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I lay there in the bedroom I grew up in and performed the arithmetic I’d been declining to perform since a black Suburban came up my parents' driveway that afternoon.

I did not conclude that I still love Gregory Normand.

I want that on the record. I concluded nothing of the kind, and anyone who says otherwise has not been paying attention.

Chapter Ten

Gregory

Billy was waiting for me on the guest house steps at seven in the morning, dressed, shaved, and holding two cups of coffee.

That's never good. Nobody brings you coffee at seven unless they want something.

"Morning," he said.

"You read the groom."

"I did."

"In front of everybody. After I gave you three rules."

"Two of which I followed." He handed me a cup. "Gregory, I've been up since four. I want to talk to you about the shape of my life."

Which is a sentence I have heard from exactly one kind of person, and that person is an actor who has just been offered something better by somebody else.

I sat down on the step beside him. The fog was still sitting in the redwoods and the whole meadow had gone that flat pearl color it goes before the sun clears the ridge.

"Go ahead."

"Steven wants to have a conversation with me Thursday."

"I was there."

"Ascendant has eleven million users." He was looking straight out at the trees rather than at me, the way people do when they've rehearsed. "I looked it up last night. A hundred and forty million in revenue last year. They have a vertical launching in Q4 and the brief is authenticity."

"Billy. Don't."

"And I've been thinking seriously about the fact that you're paying me twenty thousand dollars for a week."

There it was.

"That is a very good rate. That's probably the best week of your career."

"It's the best money anybody has ever offered me by an enormous margin, and I want to say thank you, because it's getting my sister off my back and putting me in an apartment." He finally turned and looked at me. "But it's only a week, Gregory. And he's talking about a contract."

"Steven said a conversation. Not a contract."

"A conversation is how a contract starts. You'd know. You're a producer."

The fog moved a little in the trees.

"You understand he isn't real," I said.

"Who?"

"Zephyr. Zephyr isn't real, Billy."

"I know that." He said it patiently, the way you'd explain something to a child, which was novel, given that four days ago this man had been living in a hatchback. "But he doesn't need to be real. He needs to test well. And I test extremely well. I tested well last night on a man who cross-examines people for thousands of dollars an hour."