Page 24

"Babe." He reached over without looking and put a hand on Blaine's shoulder, eyes still on me. "Babe, it's Gregory Normand."

"I'm aware," said Blaine.

Steven came around the table. He was shorter than I'd imagined and moved with the terrible unguarded enthusiasm of a golden retriever in excellent tailoring. My replacement took my hand in both of his.

"Okay. I have to say this. I loved The Darkest Hour. Obsessively. I've watched the doorway scene probably forty times? And I know you must get that constantly, and I said to myself on the drive up, Steven, do not be the guy who mentions the doorway scene. And then I walked over here and immediately mentioned the doorway scene."

"Everybody mentions the doorway scene."

"Because it's insane." He still hadn't let go of my hand. "So — tell me if this is inappropriate, but I have to ask, because Blaine says you never do these — would you ever come on a podcast?"

I looked at him. Then past him, at Blaine, who had picked up his wine and was studying the tablecloth with the expression of a man watching a car accident he personally scheduled.

"A podcast?"

"We do a series at Ascendant called The Long Answer. Founders, artists, athletes, people at inflection points, and the whole brief is basically what did it cost you. Which I know sounds intense, but the completion rate is thirty-one minutes, which for long-form is—"

He caught himself and laughed, and in that laugh I understood that he was not performing. This was what Steven Ellis Bland was like all the way down to the bone.

"Sorry. Sorry! I'm doing work at a family dinner. Blaine hates when I do that."

"I don't hate it," muttered Blaine. "I've simply asked that it happen after the salad."

"See, he's funny," Steven said to me, delighted, as though I’d never met the man. "People don't know that about him."

And that, right there. That was the knife.

I want to be precise, because I didn't see it coming from any direction at all. People don't know that about him. Said to me. Who built six years of a life with him. Who once made him laugh so hard at a dinner in Palm Springs that he had to put his forehead down on the actual table.

Who lost the entire private register of that laugh in our divorce.

Steven wasn't being cruel. Steven was being generous. He was including me. The man had no earthly idea there was a knife in his hand.

"Steven," said Rhoda from the head of the table. "Come and sit down, dear. We're all waiting on you."

"Coming!"

And here is the thing I had not noticed until that exact second, and could not stop noticing for the rest of the week.

Rhoda Cauthorne takes people's faces in her hands. She did it to me on the gravel. She did it to Lance at the door. She does it to caterers, to the man who services the well, to delivery drivers who did not sign up for it.

She did not do it to Steven Ellis Bland. Not once, that night or any other.

She pats him. Upper arm. Twice. The way you reassure a horse you do not intend to ride.

"Steven," Harold said, holding out the pitcher. "Turmeric and blood orange. Nettles off the north slope. Esteban and I picked them this morning."

"Oh — no thank you, I'm actually off nightshades this month?"

"Nettle is not a nightshade." Harold's eyebrows went up toward what remains of his hairline.

"It's a whole protocol thing, it's very—" Steven made a small apologetic gesture. "It's an Ascendant thing."

Harold lowered the pitcher and looked down into it, and I swear before God he looked wounded, as though he'd been declined the chance to hand over his own baby.

"Of course," he breathed. "Of course."

"He picked them this morning," Rhoda said pleasantly, to nobody.