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The microphone went check again, down the hill.

Billy looked at me a long moment. "Yes," he said quietly. "They'd believe you."

"Billy—"

"They'd believe you completely." He nodded a few times, slowly, the way people do when they're swallowing something. "You know, I've spent all week trying to work out who you actually are. There's the man who spent a fortune getting somebody out of a hatchback. And there's the man who did it because he needed a prop." He picked his phone up. "And I've decided it doesn't matter. Because you were always going to do this to me."

"That's not what I—"

"Mr. Normand."

And there it was. Mr. Normand. What he called me in a black box theater off Melrose when he was still hoping.

"It's fine. I'm going to go stand at the back and watch a wedding. And on Monday I'll take the story you built me, because you're right. I'm a man who lived in a car, and I am not going back."

He put the phone in his pocket, walked past me out into the sun, and went down toward the meadow.

* * *

I stood behind that catering tent a while.

I want to describe what happened in my chest, and I've been putting it off for pages, and the honest answer is that nothing did. Nothing happened. I stood in the shade beside a crate of glassware and listened to a string trio start up down the hill, and felt precisely nothing at all, the way you don't feel a cut for the first few seconds.

And then a thought arrived, fully formed, and I want it written down exactly as it came.

It held. Billy isn't going to say anything. You've got until Monday.

That's what my mind produced. Standing there, in a navy suit I'd bought because of something my ex-husband once said in a hotel room in Cannes.

The lie held.

I have been telling this story as though the terrible thing that happened to me that weekend was that Blaine Cauthorne married somebody else. That was not the terrible thing.

The terrible thing was standing behind a catering tent in Marin on a Saturday afternoon, with a string trio warming up and a meadow filling with people in the sun, understanding with total clarity that I had just done the worst thing I have ever done to another human being — and that my first thought about it was good, situation contained.

That is who I had become.

Chapter Nineteen

Blaine

They got me into the suit at two.

That isn't vanity, it's construction — hand-loomed hemp silk doesn't have a lining, it has a system. Ines stood behind me doing something at the back of my collar while an assistant held the trouser hem off the floor. My mother sat on the bed and cried quietly.

"Mother. Please."

"I'm not saying anything."

"You're making a sad sound."

"It's a happy sound, sweetheart. I swear."

"It doesn't sound happy."

"Blaine, if you're going to litigate my sounds—" She blew her nose and stood. "Turn around. Let me look at you."

I turned around.