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"Okay," said Steven.

And then Reverend Anne-Marie began to talk about how the two of us had come to be standing there, using the biographical details my mother had supplied. She got as far as the conference in San Jose and the panel on data portability, and I heard my own voice say:

"Can I stop? Please."

Nobody moved.

"Sorry?" said the Reverend.

"Can I stop?" I let go of Steven’s hands. "I need this to stop. Now."

And here's what I have had to sit with since. There is a version of that moment in which I do it well. In which I take Steven's arm and walk him out of that meadow and up to the house and tell him privately, with dignity, in a room with a door on it.

That version was available to me and I did not take it.

What I did instead was stand in front of every seated guest, in that ridiculous suit, in the meadow where I was married the first time, and say it out loud.

"I can't marry you."

Somebody behind us said "oh my God" very clearly.

"Blaine—"

"Not because of anything you've done." My voice had gone somewhere I’ve never heard it go. Loud isn't the word. Uncontrolled. Shaking. "You have been kind to me every single day, and I have been pleasant to you, and that's what I've got. There should be more than me being pleasant to you."

"Blaine, can we—" Steven had his hand out. "Can we go inside?"

"I’ve never asked you a question." I could hear myself. That's the thing nobody believes. I could hear every word and I could not stop saying them. "In a year. Not once. I didn't want to know you, because if I knew you I'd have had something to lose. I’ve spent two years making absolutely certain that I would never have anything to lose again."

His face had gone white.

"And you filmed him."

There it was. Out. In front of everybody.

"What?"

"Esteban. You filmed him face-down in my mother's koi pond with his head split open, and then you turned off my alarm so that I could sleep, and you never once asked me how he was." My hands were shaking. "Not once, Steven. And you were the reason he was standing in that water."

Steven Ellis Bland stood in a meadow in front of his entire leadership team and his parents and mine, in an oyster-colored suit, and said:

"I did ask. I really did."

"No. You didn't."

"I asked Harold on Thursday." His voice was very small. "I didn't ask you because you'd been up all night and you looked destroyed, and I thought if I brought it up you'd start doing logistics again instead of resting. So I asked your dad. And he said Esteban was okay."

The meadow was completely silent.

"Oh," I mumbled.

"I sent him money." Barely audible. "Not from Ascendant. From me. I didn't tell you because I was ashamed of how it would look."

I stood there in that ridiculous suit with my hands out in front of me and looked at his face.

"I'm not a good person, Blaine," Steven said. "I know that about myself. I've always known it. I'm shallow and loud and I have built a career out of things that don't matter. But I'd have gotten there. About him. About all of it. If somebody had told me."

His chin came up.