Page 21

"Billy." I was unpacking, which for me means taking three things out of a bag and abandoning the project. "Come here. Sit down. Debrief."

He came and sat on the arm of a chair, and the trapdoor swung shut on the way over. I watched it go — watched Zephyr drain out and Billy come up, damp, delighted, and slightly appalled. A man who has just gotten away with something and can't believe the audience bought it.

"They love me," he whispered.

"Yes. They do."

"The woman with the bracelets asked if I'd look at her aura, and I said auras are a Western simplification, and Gregory — she wrote it down. She went inside and got a notebook."

"That's Rhoda."

"She's going to ask me things I don't know."

"She is never going to ask you anything you don't know, because there is nothing to know. It's all hocus-pocus and linen outfits."

I found the one decent bottle of wine I'd brought and opened it with Blaine's corkscrew, which I’d swiped and fully intended to keep.

"Rules. Three, and then we're done. One. No diagnoses. You may observe, you may sit with, you may hold space, whatever the verb is — but you do not diagnose anybody with anything. A diagnosis invites a second opinion and a second opinion invites a doctor."

"Okay."

"Two. No numbers. No dates, no prices, no countries, no lineages with dates in them. Vague is durable. Specific can be googled."

"And three?"

"Three." I handed him a glass and he took it in both hands like communion. "Don't work the room. You're not there to win them over — you walked in that door having already won. Eat your dinner. Say four vague things all evening. Let them come to you."

Billy nodded, solemnly, with total sincerity, and I want it on the record that I believed him.

"What if somebody asks me a direct—"

"Zephyr?"

Rhoda's voice came from outside, in the tone of a woman calling a cat she isn't yet certain is hers. "Zephyr, are you resting? Only the light is doing something in the meadow and I thought—"

Billy was on his feet before I was. He set the glass down, closed his eyes for exactly one breath, and when he opened them Zephyr Amaranth Aeolian walked out of my guest house with his hands loose at his sides like a man who has been expecting to be summoned since birth.

Which left me alone with a bottle, a stolen corkscrew, and four minutes of peace, during which I shut my eyes and prayed to a God I don't believe in that Billy Truman wouldn’t blow this to pieces before dessert.

Then came the knock. Not a regular knock. Three flat blows of a fist.

I knew who it was before I opened it, and I opened it anyway, because I have never in my life let a scene start without me.

Lance Hayworth stood on the flagstone in dark glasses and a camel coat he absolutely did not need in June. A driver was lifting three enormous cases out of the car behind him. Lance held his phone up screen-out at arm's length, like a subpoena.

I leaned over and looked. Forty-one messages. All mine. Sent across four days. Not one of them answered.

He took the glasses off.

"You," he said. "Unbelievable. Catastrophic. Selfish man."

"Lance—"

"I saw him." He swept past me into the cottage without being invited, hit the middle of the room, and turned. "I saw him from the car, Gregory. There is a man in head-to-toe linen standing in the meadow with his hand on a tree. Rhoda Cauthorne is eight feet behind him holding her own elbows like she's watching the birth of a—"

The door opened behind him.

Lance stopped.