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"What is it?"

And I told him. All of it. The lost years. The confiscated paperwork. The refusal to name them, and the fact that the refusal was itself a kind of holiness. I laid it out the way you lay out a scene for an actor, with the intention under each beat so he could play it instead of reciting it.

And I watched Billy's face while I did it. Everything frightened in it went quiet, and something else came up underneath — slow, and warm, and unmistakably like triumph. He didn't say anything for a while after I finished.

"That's very good," he finally said.

"It'll hold."

"It'll hold for years, Gregory. That's a book." He rubbed his face with both hands. "You've just handed me a past."

"It's a bridge. It gets you to Monday—"

"It doesn't get me to Monday. It gets me to forever." He put the phone face-down. "Because if I say that to her, then that's who I am. In every interview. At every retreat. Every time somebody in the front row stands up and says I was in something like that too, will you tell me about yours — and they will, Gregory, because that is the actual audience for a story like that. Hurt people."

I didn't say anything.

"I've been sitting back here," Billy said, "working out what I'd do when you came up with something. Because I knew you'd come up with something. That's the whole reason I've been terrified of you all week."

"You've been terrified of me?"

"You're the most frightening person I have ever met." He said it plainly. "You gave me the best week of my life, and I’ve known the entire time that you could take it back."

Down in the meadow somebody was testing a microphone. Check. Check.

"So," Billy said. "Here's what I've decided."

"Oh God, Billy."

"I'm going to go and tell her the truth."

"That's not—"

"Not the compliance woman. Rhoda." He put his shoes on, which somehow made it worse. "Before the wedding. Now."

I came up off the crate.

"You cannot do that!"

"There are people down there in chairs." He pointed.

"Which is exactly—"

"Yes." He stood up too. He was taller than me, which I had somehow never registered in five days. "There are people in those chairs who came here to celebrate love. Rhoda has held my face in her hands and cried. And Harold came and found me last night and asked whether I thought he had been a good employer to Esteban all these years. He asked me, Gregory. And I gave him a line."

"Billy—"

"And now their son is going to get married in front of me while I stand there in a costume." He was breathing hard. "I can't. That's all. And it isn't that I've grown a conscience — I want to be clear about that, I'd have taken the money and run on Tuesday. It's that I've had a week of people looking at me like I'm somebody, and I've found out I would rather be nobody again than lie to those two people one more time."

And that was the last minute in which any of this was fixable. Because I could have said all right. I could have said: let's do it together. After the ceremony. Tonight, when he's married and the guests have gone. You and me, in that kitchen, and I'll take every bit of the blame. He'd have said yes. I'm certain of it. Billy only wanted somebody to walk in there beside him. Instead I said the worst sentence of my life.

"If you do this," I said, "I'll say you did it alone."

Billy went still.

"What?"

"I'll say you approached me in Los Angeles." I heard it coming out of me. I want that noted — I heard it in real time, and I did not stop it. "That you presented yourself to me as a practitioner. That I believed you, and brought you here in good faith, and that you used me to get an introduction to a wellness company with millions of members." My voice was perfectly steady. "I'm Gregory Normand. Mabel's blood. I’ve known this family many years and Rhoda Cauthorne has called me her son in front of everybody she loves. You're a man who lives in a hatchback."