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"Hi. Hello. I'm — do you want the name on the sheet or my real name? Because the sheet says Chad Ferrante, but that's a stage name my old manager gave me and he's in prison now, so." He set the headshot down on the stool between us like an offering. "It's Billy. Billy Truman."

"Billy." I didn't look up from my legal pad, on which I was writing the word Billy and, beside it, the word maybe. "Tell me about your practice."

"My — sorry, my what?"

"Your practice. Your healing practice. You're a renowned energy practitioner. I’m a producer who has flown you in to a very exclusive event, and I've just asked you what you do." I clicked the pen. "Go."

And here is the moment I have replayed more times than I'm going to admit to, because it is the moment I should have seen the entire disaster coming, and instead all I saw was that he was perfect.

Billy Truman didn't ask a single question. He didn't ask what the event was, or who I was, or what the job paid. Something behind his eyes simply opened — the way a trapdoor opens — and a man who forty seconds earlier had been apologizing to a door rose up out of Billy like a genie out of a very tired lamp.

He closed his eyes. Pressed his palms together. Breathed in through his nose with the unhurried calm of a man who has nowhere else in the universe he needs to be.

"I don't have a practice," he said, in a voice like warm honey poured slowly. "A practice implies one is practicing for something. I have arrived."

He opened his eyes. They were doing something I can only describe as twinkling with terrible sincerity.

"The Mongolians have a word. There's no English for it. It means the grief that lives in the hip. I release it. I have released it from a Saudi prince and from two separate Rothschilds. I don't advertise. The ones who need me—"

And then he reached out, and before I could stop him, pressed two fingers very gently to the center of my sternum.

"—already know."

The theater went quiet. Somewhere behind me the booker exhaled.

I want a fact entered into the record here, since I'm the one keeping it. At that point I hadn’t been touched by another human being in months. Not a hand on a shoulder, not a hug at a dock, nothing. And a broke improv actor in a hopefully-ironed shirt put two fingers on my breastbone in a rented black box off Melrose and something in my chest went oh.

"The grief that lives in the hip.” I giggled.

"It's very common," he murmured, eyes never leaving mine.

"Billy. Where did that come from?"

"I don't know." And for one second the trapdoor swung shut and it was just Billy again, blinking, slightly frightened of himself. "It just — comes. It's always been a problem. My ex-wife said I lie the way other people breathe, but I don't experience it as lying, I experience it as—" he searched for it "—generosity? I give people the version of the moment they were hoping for." A beat. "Is that the job? Please tell me that's the job. I need this job. I owe my sister four grand and my hatchback is also where I sleep."

There it was. The person underneath, by accident, correct.

I should have heard the warning inside it. It just comes. It's always been a problem. I’ve spent my entire career managing talent, and the one iron law of managing talent is that the quality you hire a person for is the exact quality that will eventually destroy your production. The brilliant improviser cannot be made to stop improvising. That's the deal. You don't get one without the other. I know this. I have the scars, and some of them have names.

I hired him anyway. Because I was in a hurry, grieving, and because I badly wanted to believe this man could walk into that meadow and make Rhoda Cauthorne weep with joy.

He was going to give me exactly that. Plus about forty things I hadn’t ordered.

"You've got the job," I said. "Sit down. What's your rate?"

"My—" He sat too fast, the healer draining straight out of him now that money was on the table, leaving nothing but Billy, damp-eyed, gripping a 2009 headshot. "I don't — what's fair? Two hundred? Is two hundred insane? For the week? I did a dental software team-building thing in Torrance for one-fifty and they fed me, so if there's food I could—"

"Twenty thousand dollars. One week."

Billy Truman made the sound of a man struck gently in the stomach.

"And," I went on — because a con is only ever as strong as the story the con man tells himself, and I needed him bought all the way in — "you're not doing a reenactment. I'm going to be honest with you, because we'll be working closely and I'd rather you heard it from me. There's no documentary. You're going to a compound in Marin as my guest. A renowned healer I discovered. You are going to be so serene, and so foreign-in-a-way-they-can't-place, that our hosts fall completely in love with you. That buys me time under their roof to look at a man I used to be married to. That's the whole job. You align a rich hippie's chakras, nobody gets hurt, and you drive away in a car you don't have to sleep in."

I waited for the questions. The ethics. Some flicker of conscience.

Billy considered it for precisely as long as it took him to decide he loved it.

"Can my name be Zephyr?" he asked, with a faraway look.