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"Talk to him."

"Sorry?"

"Talk to him directly. I'm not his anything." I stood and went to the door. "He doesn't need me."

"Oh — Blaine's up, by the way." Steven was still typing. "Finally. I turned his alarm off. He was destroyed. Slept till almost noon."

I stopped in the doorway.

"Did he," I said.

"Like a rock." Steven laughed at his own screen, delighted. "I've never seen him sleep like that in my life."

Slept till almost noon. Like a rock.

You don't sleep like that if you've closed the door on us.

Chapter Fifteen

Blaine

The Ascendant leadership team arrived in four white Sprinter vans.

I’d asked Steven how many people were coming and he had said the leadership team. I asked how many that was and he said the entire leadership team, and I accepted that answer, because I was standing on a low round box being pinned into hemp silk at the time and had other matters to deal with.

Nineteen people got out of those vans. I counted, because counting is what I do instead of screaming. Nineteen, and a quantity of equipment that would not have embarrassed a small documentary unit. Ring lights. Reflectors. Two collapsible objects whose function I never established. A rolling case with foam cut to hold what turned out to be a single ceramic bowl.

And every one of them was delighted.

"Oh my God," said a woman in organic cream cotton , standing on my parents' gravel with both hands pressed to her chest. "Steven. The light here is magnificent."

"I know, Bodhi. I've been telling everyone."

There was, I would learn, a second Bodhi.

I had one job, which I assigned to myself: remain in the vicinity, be pleasant, prevent nothing. You cannot stop a group of enthusiastic people. You can only stand near them and reduce the damage, the way you stand near a toddler holding a full cup of juice.

I sat on the terrace with coffee and a legal pad on which I had written, in my own handwriting, in ink:

Do not engage. Let it happen. The wedding is tomorrow. Let Steven enjoy himself.

Within the first hour the terrace furniture had been moved.

I don't mean adjusted. I mean my mother's teak dining set — which weighs roughly what a car weighs and which has occupied the same six feet of that terrace since I was in high school — was walked ten feet to the left by six people in matching athletic wear, so the morning light would fall across it more generously.

"Blaine!" One of them waved. "Do you know if this table is, like, precious?"

"It's my mother's."

"Right, but is it precious?"

"It's teak."

"Perfect. So we're just going to bring it into the light? Because right now it's kind of fighting us." He smiled at me with tremendous warmth. "Would you mind grabbing that end?"

And here is the item I want entered into the record.

I grabbed that end.