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"What?"

"If I'd stopped it, you'd have spent the rest of your life not knowing what you wanted." My face was burning. "You have never once chosen a thing that wasn't the smart play. Not once. So I sat in a chair and I let you have it. That's why."

It sounded good. God help me, it sounded good coming out of me.

Blaine looked at me for a long moment.

"That isn't the whole truth," he said. "But I think you believe it."

I opened my mouth and nothing came out.

He walked past me into the bathroom and shut the door, and I stood there in the middle of the room with sweat going down the small of my back, hoping I wasn’t about to have the first panic attack of my life.

Blaine came out in a T-shirt of mine and a pair of my jeans.

The suit was folded over his arm like dirty laundry.

"I'm going up to the house," he said.

"Okay."

"Gregory."

"Yes."

"Thank you for the hooks."

Then he left.

I sat down on the floor with my back against the bed and put both hands over my face. And then, because it is the only thing I have ever known how to do with a feeling, I did the arithmetic.

On Monday a woman named Bex was going to get a phone call from Billy Truman. By Tuesday every person in that family would know that the holy man had been a hired actor, and that I had brought him up that driveway.

Blaine Cauthorne had asked me for the truth tonight. Once. After the worst day of his life.

And I handed him one with a man-shaped hole in it.

"What in God's name am I going to do now?"

Chapter Twenty-One

Gregory

The music was still playing.

I heard it from the guest house and thought I'd finally cracked. Then I walked up the path, and there it was — a string trio at the far end of an empty tent, working through something tasteful for an audience of nobody at all.

Everything was still up. Tables dressed, chairs out, place cards curled at every setting. There had been an ice swan at some point. Now there was a tray of water with a beak floating in it.

Blaine was alone at the head table in my jeans and my T-shirt, with the boutonnières lying across the place settings in front of him.

I stood at the flap a while before I went in. I'd like credit for that. It is the one time all week I hesitated before entering a room.

Benny came in after me with a binder clamped against his chest. Lance turned up not long after with a bottle he had already opened and a champagne flute he was drinking red wine out of.

"They've left everything," Lance said. "There are coats out there and a phone charger plugged into a tent pole charging nothing at all. And there is a wall of ninety-five-dollar water bottles that Ascendant apparently decided weren't worth carrying back to the city."

"Why is the music still playing?"