Page 61

I still had Blaine's in my jacket pocket. I'd been carrying it around that property for five days like a hotel key I hadn't gotten around to returning.

There was an argument for finishing the bottle. There was a very good argument for it, and it was making itself to me quite persuasively, with visual aids. My ex-husband was getting married tomorrow, in a meadow I had reconstructed with my own hands, under canvas I had personally arranged, and there was not a jury in this country that would convict me if I…

"No," I said, out loud, to a tent.

I put the glass down and left.

I got as far as the top of the meadow before somebody said my name. It wasn't Blaine. I want that on the record, because I had already turned around by the time I registered the voice, and I turned around fast.

It was Benny Longworth, with his ever present iPad.

"Mr. Normand. Have you got a minute?”

"It's late."

"It is." He came up the path. Up close he looked younger than the blazer suggests, and considerably more tired. "I'm going to say something unprofessional, and then I'm going to go to bed."

"Benny—"

"Tomorrow afternoon Blaine Cauthorne is going to walk through that meadow and marry somebody else." His voice was perfectly level. "I’ve been doing this job for a long time. I know what it looks like when a man is marrying the wrong person."

I didn't say anything.

"Don't mistake that for being on your side." He shook his head slowly. "I want that understood. I have a client, a contract, and a schedule, and my entire professional existence is making tomorrow happen precisely the way it's written down. I'll do it well."

He tucked the iPad under his arm.

"But I'm sorry," he said. "For what it's worth. I'm truly sorry."

Chapter Seventeen

Blaine

I woke up at four-thirty and didn't try to go back to sleep.

Steven was out cold beside me with one arm hanging off the side of the bed. He had come in late, happy, and slightly drunk, kissed my shoulder, said "we're getting married tomorrow" into the pillow, and gone under like a stone.

I lay there in the dark and ran the schedule.

Haircut at nine. Photographs of the suit on its hanger, which is apparently a thing people do now. A lunch nobody would eat. Ascendant back at eleven. Guests start arriving at two. Processional begins at four.

I ran it twice. It's a good schedule. Benny built it.

Then I got up, because sleep wasn’t happening.

* * *

The kitchen was dark and the coffee maker was already on, which meant my father was up somewhere. I found him on the terrace with a coat over his pajamas and both hands around a steaming mug.

"Couldn't sleep," he said.

"No."

"Sit." He patted the back of the wicker chair beside him.

I sat. It was cold, and the fog was in over everything, and you couldn't see the tents at all.

"Big day, Sol. Are you sure you—"