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"Did you mean it?" He glanced up. "Or was that a performance as well?"

"I said it because I could see you were in pain and I meant every word of it. And I used it. Both of those are true."

Harold nodded slowly.

"At the rehearsal dinner," he said, "I stood up in front of everybody and said I'd spent decades calling Esteban family, and that the word costs me nothing to say and means he can't tell me no." He picked up his coffee, looked at it, and put it down again. "It turns out that while I was working that out in my head and my heart, there was a man I call family sitting at my table doing the same thing to me."

"I know."

"That isn't an accusation, Gregory. It's arithmetic."

Blaine was by the door with his arms folded.

"So that's all of it," he said. "That's everything. I wanted the two of you to hear it from Gregory, in this room, before somebody from Ascendant telephoned to announce that Zephyr was a fake."

"Thank you, Sol," said Rhoda.

"You don't have to do anything about it today, Mother."

"No," said Rhoda. "I rather think I do."

And she got up, and came around the island, and took my face in both her hands.

I want to be accurate about what happened next, because I’ve gone over it more than anything else in this account and I still don't entirely believe I was in the room for it.

"You're forgiven," said Rhoda Cauthorne.

I couldn't say anything at all.

"Mother."

"Don't." She didn't let go of my face. "I have had two days of this house being full of people explaining to me what things mean, and I have decided to do it myself for once."

"He hired a man to defraud you—"

"He hired a man because he was too frightened to knock on my front door." Her eyes were streaming and her hands were perfectly steady. "Do you know what I keep coming back to? The stupidity of it. Gregory sold his boat and paid a man out of his own pocket in order to knock on our front door. Yes, it is the most idiotic thing I have ever heard of in my life, and there was not one penny in it for him. There never was."

"That doesn't make it—"

"Be quiet, Blaine." She was looking at me, not at her son. "I am sixty-eight years old and I have been lied to by a great many people, darling, and every last one of them wanted something. Gregory came here because he loves you and couldn't say it with words."

She put a hand on my shoulder for a moment. Then she let go of me and went and stood beside her husband.

"Dad," said Blaine. "Please."

Harold turned his coffee around on the counter.

“In my thirties,” he said, "I made an obscene amount of money, and it frightened me so badly that I’ve spent the rest of my life building a man who never did it. Back then I hated rich people. I thought they were stuck-up assholes."

Nobody moved.

"That's all this is." He gestured vaguely at the kitchen, the house, the meadow, the four-hundred-year-old trees. "I built an entire man so I would never have to feel what I actually felt about any of it. It took Esteban getting hurt in my own pond for me to notice."

He looked up at me.

"You built a healer," Harold said. "I built me. Same trade, Gregory. You simply did yours faster, and you did it out loud, where people could get hit by it."

"Harold, that's not—"