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"Oh, Blaine." He sat down on the steps, uninvited, six feet away, which was the closest either of us had been to the other in daylight since the kiss. "Two Bodhis."

"A woman named Bex runs Talent Partnerships."

"Of course she does."

"They asked my father whether the meadow was shoppable."

"They did not!” Gregory giggled.

"Dad ran into the kitchen. Actually ran. It is the fastest I’ve seen that man move since the tech crash." I heard how easy my own voice had gone and I did not stop it. "He wanted to know whether a person could buy the trees."

"Can they?"

"I have no idea. I’ve practiced law for fourteen years and I could not tell you." I put a hand over my eyes. "They moved my mother's table, Gregory. It weighs as much as a car. There are six of them in there right now taking notes on a man who—"

And I stopped.

Because I’d been about to say on a man who doesn't exist, and we both heard the shape of that sentence arrive and stop. The terrace went quiet in a way it had not been quiet a moment before.

Gregory did not look at me.

"On a man who what?" he finally asked.

There it was. The door, held open.

All I had to do was say it. On a man you hired. One sentence, and the whole thing comes down — the con, the week, the wedding, all of it, in the generous light with a wrongly positioned table between us.

"On a man who has clearly never done an honest day's work as a guru in his life," I stated.

Gregory let out a breath.

"No," he agreed. "Clearly not."

And we sat there, the two of us, not looking at each other, for about a minute.

I want the record to show it was the best minute I’ve had in two years.

Then Benny Longworth came around the corner of the house at a dead clip with his iPad and said, "Blaine. Your rehearsal dinner is in five hours and there are nineteen unaccounted-for people on my property."

"They're not on your property."

"Everything is my property until this wedding is in the can." He stopped. Looked at Gregory. Then at me. Then at the six feet of terrace between us. "Mr. Normand."

"Benny."

"You've been very helpful this week." He turned back to me. "I need forty minutes. Now."

Chapter Sixteen

Gregory

The rehearsal dinner was in the smaller tent, and it was the loveliest thing I have ever helped ruin.

I'd like to take credit for it, but I can't. That one was Benny's start to finish, and if I hadn't spent the entire week competing with the man I'd have told him so out loud. Long tables under canvas. Hurricane lamps down the middle. Not one flower arrangement tall enough to stop anybody talking across it, which is a thing you only know to do if you have watched a few dozen of these go wrong.

The Ascendant people were gone. All of them, every van, at Benny's polite and immovable insistence, back to a hotel in Sausalito to return in the morning.

So it was just us.