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Then I went down to the guest house, because there was nowhere else for me to be. I sat on the edge of the bed with my shoes still on and stared at a wall. I want to be honest about what I felt, and the answer is that I felt like I'd been hit in the chest.

Not joy. I keep going back over it looking for joy, because it would make me a simpler man to explain. Blaine had called it off. Everything I crossed an ocean for had just happened, and I sat in a cottage feeling as though somebody had reached in and taken something out of me.

Because of what Blaine had said.

I have been pleasant to you. I never asked you a question. I made absolutely certain I never learned enough about you to be hurt.

I’d spent two years after the divorce telling myself the story of my marriage, and in that story I’m the one who did the damage. Which is true. I left by inches, over and over. I chose the work over Blaine every time. A script would arrive that I thought was a masterpiece, and it would swallow me — and none of it ever shot in Los Angeles, because nothing shoots in Los Angeles anymore. Prague. Auckland. A coastline in Malta. And I'd come home cheerful at the end of it and start looking, without ever admitting I was looking, for the next reason to leave.

Then I stood in a meadow and listened to my ex-husband explain to everybody he knows that after I'd gone, he built a life engineered so that nobody could ever do that to him again.

I did that to Blaine.

I took a man who used to sit up with me at one in the morning laughing about nothing, and turned him into a man who never asked his fiancé a single question. There is no version of that I get to feel good about.

* * *

Billy came in a while later.

He'd taken the linen outfit off. That was the first thing. Jeans and a T-shirt, hair flat, and for the first time since a black box theater off Melrose he looked entirely like Billy Truman.

He had a bag over his shoulder.

"Right," he said. "So I suppose this is goodbye."

"Billy, I…”

"I've called a car. It'll be here shortly." He set the bag down by the door. "It's a very long way to a train and I'd rather not do it in that costume."

"You don't have to go tonight."

"I do, though."

And he said it without a trace of anger in it, which was the worst part. If he'd been furious I could have worked with furious.

"On Monday," he said, "the talent woman from Ascendant is going to call me, and I'm going to tell her the story you gave me on that terrace. Because I need the money, and because you were right about all of it." He shrugged. "I want you to know I'm going to do it. It's the only offer I have."

"Billy—"

"But I'm not going to sit up in that house and bless people tonight." He picked at a thread on his shirt. "There's a man up there who canceled his wedding this afternoon. If I go up to that house, Rhoda Cauthorne is going to ask me what it means." He glanced up. "And I'll have an answer. That's the problem, Gregory. I'll have a truthful one."

Then somebody knocked. Two soft taps, and the door opened before either of us had moved. Harold came in with his arm around his son.

Blaine was still in the bizarre wedding suit.

That's what I couldn't get past. Still in it — all that pale silk, dragging over a flagstone floor. No shoes. Rhoda came in behind them. Behind Rhoda, Lance with his jacket over his arm. Behind Lance, Benny with the iPad.

"Sit him down," said Rhoda.

"I'm fine, Mother."

"Sit down, darling."

Blaine sat in the good chair. Harold stood beside it with a hand on the back of it and gave me a nod with a great deal of thank you for existing in this room in it.

"Steven's packing," he said. "So we've come down here."

"Of course."