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Fully formed. Beautiful. An idea that works for everybody. That is the only way any idea has ever arrived in my head in my entire life.

My great-great-grandmother got run out of this business over something she hadn't done, and the family response was ninety years of Mabel Normand anecdotes, because we would always rather have a good story than a true one. It's practically the family crest.

When I found out my marriage was in trouble I took Blaine to Portofino. Boats. A restaurant on the water. A hotel with a name people repeat back to you. The same month I stopped coming home — and he sat in the middle of all of it while everybody told him how lucky he was.

Including me.

And when he finally asked me to leave, I bought forty-two feet of teak and spent two years moving across an actual ocean, because as long as you're moving you never have to sit still. And as long as you never sit still, you never have to work out what was wrong.

Then I saw his face in a wedding announcement.

And what did I do? Sold the boat in a day. Cast a man. Invented a documentary. Built an entire week — a healer, a story, a schedule, a production — and drove it up a gravel driveway and parked it in front of a man I could have simply telephoned.

You could have called me.

That's what he said this morning. I have gone over it and over it and there is no answer, and there's no answer because he's right. Instead of dealing with a feeling like a normal person, I produce something. Elaborate, expensive, beautifully staged distractions, so that nobody has to look at how badly wrong I am.

And it isn't lying. I'd almost rather it were, because a liar can decide to stop. It's this: I have never once in my life shown anybody what I actually feel with nothing built around it. I don't know how. Which leaves me here, in the dark, wondering what I'm going to do next.

Blaine doesn't want any more productions. He never wanted them. Blaine stood in a meadow in front of everybody he knows and said he'd built a life in which nobody could get close enough to hurt him, and I'm the one who did that to him.

You're the one who'd have to risk something.

So how does a man like that love a man like me? How could he? I can't sit still with one single feeling for the length of a sentence. I have never done it in my life.

Which raises the question.

If everything I’ve ever built has cost Blaine something, then what have I got left to give him?

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Blaine

I gave up on sleeping around two in the morning.

I'd been lying in my childhood bed listening to the house tick and settle — the same room where I studied for the bar with a wet towel jammed under the door so my mother wouldn't smell the cigarettes I'd swiped out of her handbag. Mom has never worked out that I knew where she kept them. She has also never worked out that anybody knows she smokes in the first place.

Thank God the habit didn't stick.

My suitcase was packed and standing against the wall. I'd packed it that afternoon and hadn't taken it anywhere. So I went down to the kitchen and put the kettle on.

The house was dark except for the little light over the stove that has been on every night of my life. I got a mug down and stood there in my father's old cardigan waiting for the water to boil, looking at the guest house through the window over the sink. Down at the bottom of the lawn with one light on in it.

Gregory was still there.

"You'll want the good tea."

I didn't jump, because my mother has been doing that to me for years and I stopped jumping when I was nine.

"Mother."

"The good tea's behind the flour." She came in barefoot in a robe with her grey hair down. "Your father's got his own secret stash."

"It's the same tea."

"It is not the same tea, darling."

She got the tin out from behind the flour and made both cups herself.