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He didn't speak on the drive back.

Blaine drove up the gravel with the headlights off for the last two hundred yards, the way you do so as not to wake a house, and stopped short of the turnaround and shut the engine off.

"Esteban stood in that water for Steven," Blaine said, "because Steven is marrying me."

"Blaine—"

"He’s worked for my parents for years. My mother calls him part of the family. She has said that sentence in front of him, out loud, probably a thousand times." His hands were still on the wheel. The car ticked as it cooled. "And he stood in a pond in his work clothes holding a reflector for a man making a video. Why? Because he ran the arithmetic on what happens to a man who says no to the fiancé."

"You didn't know."

"That is not the defense you think it is."

We got out of the car. Blaine stopped at the front of the car with his keys in his hand, and I stopped too.

"You were very good tonight," he said.

"You were better."

"That's true." A breath that was almost a laugh. "You went into the water before you took your jacket off."

"There wasn't time."

"There was time. There were three or four seconds. Everybody has three or four seconds." He was looking down the meadow, not at me. "You never take the seconds. You didn't take them at the pond and you didn't take them with the tent and you never once took them in six years of being married to me."

He shook his head slowly.

"I have spent the last two years explaining to myself that that's a flaw."

"Blaine,” I began but Blaine cut me off.

"Don't."

"Solstice—"

And then he turned around and kissed me.

I want to be precise about this, because I’ve gone over it more times than I’m going to admit. He kissed me. I had my hands at my sides and a plastic bag with a wet shirt in it hanging off one wrist, and Blaine Cauthorne took two steps across that gravel, put one hand on my arm, and kissed me the way you finish an argument.

His mouth was cold from the drive and the rest of him wasn't. He had one fist closed in the front of a hospital T-shirt that belonged to Marin General. Somewhere down the meadow the canvas was breathing.

I felt young.

There's no other way to say it. Everything that has happened to me since the day I met Blaine happened again, all at once, in a driveway, at four in the morning, in a borrowed shirt.

I got one hand up to his face.

That's as far as it went.

Because he stopped. Not gradually, the way people do. Completely, the way you stop a car. He took one step back, and I watched him put the wall up between us brick by brick with his eyes open.

"No," he said.

"Blaine—"

"No. That was—" already turning "—that was adrenaline. It’s been a very long night."

"That was not adrenaline."