Page 41

"I know." He didn't let go of her hands. "Come and sit down. I'll take you back the moment they let me. Have you eaten anything?"

"No."

"Gregory's going to get you something."

And Simona turned and looked at me properly for the first time, and her whole face did something complicated.

"Gregory." She let go of Blaine and took my hands. "I didn't see you. I'm sorry, I didn't — you're here."

"I'm here."

"You cut your hair."

"I did."

"It was longer at the wedding." She was still holding on. "You sat with my mother at the wedding. She couldn't hear anything, and you sat with her the entire dinner and shouted at her about the movies."

"I remember."

"She talked about it for two years."

She patted my hand twice, then turned back to Blaine, and that was the end of it.

* * *

Esteban came out in a wheelchair, which is policy, with four stitches over his left eyebrow and an expression of profound humiliation. When he saw the four of us standing there — his wife, his employer's son, that son's ex-husband, and a nurse — he tried to get out of the chair.

"Sit," commanded Simona.

"I can walk."

"Sit down, Esteban."

We put them in the back of Blaine's car.

Nobody suggested it. Simona had driven herself and her car was in the lot, but it was three in the morning, and Blaine simply opened the rear door and said, "Get in. We'll bring you back for your car tomorrow."

They live in San Rafael, in the bottom half of a stucco duplex the color of a manila envelope, with a chain-link gate and an orange tree in a pot. It's nineteen minutes from the Cauthorne compound and it looks like a different planet.

Esteban was asleep in a matter of seconds.

Simona talked quietly the whole way, and about three miles from home she said, to the back of Blaine's head, "He was very upset about the filming."

Blaine's hands did not move on the wheel.

"Was he?"

"He didn't want to be in videos. Esteban told me on the phone last week, the first time he was asked. He said, Simona, I don't like it, I don't want to be in his videos." She said it in the flat conversational way people say things at three in the morning. "But he's very nice. Esteban said he's very nice. And he's marrying Blaine, so."

"So," said Blaine.

"So Esteban stood in the water anyway."

Nobody said anything for a while after that.

* * *

We got them inside. Simona tried to make us coffee and Blaine let her get as far as the sink before he stopped her. Then we said goodnight and left.