Lower, huh?”

"Here." He did not point at me. He laid two fingers flat against his own chest, an inch below the collarbone. "You have something the size of a house key sitting here, and for two years you have been very careful with it. The way one is careful with a broken bone."

I want to be exact about this, because I have thought about it since and I decline to be sentimental. Nothing happened in my body. My pulse did not change. My hands did not move. But something in the room reorganized itself, and the thing that reorganized it was not him.

It was Gregory.

I caught it in my peripheral vision — his hand coming off the stem of his wine glass and going flat, palm down, against the wood. A small motion. Nobody else at that table registered it, because nobody else at that table has spent several years learning what Gregory Normand does with his hands when a scene is going wrong.

That was my confirmation. Not proof. Confirmation.

The fraud was improvising. He’d gone somewhere he had not been authorized to go. And my ex-husband was sitting eleven feet away with his palm flat on a table, doing the arithmetic of a producer whose talent has just walked off its marks.

Whatever this was, Gregory hadn't scripted it. Which meant that every word of it, the fraud had gotten on his own.

"You said two years," I said.

"Did I?"

"You did."

"Then it was two years." It wasn't a con man's smile. It was worse than that. It was almost kind. "I don't choose the numbers. They arrive."

"Zephyr," breathed my mother — hand on her chest, eyes streaming freely, bracelets absolutely silent for the first time in my recollection. "Zephyr, my son works too hard, I've said it for years—"

"That's not what he's saying, Mother."