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I knew what was coming before she opened her mouth. I'd been waiting for it since the guest house, because Rhoda Cauthorne does not let go of things. She simply takes a long time getting round to them.

"Gregory, darling. What was the name?"

"What name?"

"The name Zephyr said." She had a stack of Blaine's return notes in her hand and she wasn't even looking at me, which was somehow worse. "In the guest house. He said a name, and I asked what it meant, and you told me he was tired."

"He was tired, Rhoda."

"Billy," she said.

The hall was very quiet. Somewhere in the library Lance said something and Blaine laughed.

"He said it was a name he used to answer to." She frowned down at the notes. "I've been turning it over. I think it must be something they do. Isn't it? A name from before. You come into the work and you leave the old one behind. Harold says that's Buddhism, but I don't believe Harold knows."

"Harold doesn't know."

"So it's that. Billy."

I stood in Harold Cauthorne's hallway, in his son's shirt, and looked at his wife holding a stack of apologies for a wedding I had destroyed.

"Yeah," I said. "That's the name."

Rhoda patted my arm and went into the library.

* * *

Here's the part I've thought about every day since.

Late afternoon. Everybody had scattered, and Blaine found me on the back steps looking at the meadow. The chairs were gone. The arch was gone. You could see where the rows had been in the flattened grass, and that was all.

He sat down next to me and didn't say anything for a while.

"Gregory." He wasn't looking at me. "There's something you're not telling me. You almost told me this morning and then you clammed up. And I have spent all day watching you be happier than I've seen you in years, and also watching you check the door every time somebody's phone goes off."

The meadow was quiet. There was nobody within fifty feet of us. Nothing rang. Nothing slammed. No truck, no telephone, no interruption of any kind.

I want that on the record more than anything else in this account.

Nothing stopped me. I had it lined up and ready to confess.

Zephyr is Billy Truman. He's an out-of-work actor out of a black box theater off Melrose. I paid him twenty thousand dollars to get me through your mother's front door, and tomorrow a woman named Bex is going to call him, and he is going to tell her a story I invented.

And I thought: Blaine will want nothing to do with me ever again. I'd spent two years without him and I'd had him for one magical night. I did the arithmetic and decided I would rather have Sunday.

"I'm frightened of how much I want this," I said, and felt my pulse go up.

Blaine was quiet a second.

Then he took my hand and held it in both of his on his knee.

"All right," he said. "Keep it to yourself. For now."

Chapter Twenty-Four

Blaine

I woke up before Gregory, and I let myself enjoy it.