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"Sure, Billy. Your name can be Zephyr."

"Zephyr Aeolian."

"That's — that's a bit much, that's like being a priest named Father Church."

"Zephyr Amaranth Aeolian," said Billy, or Zephyr, the trapdoor swinging wide open again. And I understood, with a small cold drop in my stomach, that I had not hired an actor who would play a character. I’d hired a character who had been waiting his entire ramen-eating life for somebody to finally, finally let him out.

"He isn't a healer," Zephyr said dreamily, gazing into the middle distance where his backstory was already arriving by the truckload. "Healer is a word for people who think something is broken. He's a somatic alignment and elemental stillness guide."

I wrote that down. God help me, I wrote it down verbatim.

"And he comes from a lineage. The teaching passes mouth to ear only. His mother was a — no. His mother was found. On a mountain. As an infant. By monks—"

"Billy."

"—who knew immediately—"

"Billy. We'll build the backstory in the car." I stood, gathering the legal pad, on which I had now written, beneath Billy — God help me — yes. "My driver Martin is outside in the black Suburban. Go get in it. Do not tell him your mother was found on a mountain."

"Should I tell him about the hip grief?"

"Absolutely not."

He gathered up his headshot and floated toward the door, and at the threshold he turned, and for a moment he was just Billy again. Plain. Stunned. Grateful. A man who lived in a hatchback and had been handed six months of rent for one week of the only thing he had ever been any good at.

Lying.

"Hey." Billy turned to me and quietly said, "Thank you. Really. Whatever this is. Nobody's said yes to me in a long time."

And I felt it then — the first hairline crack in the plan — though I misfiled it at the time as something else entirely. I took the small answering ache in my chest for sympathy, when what it actually was, was recognition.

Because I know a little something about being a man who produces the version of the moment everyone was hoping for. I know about handing people the grand thing instead of the true thing and calling it generosity. I had, after all, married a man and then spent six years staging him spectacular productions in place of the one small ordinary thing he actually wanted, which was for me to simply, occasionally, stay in the room with him.

But that thought, like the good ones always do, didn't land anywhere.

"Get in the car, Zephyr."

Chapter Five

Blaine

The driveway is still gravel.

My father won't pave it. Asphalt, he says, is a kind of violence against the land. So instead we have three hundred yards of stone trucked in by the ton from a quarry in Sonoma and raked every week by a man named Esteban, whom my parents describe as part of the family and pay like staff.

I felt every rock of it through the tires.

I’m convinced my father engineered that driveway to be exactly uncomfortable enough that guests arrive a little humbled and ready to be grateful. It is the most sophisticated thing he’s ever done and he did it entirely by accident. I've never told him, because he'd stop.

I did not look at the meadow.

The long green shoulder of land that runs down to the tree line. The best acre in Marin county. The one my mother calls the cathedral, because the redwoods stand around it like columns and in the late afternoon the light comes down through them in bars of gold you feel you could lean against.

It’s where I got married once before.

And on Saturday — according to the planner, and the eighty thousand dollars already committed to a company that erects temporary structures for people who own permanent ones — it is where I will get married again.

So I looked at the tree line. Then the house. Then at my own hands.