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"That is not what happened last night."

"That is exactly what happened last night."

"Last night you went off-script and improvised at a hostile witness—"

"And nobody in that house has questioned me once." He drank some coffee. "You said it yourself in the car. The audition is over. The part is yours. Nobody else alive can play it. You told me I wasn't lying, I was giving people the version of the moment they were hoping for. That's the kindest thing anybody has said to me in years and I haven't stopped thinking about it since."

Here's a thing nobody tells you about giving an actor the speech.

The speech works. That is the entire problem with the speech. You stand in a trailer and you tell a frightened person that they are the only one on earth who can do this, and if you're any good at it they believe you — and then you have to go on living in a world that contains a person who believes you.

I told Billy Truman he was a genius to get him into the car. And he went ahead and became one.

"What do you want, Billy?"

"I want you not to blow it up on Thursday." He set the cup down on the step. "That's all. You do your week, I do mine, and on Thursday when Steven wants to talk, you don't walk over and say actually he's an improv guy from Reseda and I found him through a booker."

"And the documentary?"

Billy had the grace to look at his shoes.

"There isn't one," he said. "Is there?"

"No."

"I worked that out somewhere around Sausalito." He shrugged. "It's fine. I'm not judging you. I'd say we're roughly the same amount of employed."

Somewhere down the meadow a truck was grinding up the gravel in first gear.

"Billy. Look at me." I waited until he did. "If this goes badly, it goes badly on you. Not on Rhoda, not on me. You're the face. If somebody at Ascendant does forty minutes of due diligence on a man with no birth certificate and no lineage and no—"

"Then I'll have had forty minutes of somebody taking me seriously," Billy said. "Which is forty more than I've had since 2011."

And what do you say to that?

I sat on the steps of an eleven-million-dollar barn's guest cottage with a man I'd pulled out of a black box theater off Melrose four days earlier, drinking his coffee, watching him look at his own future like a horse he’d already put money on.

"We'll discuss it Thursday," I sighed.

"Great." He stood, brushed off his linen, and rolled his shoulders once. The trapdoor swung open on the way up. "Rhoda has asked me to walk the property before breakfast and bless the ground."

"That's not a thing."

"It is now," said Zephyr Amaranth Aeolian, and he floated off into the fog.

* * *

The truck arrived at eight-forty.

I know because I was on the terrace with my second coffee when Benny Longworth ran past me at a speed I would describe as tactical, saying something into his earpiece with the iPad held against his chest like a shield.

Then, about four minutes later, from down in the meadow, I heard Rhoda Cauthorne scream.

By the time I got down there the crew had it half off the flatbed, and I want to be clear that I heard the thing before I saw it. Vinyl makes a specific noise unrolling. It's the sound of a bouncy castle deploying.

The tent Benny ordered was a sailcloth marquee. Ivory canvas, wooden poles — the kind of structure that looks like it grew there, which is precisely what the eighty thousand dollars is for. You pay it so that nobody ever notices the tent.

What was coming off that truck was not that.