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Lance picked up the bottle and the glasses. At the door he stopped.

"You'll tell me in the morning what that call was about, right?"

"Probably not."

"Fine," said Lance. "I'll simply be extremely curious until you do."

* * *

After he was gone, I sat with the phone in my hand for about ten minutes before I found the number.

Billy answered on the fourth ring.

"Gregory." Not a question. Not surprised.

"Billy. I need to say something and I need to get all the way through it."

"Okay."

"On Saturday, behind the catering tent, you told me you were going up to that house to tell Harold and Rhoda the truth. And I stopped you." My voice was doing something and I let it do it. "I told you that if you did it, I'd say you'd done it alone. That you'd come to me in Los Angeles pretending to be a practitioner and used me to get to Ascendant. And I said it knowing they'd believe me over you."

The line was quiet.

"That's the worst thing I’ve ever done to another person," I said. "It wasn't a mistake. I knew exactly what I was doing while I did it. And I'm sorry."

"Right," said Billy. "Well. Don't worry about it."

"Billy—"

"No, honestly." I heard him moving around, the hollow sound of an empty room. "I've thought about this a lot, actually, and I'd like to be clear. You paid me twenty thousand dollars. That's more than I have made as an actor in any single year of my adult life, and I'm forty-three. My sister's stopped threatening me. I'm not sleeping in a hatchback."

"That doesn't cancel—"

"It doesn't cancel anything. You did a rotten thing to me and I was frightened of you for about six hours." He laughed, and there was nothing mean in it. "But I'd do the week again for the money. It's changed my life."

I didn't know what to say to that.

"Anyway," said Billy.

"Anyway."

And then there was a pause of a very particular length. I have had that pause in every room I have ever worked in.

"So — no pressure at all, obviously, and I know it's completely the wrong moment." His voice was working very hard at being casual. "But if you're ever casting anything. Even something tiny. I'm quite good, Gregory. You said so yourself."

"I did say that."

"You did."

"Take care of yourself, Billy."

"You too," he said. "Get some sleep, you sound wrecked."

And he hung up first, which I hadn't expected.

I sat there with the phone in my hand and realized he'd be perfect for a part in Lance's film.

There's a bailiff in The Quiet One, in the courtroom sequence. Three lines, and he stands at the back of the frame for the entire middle of the picture. Billy could do it standing on his head.