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"Gregory, that woman toasted you at her son's rehearsal dinner." He took a long drink of something. "In front of the groom. Who then hugged her."

"I'm aware." My face was burning.

"I have been to a great many rehearsal dinners. That is the strangest one I’ve ever attended, and I once watched a man propose to a groomsman at one."

We stood there a moment.

"Did you read it?"

"Yes."

Lance went very still. "And?"

"It's the best thing I've read in years”. My voice came out flat, the way it does when I'm holding something. "The courtroom sequence in the middle. Where he starts typing and then doesn't. Where the hands freeze.”

"Yes."

"Lance, the hands stopping is the whole film. That's the poster. It’s the thirty seconds they play when they announce that you've won."

"Don't say that unless—"

"I'm not being nice to you." I turned and looked at him. "It will be hard to finance and everyone will call it a small film and every one of them will be wrong. The director is going to want a longer schedule than anybody wants to pay for, and she should get it."

Lance Hayworth put both hands over his mouth.

"Are you saying yes?"

And here is the thing about me that I would like, eventually, to stop being true.

I had the word right there. It weighed nothing. My oldest friend was standing at the edge of a tent with both hands over his mouth waiting for one syllable, and I had read the whole thing the night before and known by page four that I wanted to make it.

"I'm saying it's good," I said.

His hands came down.

"Right," he said.

"Lance—"

"No, that's — right. That's fine." He was already reassembling. It takes him about a second, and it is the most professional thing about him and the saddest. "That's more than I had this morning."

"I need to get through tomorrow."

"Sure."

"That's not an excuse, I actually need—"

"Gregory." He stopped me with two fingers on my forearm. Very gently. "I know you need to get through tomorrow. I've watched you all week." A breath. "But you should know I'm going to make that film with somebody. It's going to happen inside a year. And I would rather it was made with you."

Then he kissed my cheek and went to find a cocktail.

* * *

The tent emptied out.

Everybody drifted off, and I ended up in the dark with a glass of wine I hadn't finished, watching Benny's people strip the tables.

One of them clocked me, pulled a corkscrew out of her apron, opened a bottle somebody had abandoned, and moved on down the table without breaking stride.