“Why am I going to marry Robert?” “So that when I die, everything I own will be yours. My estate will be under your control. And you can keep my legacy.” “You could appoint that to me.” “And have someone try to take it away because you were my lover? No. This is better. This is smarter.” “But marrying your brother? Are you crazy?” “He'll do it,” she said. “For me. And because he’s a rake who likes to bed almost every woman he sees. You’d be good for his reputation. It’s a win-win.” “All this instead of just telling the truth?” I could feel Celia’s rib cage expand and contract underneath me. “We can’t tell the truth. Did you see what they did to Rock Hudson? If it was cancer he was dying of, there’d be telethons.” “People don’t understand AIDS,” I said. “They understand it just fine,” Celia said. “They just think that he deserves it because of how he got it.” I rested my head on the pillow while my heart sank in my chest. She was right, of course. The past few years, I’d watched Harry lose friend after friend, former lovers, to AIDS. I’d watched him cry his eyes red out of fear that he’d get sick, for not knowing how to help the people he loved. And I’d watched Ronald Reagan never so much as acknowledge what was happening in front of our eyes. “I know things have changed since the sixties,” she said. “But they haven’t changed that much. It wasn’t that long ago that Reagan said gay rights weren't civil rights. You can’t risk losing Connor. So I'll call Jack, my friend in the House of Representatives. We'll plant the story. You'll shoot your movie. You'll marry my brother. And we’ll all move to Spain.” “Tl have to talk to Harry.” “Of course,” she said. “Talk to Harry. If he hates Spain, we'll go to Germany. Or Scandinavia. Or Asia. I don’t care. We just need to go somewhere where people won't care who we are, where people will leave us alone and Connor can live a normal childhood.” “You'll need medical care.”