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"When?"

"Today. This morning. I'll go up after—"

"Now," he said.

"Blaine—"

"You said you'd tell them, and there's no better time than the present. We'll go now." He came back down the path. "And I'm coming with you."

"You don't have to do that." My stomach was turning over.

"I know I don't. But I want it over with."

I want the record to show that I understood his thinking. He didn't disbelieve that I'd do it. He knew I'd do it.

Blaine didn't believe I'd do it plainly.

And he was right, because I had already started producing a scene. Here's what was going on in my head on the way up that hill. I'm putting all of it down, because otherwise none of the rest makes sense.

Open on something true and painful that isn't about me. Establish that I'm a person who cares about this family. By the time they understand what they're being told, they'll already have decided how to feel about it.

"Whatever you're building, forget about it," said Blaine.

"I haven't said anything."

"You're making a face."

"I make faces all the time."

"You've got the other face." He wasn't looking at me. "The calculated one you use on studio executives. You used it in my mother's kitchen the day you arrived."

Start with Mabel, then. Go straight at the family disease. Put the whole thing in a frame Rhoda already loves, because it makes what I did look inherited instead of chosen.

I had the line built. It was a good line. I'd had it since the bottom step.

"Gregory. Stop."

"What?"

"Whatever it is you're doing with your hands."

I looked down and found that I was gesturing. I was about to confess to a con and I was blocking it the way I'd block a scene.

I put my hands in my pockets.

"Can I ask you something?"

"No." He didn't even look at me.

"You don't know what it is."

"You want to know whether you can tell them alone." He stepped over the loose flagstone at the top without looking at it, the way you do on a path you learned as a child. "The answer's no. Because if you're alone in that room you'll stage-manage it, and my mother will spend ten years telling people about the difficult thing you were brave enough to say."

He was, as usual, entirely correct.

"Then what am I supposed to do?"

"Say what happened," said Blaine. "In the order it happened. Like a normal person."