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"Two years." He held up a hand. "That's the first thing. You've been gone two years. And I want to be respectful about it, because I know what Blaine was to you, and I have never been married, so I don't get a vote on how long it's supposed to take."

"Lance—"

"But you didn't grieve for two years. You hid for two years." The words came fast, the way rehearsed sentences do. "You bought a boat, which is the single most theatrical way a human being can leave a place, and you sailed off, and every so often you sent me a photograph of some water. And nobody said a word about it, because your marriage had just ended and everybody who loves you decided to be gentle."

"And you've decided not to be."

"I've decided it's Thursday." He turned the script over in his hands. "Because here's what I have watched this week. You landed here with nothing, and inside of one afternoon you had hired an actor, built him a name and a lineage, and installed yourself in the guest house of a family with every reason on earth to throw you out."

"That's not—"

"You're producing, Gregory. Except it isn't a film, it's people's lives." His voice cracked slightly. "You have worked like a dog all week and you are the single most functional human being on this property. And you have aimed every bit of it at a man who is marrying somebody else on Saturday."

And this is where I should have told him.

I want that noted. Lance Hayworth has known me eleven years and has been lying by omission to his friend Blaine all week on my behalf. All I had to do was say it.

He kissed me. He crossed the driveway and kissed me.

Lance would have gone through the roof of that tent. Here's why I didn't tell him. Because the second you say a thing out loud, somebody else gets to have an opinion about it. And Lance's opinion would have been the one he'd held all week — that Blaine Cauthorne is a man in a great deal of pain who is about to do something very stupid, and that a kiss at four in the morning is not evidence of anything except a very bad night.

And he might have been right.

That's what I couldn't take. Not that he'd disagree. That he'd be correct. Because I had been running those six seconds through my head all night and I'd gotten two entirely different readings out of them.

Reading one: Blaine kissed me because his feelings for me never went away. Because it has been sitting under everything for two years, exactly where I left it.

Reading two: he kissed me goodbye.

That he'd had a long night and was raw all the way through, and he took one last look at the man he used to be married to and closed it. Filed it. Shut the drawer. And then went inside and slept, easily, for the first time in years.

Every single thing I know about Blaine supports the second one. That man does not leave loose ends. And I couldn't say one word of it to Lance, because saying it out loud would have made it examinable.

So I said, "All right. That's the unkind part."

"That was the unkind part." Lance took a breath. "Here's the other thing."

And he handed me the script.

THE QUIET ONE. An author I didn't recognize. Short, from the feel of it, which is always a good sign.

"I optioned it over a year ago with my own money. Debut novel. Nobody's heard of the author — she works at a library in Portland."

"What's it about?"

"A court stenographer." He was watching my hands, not my face. "Forties. He's been typing other people's testimony for a decade. He's very good at it and he's completely invisible, which he likes. And then he transcribes a case and recognizes something in it that nobody else in the room can recognize."

"And he has to say so."

"And he has to say so. In a proceeding where his entire professional value is that he's part of the furniture." Lance put both hands flat on the dance floor. "It's one room, mostly. There's no wardrobe. There is nothing anywhere in it for me to hide behind. There isn't one scene where somebody looks at my face because it's my face."

"Who's attached?"

"A director. A good one. Third feature, won something at Sundance, and she won't do it without a producer she trusts, because the last time she made something she got eaten alive by a financier." His jaw was tight. "So I've got a script, a director, and a lead. What I don't have is the money or the weight. Nobody is writing a check for a small film about a man nobody looks at, on the strength of the actor who wants to disappear into him."

"You've got more pull than you think."

"I've got heat. It isn't the same thing and you know it." He looked off toward the meadow. "I always get offered the man who saves the world, or the man whose wife is already dead when the picture starts. Both of those are fine. I've made an enormous amount of money being looked at."