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"Gregory," said Benny, and there was a warning in it that I heard perfectly well and elected to ignore. "It's handled. I have a call in to—"

"There's a unit shooting a period piece in Vallejo." Two years of unemployment and I still read the trades like scripture. Thank God. "They have two eighty-foot sailcloth marquees for a garden party sequence, and they wrapped exteriors on Sunday, which means those tents are folded in a truck doing nothing until the strike date." I was already scrolling. "The location manager is a woman named Ally Shah, whom I got out of a very bad situation in Malta in 2019, and who has told me on four separate occasions that she owes me. I'm about to find out whether she meant it."

"Gregory—"

"I'll need staging for the platform, because whatever gets set on that slope has to be shimmed and I'm not trusting a party yard to do it. There's a grip house in Richmond I've used for years. And I want a lighting package, because that meadow at six-thirty is going to be spectacular and it is currently being lit by nothing but God, which is amateurish."

Silence in the meadow.

Then Rhoda Cauthorne walked over and took my face in both hands.

"Gregory," she whispered.

"Don't thank me yet."

"Harold. Harold, do you feel it?"

"I feel it," said Harold, who was still looking at the pineapples.

And I made the calls.

I'd like to report that it was difficult. It was not. It was the easiest ninety minutes I had spent in two years, and the best I have felt since the divorce, and both of those facts should have frightened me considerably more than they did.

Ally meant it. The grip house had a truck free. By noon there were nine people in that meadow who knew exactly what they were doing. By two the vinyl was going back onto the flatbed with its pineapples, and Benny Longworth was standing at the tree line with his arms folded, watching a film crew build a wedding on top of his wedding.

I went over to him, because I'm not a monster.

"That was your call to make," I said. "I stepped on it. I'm sorry."

"Did you?" He didn't look at me. "Because from where I'm standing, a man with no role at this event solved the largest problem at this event in under two hours, in front of the clients, and is currently being described by the mother of the groom as heaven sent."

"Benny—"

"She used those words. Heaven sent." He finally turned. Up close he was younger than the blazer suggested and considerably angrier. "I have run hundreds of weddings. I have never lost a tent. And I want you to understand that I am grateful, because I am a professional and my client is going to have a beautiful wedding."

He tucked the iPad under his arm.

"I'm also aware that you didn't do it for Rhoda."

"I did it because the tent had pineapples on it—"

"Mr. Normand." He said it almost gently, which was worse. "I have planned a great many weddings, and I’ve been engaged at three of them. I know exactly what it looks like when a man is doing somebody a favor. And I know what it looks like when he's doing it for one particular person in the room."

Then he turned and marched off toward the staging truck, and I stood there for a moment working out what he had just told me about himself, and whether he'd meant to.

* * *

Here's the part I keep coming back to.

Around four, the crew had the first marquee up and the second one halfway, and the light was starting to do that thing it does coming through the redwoods. I was standing near the platform with a coffee, being — I'll say it — profoundly pleased with myself.

And a chipmunk ran across my foot.

It came out of the grass at a speed I did not know chipmunks possessed. It went over my shoe and straight up the nearest vertical surface, which was the interior corner of the marquee, and which was not a tree, a fact it appeared to register at about nine feet.

It stopped. Clung there a few seconds.

Then it looked down.