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"He must be," she agreed instantly. "Oh, I feel so — abandoned."

I looked at the door he'd gone through and wished I had walked out of it beside him. Because that was the moment. Every person I’d lied to was standing in one room. The wedding was already in pieces, so there was nothing left to protect. And Billy had just handed me an exit line and gone out to a hired car.

A handful of sentences and it would have been finished.

Zephyr isn't a healer. He's an out-of-work actor named Billy Truman and I hired him in Los Angeles. There's no documentary. There has never been a documentary. I did every bit of it so that I could be in this house this week.

I had it. Fully formed, right there behind my teeth.

And I lost my nerve.

Blaine looked up at me from the chair. He'd been staring at the floor since he sat down. His eyes were red and his face was completely open, in a way I have seen perhaps a handful of times over the years.

"Gregory."

"Yes."

"I'm glad you're here."

My mouth opened and nothing came out of it.

* * *

Harold went up to the house at some point and came back with two bottles of something and a tray of food. He put it on the little table, said "there — that's ours," and sat on the floor with his back against the bed like a man half his age.

Rhoda sat on the arm of Blaine's chair with her hand in his hair.

Lance took the window seat and pulled his knees up, in trousers I’m certain Ines would have had opinions about.

Benny stood in the doorway with the iPad a while, taking messages through the earpiece. Then at some point he sat down, and put the iPad face-down on the floor.

Nobody talked about the wedding.

I want that understood, because it is the strangest thing about that evening. There we all were in a small room after the largest social catastrophe any of us had ever been part of, and we talked about a broken gate at the bottom of the property, and whether Lance ought to go to Sundance this year.

Blaine sat in that chair in a wedding suit with his mother's hand in his hair and didn't say much. Once — about halfway through — he laughed at something, a strange cracked noise, and swiped at his eyes.

We all looked away.

* * *

They started drifting up to the house once we could hear cars on the gravel.

Harold first, because Rhoda sent him to confirm that Steven had actually left and that nobody from Ascendant was still on the property. Then Rhoda, to see what had become of her house. Then Lance, walking Benny up, because Benny had staff to deal with.

Which left the two of us.

I want to be extremely clear about the next part, because I have had a long time to think about what it cost. Blaine was still in the chair. I was on the end of the bed. There was a bottle on the little table with not much left in it and neither of us had touched it in a while.

"You should get out of that suit," I said.

"I know."

"Do you need—"

"It fastens at the back." He was looking at his own hands. "There's no zip and there aren't any buttons. There's a column of hooks running from the base of my neck down to about the middle of my spine, under a placket, and it took Ines and two assistants to do them up." He exhaled. "I can reach four of them. If I ask my mother she'll cry. If I ask Lance he'll say something strange."

The room was very quiet.