Page 49 of The Naughty Ex

"Thank you."

"It's excellent. You did the whole thing in one breath and it's exactly what would work." He set the pad down. "And no. I'm not doing that."

"You understand this ends with you being found out."

"Probably."

"Certainly. You're an improviser out of a black box theater off Melrose. You have no lineage, no training, and no birth certificate matching the name you're using. Tomorrow a group of people who work in brand compliance are arriving at this property."

"Yes," Billy said. "I know."

"Then—"

"Do you know what I did the day before you found me?" Billy’s lower lip trembled.

I didn't say anything.

"Corporate gig. Team-building in Torrance for a company that makes dental software. One-fifty, and I only got it because somebody dropped out." He turned the coffee around in his hands. "Nobody in that room wanted to be there. I did four hours of improv for people looking at their phones, and at the end one man came up to me and said you were funny. And that was the best thing that happened to me in months. That's not a joke. I've thought about that man's face a lot."

"Billy."

"And then a man in a black box theater told me I was the only person alive who could play a part." He turned toward me and his eyes were wet. "You know what you did? You didn't hire me. You cast me. Nobody has cast me in anything in a very long time. I'm not going back. Not for you, not for anybody."

"That's not—"

"I'm a middle-aged man who lives in a car." Evenly. A fact he had made his peace with some time ago. "You're asking me to turn down the only thing anybody has ever offered me, so that a lie you invented doesn't get found out. And I'd do it, Gregory. That's the part I want you to understand. If you had leverage I'd do it in a heartbeat, because I'm grateful and because I like you."

He wiped his eyes with the back of his wrist, and something turned over in my stomach.

"But you don't have any leverage," he said. "Do you?"

I sat on those steps and ran it four different ways while a hummingbird did something aggressive to a fuchsia beside the door.

He was right. I couldn't expose Billy without exposing myself. I couldn't fire him, because a con requires the con man to remain on the premises. And I could not threaten him with anything he was not already fully prepared to lose.

"Two o'clock," Billy said, standing. "Would you like to be there?"

"Would you like me there?"

"Honestly? Yes." The trapdoor was open before he finished turning. "You're very good at this. And I've never once had anybody in the room who was on my side."

* * *

Blaine wasn't at breakfast.

I want to be clear that I did not go up to the house to look for him. I went because I wanted eggs.

He wasn't in the kitchen.

He also wasn't on the terrace, or in the sun room, or in the little room with the piano nobody plays. His car was still in the turnaround with the dew still on it, which meant he was somewhere in that house.

Asleep, possibly. Though it was past ten.

Blaine has not slept past six-thirty in all the years I have known him. He used to be up before the birds, and I used to lie in bed two floors up and listen to him make coffee. So if he was still asleep at ten past ten on the morning after he kissed me, then one of exactly two things was true, and I spent an unreasonable portion of that morning trying to work out which.

Either he'd been awake all night.

Or he'd slept like a man who had settled something.