Page 77

"I can do it," I said.

"I know you can."

Blaine stood up, turned around, and put one hand up to hold the collar forward and away from his neck.

I got up off the bed.

I want to be honest about my hands. They were not steady. I have talked studio heads out of eight figures with a perfectly straight face and my hands were not steady on the back of my ex-husband's wedding suit.

I undid the hooks. All of them, one at a time, from the top down. He stood there holding the collar away from his skin and neither of us said one word. It took a long time. Whoever built that thing built it to be undone slowly by somebody who had been given permission. I could hear Blaine breathing, could see the back of his neck, and when the last hook came free the suit loosened at once and fell open.

"Gregory."

"Yes?"

He turned around.

Blaine was crying. Silently, without any sound at all, the way he does — tears going down a completely still face like a man who has simply stopped holding something up. He held the jacket closed against his chest with one forearm.

"Don't be kind to me tonight," he murmured.

"Blaine—"

"I mean it. I'm asking you for something." His voice broke straight down the middle. "Everybody has been kind to me all day and I can't take one more person being nice to me. I stood in that fucking meadow and I did that to a man who has never done one cruel thing to me in his life. If you're gentle about it I'm going to fall apart."

"Then what do you want?"

"I want you to tell me the truth about something."

"Ask me. Anything."

"Did you come here to stop the wedding?"

There it was.

And I want this noted, because I’ve thought about it more than I have thought about anything else in my life. I had an answer ready. Somewhere behind my face a version of me was already assembling something graceful — I came to say goodbye. I came to see you happy — and it would have played beautifully.

"Yes," I stated in a small voice.

His face didn't move.

"I saw the announcement in a bar in Hawaii and I sold the boat the same afternoon." My voice was doing something I couldn't govern. "And I came here to stop you marrying that man."

He took it the way he takes everything. Filed it. Didn't blink.

"Then why didn't you?"

"Blaine—"

"You had all week." He sighed, long and wearily. "You had this morning, and you had the part where I was standing up there in front of every person I know, in this hideous suit. Christ, Gregory, you didn't do one single thing."

"I know."

"I have watched you take a studio apart because an executive was rude to a first-time director. And today you sat in a chair and did nothing. Why?"

And this is the part where I should have said because I had nothing left.

Instead I said, "Because it had to be your decision."