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It cost more than my first year at Stanford. On me it looks like a very expensive pair of pajamas a monk might be buried in.

That is the point. My mother has spent forty years and an obscene fortune perfecting the art of appearing to have renounced obscene fortunes, and that suit is the thesis of her life's work. I am to be married in it whether it suits me or not, because it has never once occurred to her that the wedding is mine.

"Sunday," I said. "Fine."

"Don't say fine like that, Blaine Solstice. You always say fine like a man signing a contract.” She paused. Then she used the voice she saves for gossip.

"Darling. You will never in a thousand years guess the delicious thing that's happened. Lance Hayworth is going to be your best man. An actual movie star at our wedding! Can you imagine?" Mother sighed.

Our wedding. I let it go.

"I know, Mother. Lance and I arranged it weeks ago."

"Well, his assistant rang to confirm." A small wounded pause. "A young man named Geoffrey. Or Gregory. Very brisk. I suppose that's how they all are now, the famous ones. They have people to do the confirming."

I set the pen down parallel to the pad.

My mother adored my ex-husband. She adored him the way she adores weather systems and expensive salt, and she has never once said his name to me by accident.

"I didn't mind. Truly," she went on. "It's only that when I was young, if you were coming to a wedding you telephoned yourself."

"Times change."

"They do. They do." Another long sigh, performing serenity over a slight she had clearly been nursing since lunch. "Anyway. It's marvelous. A movie star. The Pruitts will lose their minds."

And there it was. The entire apparatus of my mother in one sentence. Forty years of renounced ego and renounced fortune, of tofu and loving-kindness and silent weeks in the pavilion, dissolving on contact with the news that a famous person has agreed to stand near her in photographs.

I felt the old mortification. I’ve been feeling it since I was nine. And underneath it, again — faint, unaccountable, coming from a direction the floor plan did not allow for — the draft.

"Sunday, Mother," I said. "I'll be there at two."

I hung up before she could tell me what the Pruitts would say.

Chapter Three

Gregory

You can sell a boat in a day if you don't care what you get for it. I didn't, so I did.

A broker named Chip with a sunburn and cheap sunglasses took The Second Take off my hands for roughly sixty cents on the dollar. I signed the papers on the hood of his truck and felt nothing about it, which alarmed me less than it should have. For two years I'd lived on that boat. Two years of waking to the specific slap of water on teak, of coffee going cold in my hand while I watched a horizon do the one thing horizons do, which is remain a horizon. I sold it in four hours and walked up the dock without looking back.

The flight from Kona to LAX is six hours. I spent the first two not thinking about Blaine, with tremendous discipline and at great cost, the way you don't think about an aching tooth.

Somewhere over the water the feeling caught up with me, exactly as I'd known it would. It found me in 2A with a glass of something amber I had not asked the flight attendant to keep refreshing but which she kept refreshing anyway, God bless the woman. The feeling sat down in 2B, where nobody was sitting, and it stayed there the rest of the way. My grief. My oldest traveling companion. Buckled in beside me like we'd booked the flight together.

I took out the magazine page.

I'd smoothed it against my thigh maybe forty times by then and it was going soft at the creases. Blaine's face. Pleased to announce. I read the date and the place again, though I could have drawn you a map of the place from memory — the redwoods, the incense, the three hundred yards of gravel Harold refuses to pave because asphalt is a kind of violence against the land.

Bless his eleven-million-dollar hippie heart.

That's what the main house cost, by the way. Eleven million dollars, to look like a barn.

I was married in the meadow below that house.

I want to be precise about the geography of my own ruin. Blaine was going to marry Steven Ellis Bland on the exact patch of grass where he married me.

That's when I started to laugh, quietly, in 2A, which gets you one look from the man in 2C and no more than one, because everybody on a plane has decided in advance that they will not be getting involved.Because it was funny. That's the other thing nobody tells you about heartbreak — that at the right altitude it is hysterically funny. The audacity. The production value. My ex-husband had mounted an entire second wedding on the standing set of the first one, recast the lead, and struck none of the original scenery. If I'd pitched that to a studio they'd have passed. Nobody remarries in the same meadow, Gregory. It's too on the nose. Audiences won't buy it.