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Not I love you. Not one of the enormous things he’s said to me over the years, in restaurants, in airports, in front of large numbers of people.

Just that. Flat, in the dark, like a man making a statement he expected to be tested on.

We couldn’t stay there. Even I knew that.

At some unspeakable hour, we found our clothes among the wreckage. We blew out what was left of the candles and walked down the path holding hands like a pair of teenagers. He still had frosting in his hair, and I didn’t tell him.

At the guest house, he didn’t ask whether I was staying. I followed him in and got into his bed.

That is the sentence I keep looking at. I got into Gregory Normand’s bed, in my parents’ guest house, on my wedding night.

And I slept better than I have since the divorce.

* * *

I woke before it was light, his arm heavy across my waist, his breath warm against the back of my neck. The room was grey. Down the hill, someone had already started on the tent—I could hear poles clanking into a truck bed, the sound sharp in the early morning quiet.

Gregory was awake. I could tell from his breathing.

"You’re thinking," I said.

"I’m always thinking."

"You’re doing the loud kind."

He didn’t laugh.

I turned over so I could see his face. For two years, I had built, very carefully, a life in which this was not available to me. I had believed in it completely. It had taken one botched wedding to come apart.

"Say it," I said.

"Say what?"

"Whatever you’ve been not saying since you got here." I put my hand flat on his chest. "Say it now, in the dark, where I can’t see you properly, and I’ll take it however it comes."

He lay there.

I felt him breathe in to speak. I want that on the record, because I have gone over it a great many times since.

He took the breath. Whatever it was, it was right there.

"Blaine," he said.

"Yes."

And down the hill, a truck door slammed. Somewhere up in the main house, a telephone started ringing. He let the breath go.

"Nothing," he said. "It’ll keep till later."

I said nothing at all, having discovered that I would rather not know.

Chapter Twenty-Three

Gregory

I woke up with Blaine's hand fisted in the front of my shirt.

His shirt. My shirt, that he was wearing. I'd been awake about forty minutes by then and hadn't moved a muscle, because I have spent two years learning what it's like not to have that man next to me and I was not going to waste any of it sleeping.