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Then screen door opened at the top of the porch and the temperature of Northern California dropped about ten degrees.

I knew before I looked. You always know. Six years of marriage installs a sensor array that no divorce decommissions.

Blaine stood at the top of the steps. He had his phone in one hand, mid-errand, halfway through a sentence. "Mother, Benny needs the final count for—"

Then he stopped. All of him. The voice, the feet, and I would swear the blood in his veins.

Here's what I had been expecting, because I storyboarded this across an entire ocean. I'd prepared for fury. Fury I can work with — fury is engagement, fury means the account is still open. I'd prepared for tears, in the more flattering cuts of the scene. I had prepared for every temperature except the one I got.

Blaine looked at me the way you look at a contract you’ve already signed.

The shock lasted half a second. Then he put it somewhere deep and shut a door on it, and I watched him do it, because six years of marriage also teaches you where the doors are. No fury. No tears. His face simply — concluded. Reached a finding of fact. Then he came down the steps unhurried, kissed his mother's cheek, nodded to Harold, and said, in a voice you could have chilled wine with:

"Gregory. What a surprise."

"Blaine." My heart was doing the hummingbird thing. "Congratulations. Truly. I was just telling your mother—"

"Later."

He turned to Rhoda and smiled. A real smile, or a perfect print of one. Somewhere in the last two years I lost the ability to authenticate.

"Mother, put them in the guest house. Dinner's at seven, isn't it? Wonderful."

Then he turned back to me. Only to me. And he dropped the temperature of the sentence so that it arrived like a subpoena sliding under a door.

"Come inside and help me find the corkscrew."

He went into the house without waiting to see whether I'd follow.

Rhoda beamed. Harold beamed. Zephyr pressed his palms together and bowed to the entire tableau.

And I stood on the punitive gravel in the long gold light of the best acre in Marin, with one shoe full of rocks, and thought, with the last functioning part of my professional brain:

I’m in so much fucking trouble.

Chapter Seven

Blaine

I made it to the kitchen before my hands started.

Not shaking. I want to be precise. My hands do not shake. What they do is go very slightly wrong, so that setting a phone down on granite takes about a tenth of a second longer than it should. I put the phone face-down on the island and laid both palms flat on the butcher block. Then I counted my pulse, which is what I do instead of panicking.

A hundred and ten.

Composure is not the absence of feeling. It's the management of feeling, and like any management problem it is judged on exactly one metric. What gets out. Nothing gets out of me. I saw to that years ago, at considerable expense.

But I want the cost recorded, because a record that omits the damaging facts isn't a record.

When that screen door swung open and I saw my ex-husband standing on my parents' gravel — thinner, browner, hair shorter than he used to wear it, my mother's hands already cupped around his face like the prodigal had come home trailing myrrh — something in me came off its hinges and stayed off.

I kissed my mother and approved the guest house, because refusing would have been evidence. I said what a surprise in the voice I keep for opposing counsel who have flown three thousand miles to be intimidating.

Then I told Gregory to come help me find the corkscrew and walked into the house at exactly my normal speed. Ten seconds. That's what I gave myself.

I knew what he was doing before the screen door finished closing.

I'd been standing behind that screen for two full minutes with the florist in my ear, chasing a final guest count, watching the whole arrival through the mesh like a man watching dailies. I didn't hear what he told my mother. I only caught the end of it — her voice climbing into the register she saves for signs from the universe, and Gregory saying he would love nothing more.