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So I had no story to disprove. I didn't need one.

But I had the strange man.

The linen outfit and the bowing. The way he walked past two of the wealthiest people in Northern California to pay his respects to a tree.

And before any of it — through the windshield, while my mother was still shrieking on the steps — Gregory had taken hold of that man's shoulder. Briefly. Warmly. Turned him and said something to his face and let go.

It's the specific proprietary touch of a man who has cast the perfect actor and is pleased with himself about it.

I’ve watched Gregory Normand do that for years. He did it to a cinematographer at our own rehearsal dinner. It is the one tell he doesn't know he has.

That so-called guru was hired. I'd lay money on it. Whatever explained him was a pretext. And the pretext was not aimed at my mother.

My ex-husband read the announcement somewhere out on that boat and came, two years too late, with a rented mystic and a plan in his pocket, to do the only thing he has ever known how to do about a feeling.

Produce it.

So I ran it as a legal case, because that is what I always do.

The claim. I walk back out onto that porch and announce that the healer is an actor and my ex-husband is running a confidence game on this family days before my wedding.

The evidence. One shoulder touch. Years of pattern recognition, admissible nowhere outside my own skull.

The damages. My mother, publicly humiliated, six weeks after the last time — the man who read her chakras over Zoom at eleven hundred dollars a session and turned out to be moving shady dietary supplements off the back of it. We’re not permitted to say his name in this house. My father's hope, which is the one soft thing in him I’ve never been willing to bruise. A hundred and forty guests. A rehearsal dinner. My fiancé's entire leadership team arriving Friday with their phones out, prepared to film all of it for millions of subscribers.

And the cost nobody else in the world would itemize: every person I know standing on that lawn watching me lose my composure over Gregory Normand. Eight years after I married him in that meadow. Two years after I signed the divorce papers. They would all see that he can still get a rise out of me.

Absolutely not.

If I expose him, Gregory matters. The only move was the one I’d already started playing on instinct out on the porch, which is to treat him as nothing. You don't fight nothing. You house it, you feed it, you let it get bored, and you send it home.

I had about ten seconds of peace with that.

Then the door swung open and he was standing in it, one hand on the frame, like he'd been given the mark and hit it.

"So," Gregory said. "Corkscrew."

"Third drawer next to the stove."

He didn't move toward the third drawer. He leaned in the doorway and looked at me instead — the full-beam version, the attention he used to aim at scripts and financiers and, for a while, at me.

I gave him back the flat stare I use on process servers.

The refrigerator hummed. Outside, my mother laughed at something the fraud said.

"Solstice—"

"No." I have never once needed to raise my voice. "You don't get to use that name. That was community property and I kept it. Blaine is fine. Mr. Cauthorne if you're feeling ambitious."

He took it. I watched him take it — watched it go into whatever ledger he keeps and watched him recalculate, visibly, the way he always has.

"Blaine. All right." He straightened off the frame. "I need you to know I didn't come here to wreck anything. I'm working. I'm producing a documentary. My first. About Zephyr."

Zephyr. Of course. As though Gregory Normand had ever in his life given a damn about New Age anything.

"He's the real thing." Eyebrows up, entirely aware I didn't believe a syllable. "Found him through a contact I can't name. He gave me a week, total. We were coming up the 101, I saw the exit, and I thought — I left two years ago without saying any of the things a person is supposed to say."

"Gregory—"