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I've spent a career standing in rooms full of people telling them what to do. And in the most important six seconds of the last two years of my life I stood there like a mannequin holding a bag with a wet shirt in it.

Why didn't I do anything. Get both hands on his face. Say I never stopped, not for one day, not once.

Instead I let my ex-husband kiss me and then leave me standing in the dark like a man who'd been handed a flyer.

* * *

Billy was on the guest house steps with a legal pad and two cups of coffee.

"Morning," he said.

"Is it?"

"You said we'd discuss it today."

I stood in the doorway with absolutely no idea what he was talking about.

"Discuss what?"

Billy looked up at me.

"The meeting," he said slowly. "With Steven. Two o'clock, the sun room. You said, and I quote, we'll discuss it Thursday. On these steps. Two days ago."

"Right." It came back the way things come back when you've filed them somewhere unhelpful. "Right. The meeting."

"Are you all right?"

"I'm terrific." I sat down and took the coffee because he was holding it out. "Talk."

And here's the part I'm least proud of. Billy Truman — a man living in a hatchback, whose entire financial future was being decided that afternoon — had been up since dawn working out what he was going to say. And I was three hundred feet from the spot where my ex-husband kissed me. I sat on those steps, stared at a legal pad, and for the first two full minutes did not hear one word the man said.

"—which is why you can't sell it flat," he was saying. "Because the people who want it most can't afford it, and the people who can afford it don't value anything cheap. So you tier it."

"Sorry. Say that again."

"Tiering, Gregory."

"Right."

He turned the pad around. Three pages, front and back, in handwriting that got smaller down each page the way it does when somebody's racing to get the ideas out before they evaporate.

ZEPHYR — CORE OFFERINGS.

"Where did you learn tiering?"

"You told me."

"I did not tell you—"

"You told me about withholding." He flipped back a page and read from his own notes. "Withhold the thing they want and they'll build the whole cathedral themselves. You said that in the car outside the theater in Los Angeles." He looked up. "I've been listening to you all week. Everything I know about this, I learned from you."

I made myself get back into the conversation. It took actual effort, which frightened me a little.

"Here's what happens this afternoon." I tapped the paper. "You're going to be magnificent, because you can't help it. And when he gets to the contract, you're going to explain — beautifully, in Zephyr's voice — that what you do cannot be scaled. That the moment it becomes a product it stops being the thing he wants. Steven will fall for it completely. He'll go back to his people and tell them you're the real thing and you can't be bought, and they will love that more than anything you could actually sell them. And then everybody goes home."

Billy was quiet for a second.

"That's very good," he said.