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"That was my fault. Nobody in this company approaches Lance Hayworth again, about anything. If he comes into a room, you greet him and you go back to what you were doing." A breath, and I saw his eyes were wet. "And I'm going to go and apologize. It's going to be awful and I deserve it."

Then he went upstairs too.

I stood in my parents' great room holding a legal pad that said DO NOT ENGAGE, and I could not, for the life of me, work out who the villain was.

Every person in that room had behaved understandably. Bex was doing her job. Steven had been indiscreet in the way that ninety percent of human beings are indiscreet, and had then stood up in front of his entire team and eaten it, which is more than most people in my profession manage in a career. And Lance was right about every single thing.

There was no case. There was nothing awful to find.

There was only the fact, sitting in the middle of the floor like a dropped glass, that my oldest friend would rather be hunted by a pack of paparazzi than spend one more day in a house with the man I’m marrying.

* * *

I went out to the terrace, where the table was in the wrong place, sat down, put my head back, and shut my eyes.

A moment later somebody put something in my hand.

"Would you mind?"

I opened my eyes.

A young man from Ascendant whose name I never learned had handed me a ring light. He was already turning away, phone up, framing something in the middle distance.

"Just hold it about — yeah. Like that. That's amazing."

And I sat on my parents' terrace, at my mother's displaced table, holding a stranger's ring light at a forty-five-degree angle to a shrub.

That's when I started laughing.

Not out loud. But something came apart in the middle of my chest and shook there for about fifteen seconds. Tears filled my eyes, and the young man said "perfect, hold that, perfect" and took several photographs of a plant.

"Thanks so much." He took the light back. "You're a legend."

Then he was gone.

Gregory was standing at the bottom of the terrace steps, watching the entire thing. I don't know how long he had been there. He looked at me, then at the shrub, then at the space where the ring light had been, then back at me.

"Was that—"

"Don't."

"Blaine. Was that a ring light—"

"I said don't."

Gregory Normand put a hand flat over his face and laughed the way he used to laugh in our kitchen in Los Angeles. I sat at that table in the wrong light and did not tell him to stop.

That's the crime. I want it recorded properly.

I did not say one inappropriate word to my ex-husband. I didn’t touch him, and I made no reference of any kind to what happened in the driveway. I simply didn't tell him to stop laughing.

"How many of them are here?" he asked, once his laughter subsided.

"Nineteen."

"There are nineteen—"

"There are two women named Bodhi."