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“And where is the guest house?” I asked, standing, putting my leather bomber jacket back on. It was cut long, and I liked that. I pulled my scarf back on as well, concerned about leaving anything behind.

“There’s more than one but I know where they are,” Landry told me, standing up beside me. “We’ll be back.”

No one said anything, and it was just weird. If I hadn’t seen someone I loved for eight years, I would have been sitting on top of them until I got every one of my questions answered in rapid succession. At gunpoint, if necessary.

We walked first back up to the living room—showroom—retrieved our luggage, and then we went down another set of stairs and came out on the side by the trees. There was a cobblestone path that led to a small gate opening onto a huge rose garden. It looked like something out of Alice in Wonderland.

“Jesus.”

“Come on.”

“I need the tour map,” I said snidely. “Can I get one at the gift shop on our way back?”

He snorted out a laugh. “You’re funny.”

I grunted, but I was watching him. “Why wouldn’t you just lie to them, let them pay for school and be gay thousands of miles away?”

“Because I didn’t feel like lying about who I wanted to love for the rest of my life. It seemed counterproductive. My father said I could go to the same retreat as Will and he would still send me to school. I told him no.”

The blanks were starting to fill in.

“I thought you came out to your folks the night you graduated from high school?”

“No, my father found out the day he caught me—well, whatever, that’s a whole other story—but no, the day he and Will’s dad found us, that was the day my father found out.”

“And what happened to Will?” I asked, even though Chris had told me already.

“Will went into one of those programs where they un-gay you after we graduated, and I left for college.”

“Did your mother know what happened?”

“Of course.”

He was so calm.

I realized that I didn’t want to have the floodgate-opening talk right there in the open. I cleared my throat. “I had no idea you came from this kind of money.”

“It’s shit.”

“Spoken like a man who never had to go without anything.”

“Oh, fuck you,” he growled at me, stopping, rounding on me as I tilted my head and appraised him. “I’ve gone without quite a bit in my life.”

“But you didn’t have to; that was your choice.”

“And so that makes me what, spoiled? Stupid? What?”

I stared at him, at his clothes. He bought things cheap at consignment stores and Target and then paired them with extravagant pieces like the ankle boots he’d bought or his cashmere peacoat. He had scarves that looked like they came off the pages of GQ that in reality came from small ethnic stores in our neighborhood. He had a flare for fashion, for accessorizing, so he always looked like a million dollars walking down the street. But I knew, the platform boots from the night before notwithstanding, that normally, frugal was his middle name.

“Trev?”

I squinted at him. “You live on my bullshit budget and you don’t have to.”

He spun around and started stalking away from me.

I followed, trying to think of what I meant.

The guesthouse, and the walk down to it, reminded me of Greece when I had seen it on the Travel Channel. How white it was, the walls—all that was missing was the azure Aegean and we would have had a damn postcard. I needed to hurry up and get used to the luxury, because it was screwing with me.