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Guests started arriving at two.

They came up that punitive gravel in a slow line and got out of their cars looking precisely the way people look at a Marin wedding — moneyed, excellently dressed, faintly stunned by the trees — and Benny's people moved them efficiently down toward the meadow.

I stood on the terrace with a glass of wine, ignoring the dread going around and around in my stomach.

Then Bex found me.

"Gregory! Hi. Sorry." Phone in one hand, heels in the other, which is never a good sign in a professional. "Do you have one second? It's about Zephyr."

"I'm not his—"

"No, I know what you said. It's a compliance thing and it's so boring, I'm sorry." She pulled something up on the phone. "So Legal wants a W-9 and a signed likeness release before we can put him in front of a camera Monday. Standard. Except we can't do a W-9 without a legal name, and the name he's given us doesn't come back to anything. Which happens! People have stage names. But when I asked him for the legal one he told me—" she looked up "—that a name is a room you agree to stand in."

"That sounds like him."

"It's beautiful," said Bex, "and Legal is going to eat me alive."

"So don't take it to Legal."

"I have to take it to Legal, it's a Monday launch." She was already typing. "So I ran a background check. Normal diligence, I'd do it for anybody. And Gregory—" She stopped typing.

"Yes?"

"There's nothing." She looked genuinely distressed, and I want to be clear that it was not distress about being conned. It was distress about a Monday launch. "No practitioner registry, no press, no interviews, no photographs, no clients. Nothing. Which honestly at first I thought was incredible, because that's the entire authenticity play, right? A man with no footprint."

"Right."

"But then one of the Bodhis found a Chad Ferrante."

I did not move one muscle in my face.

"Who?"

"Improv guy. LA. There's an old headshot, and a podcast appearance from years back, and Gregory—" She turned the phone around. "That's him. That's obviously him."

It was obviously him.

Younger. Heavier. Laughing at something off camera. Under a stage name a manager had given him, and which he had told me about on the first day, standing in a black box theater holding the sheet like an offering.

"Huh," I said.

"Right?"

"That's very strange."

"It's so strange." She took the phone back. "Anyway, I need to talk to him before the ceremony, because if there's an explanation I need it in an email by tonight. And if there isn't—" she made a small horrified face "—then I have to tell Steven, at his own wedding, that the guru he pitched to the entire leadership team is an improv actor from the Valley. Gregory, I would genuinely rather die than ruin his day."

I want to describe what happened next precisely, because everything afterward came out of it.

I had two options.

The first was to tell her the truth. Right there, on the terrace, before the ceremony. I hired him, Bex. It's my fault. There's no documentary. Tell Steven and I'll take all of the blame.

And Bex would have come apart. Steven would have found out in a tent an hour before his wedding. Rhoda and Harold would have learned that every word out of me since the Suburban came up their drive had been a lie, and I could not bear it. It would have been the single worst thing I have ever done to people who love me.

The second option was to produce something.

And I have to tell you: it was not a decision. That's what I need understood. It was not a moment of weakness in which I weighed two roads and took the wrong one.