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"Yeah?"

I looked at the light on in the guest house window.

"You were never the one who wasn't paying attention."

And Steven hung up.

* * *

Then the guest house door opened.

Gregory came out onto the path barefoot with his hands empty, his eyes red and damp, and I understood a full second before he opened his mouth that he had come to tell me the truth himself.

He sat down on the end of the wall. Not next to me. A few feet away.

"Blaine. I have to tell you something, and I need to get all the way through it." His voice was very quiet. "This isn't going to be pretty."

"All right."

And he told me everything, with his eyes on the ground.

It didn't take long. It never does, once it's finally said. The wedding announcement in a bar in Hawaii. The boat sold in a day to a man named Chip. Lance on the phone from the car, letting something slip about my mother. A black box theater off Melrose, and the fraud he brought up our driveway. Twenty thousand dollars for one week. There was never a documentary.

And then, quieter, at the end: that on Saturday, an hour before my wedding, Billy had wanted to come up to the house and tell my parents the truth. And that Gregory stopped him. That he told him if he did it, he'd say Billy had done it alone — that Billy had approached him, that Billy had used him — and that Billy believed it, because it would have worked.

"That's everything," he said. "There isn't any more."

Then he looked up.

"Say something. Please."

Here's what I want written down, because I have gone over it since and it does not get better with handling.

I wasn't surprised.

Not by one word of it. Not the theater, not the money, not the documentary, and not — God help me — the part about Billy. I sat on that wall and listened to the man I love confess to the worst thing he has ever done, and what I felt was recognition.

"Gregory." I put both hands over my face. "Why did you come here?"

"What?"

"It isn't a complicated question."

"To stop you marrying him." It came out of him in a rush. "I've told you that. I told you that in the guest house on Saturday and it's the truth."

"No." I took my hands down and looked him in the eye. "That's what it was about. I'm asking what you came here to do."

Gregory didn't answer.

"You could have called me." I was very calm. I have been told by opposing counsel that I become frightening when I go calm, and I have always taken it as a compliment. "You had my number for two years. You could have telephoned me from Hawaii and said don't do this, I still love you, and I would have dealt with it."

"Blaine—"

"You could have driven up that driveway on your own and said it to my face. My mother would have let you in. Hell, mother would have thrown me out and kept you." My voice sounded flat. "There were a dozen ways to say one true sentence to me. And what you did instead was sell a boat, cast an actor, invent a documentary, and build an entire production rather than tell me how you feel."

I heard myself and kept going anyway.

"God, you always do this."