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And then a voice I recognized as my own said:

"That's not what that was."

Benny's eyebrows went up. "I'm sorry?"

"The tent." My mouth was moving. I was somewhere behind it, watching. "You're describing a calculation. Gregory doesn't calculate. That’s the entire problem with him. If he calculated things I could have argued with him while we were married." I heard my own voice come up half a degree and could not stop it. "He sees something broken, he fixes it, and then he is genuinely astonished afterward to learn it cost somebody something. It isn't a strategy. It's who he is."

Benny looked at me for a long moment with an expression I would describe as professional pity.

"Okay," he said, and crossed one leg over the other.

"I'm not defending him."

"I didn't say you were."

"You were about to write him off as a manipulator, and he isn't one. He's something considerably worse, and I'd rather the record was—"

I stopped.

What in God's name is wrong with me?

"That's all," I muttered.

Benny picked up the iPad, stood, and tucked it under his arm.

"For what it's worth," he said, "I've listened to a great many people describe their exes at these things. Nobody has ever corrected me on one's behalf before."

"Benny. That's enough."

* * *

I couldn't sleep, which is not unusual. I went outside at half past midnight, which is.

I want the reasoning entered accurately, because I’ve been over it since and it holds up better than anybody gives it credit for.

That platform sits on a slope. Not a severe one, but a slope. And it was assembled by a crew out of a film unit in Vallejo — people who build things intended to stand for six days rather than eighty years, and who have never once in their lives had to think about a hundred and forty guests in hard-soled shoes on wet grass. The mist comes in off the bay most nights that time of year. Timber shims take up moisture. Moisture means movement.

Naturally I’m the only person on the property who would think of it. And it turned over and over in my mind until I understood I wasn’t going to sleep until I had checked on it.

So I put a coat on over what I was wearing, took the flashlight from the drawer by the mudroom door, and went out to check the staging.

That was my intention. I want that on the record as well.

The fog had come in as far as the tree line and stopped, the way it does, so the meadow was clear and the redwoods above it had gone to smoke. Everything was wet. The tents stood there in the dark.

In daylight they're canvas. At half past midnight, with the fog behind them and nothing lit, they were something else — two enormous pale shapes with the sky coming through them, breathing very slightly in the air off the ridge.

I put the flashlight on the platform edge and went the whole forty feet, and checked every shim.

They were perfect.

Of course they were. They were set by people who level dance floors for a living, on a unit where several million dollars of somebody else's money depends on a camera not sliding down a hill.

I switched the flashlight off and stood inside my own wedding at half past midnight in soaking wet shoes. The canvas moved a little. There's a sound they make — a soft continuous breathing, like standing inside something asleep. The staging smelled of new pine. And overhead, very faintly, I could make out the seam where a chipmunk had run across the crown of it that afternoon, while a man I used to be married to stood on a folding chair holding a nine-foot light stand over his head and made a noise I fully intend to describe at his funeral.

I have watched Gregory Normand solve things for years. I watched him save a flooded location in Prague. I watched him replace a lead actor inside twenty-four hours. Plot holes, permits, a customs officer in Malta — there was nothing he could not fix. He was obscenely good at his job.

And I’ve sat in the kitchen of a house we owned at two in the morning, alone, for the eleventh consecutive night, while he worked on another continent.