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"That's not—"

"Don't produce this." He was already walking toward the exit. "Whatever it turns out to be. Be here for it and let it happen. You don't have to produce everything, Gregory."

And he walked out of the tent and took my heart with him.

Chapter Twenty-Two

Blaine

I made it as far as the bed.

That isn't a figure of speech. I walked up the hill, in through the kitchen door, up the back stairs, and lay down on top of the covers in the room I have slept in since I was nine years old. I was still wearing Gregory's jeans, with frosting in my hair.

And then I argued with myself.

I want to be accurate about this, because I’ve built an entire career on the quality of my arguments, and what I constructed on that bedspread was the finest brief of my professional life against going back down that hill.

You called off your wedding this afternoon.

True.

Steven is sitting in an apartment somewhere by himself, and there is no happy ending in this for him, and there never will be, at least not with you.

Also true. Unanswerable. I sat up in the dark and answered it anyway: Steven is not coming back, and it is highly doubtful he will ever forgive me.

And: you have known Gregory Normand has hurt you worse than anybody alive over the course of many years.

That one I could not get around. So I stopped trying, which is not a thing I normally do.

I’ve always done everything correctly. My entire life. Excellent grades, the right schools, a corner office. And when my marriage ended I did not fall apart — I optimized. I found a kind man I couldn’t possibly be hurt by and built an entire future out of him.

And this afternoon I stood in a meadow in front of every person I know and blew it up. The day was already ruined.

Suddenly, I thought: let it be ruined properly. Let one day of my life be entirely and recklessly mine. Nobody gets to grade this one. There is no version of tomorrow in which anybody thinks well of me anyway.

I have never in my life had a thought like that. For a minute or so I sat in silence. Was I even capable of being reckless? Then I put my shoes back on.

* * *

I stopped in the kitchen and took a bottle of my father's ludicrously expensive wine off the counter.

Then I put it back. I wasn’t giving myself any excuses.

The path down is gravel and I’ve never once been so aware of the noise it makes. The night was silent, which meant the musicians had gone. The tent glowed gold at the bottom of the hill with all those candles still going, burned down to almost nothing.

I went in, and Gregory was sitting at the head table.

Not clearing or stacking plates. Just sitting in a chair with the wreckage of a reception that never happened surrounding him. There was buttercream in his hair, and he was doing absolutely nothing.

"I heard the gravel," he mumbled, without turning around.

"You didn't get up."

"No."

"Why not?"

"Because I've spent this entire week making things happen." Gregory turned his head. "And I decided I wasn't going to make this one happen."