Venice High School has been destroyed, and the ruins look almost Greek or Roman, with only columns and statues left standing. Already, there is a tent city for classrooms, and Frankie pauses to let two teachers cross the street, textbooks in their hands. Elsewhere, the damage is sporadic: a row of hotels with signs that hang askew and a bank of windows boarded up, while a block over, a stretch of houses looks untouched. When she reaches Menotti’s, the market, she thinks about a night Jack wore a hat and glasses, and together they went through Cesar Menotti’s trapdoor by the crates of apples and down into a secret speakeasy—not to drink but to be a part of pulse-spiking fun. No one recognized him, or maybe no one cared, and he and Frankie sat in a corner together with a script on the table should they need to pretend the visit was work-related. The one time they were out, just the two of them. He’d asked the waiter about his accent and ended up getting the man’s life story, including the fact that his mother just died and he was working to afford the trip back to Sorrento. When they left, Jack slid a tip under the menu that was more than enough for the journey home.

  Oil rigs are off to the right, an ominous sight. Then, through the window, there’s the scent of still water and algae and sea, a murky green comfort. At the end of the street is the Abbott Kinney Pier, which Jack has told her is crucial in moving liquor from three miles out—just past the territorial waters of the United Sates—and into Venice.

  There is a small alley behind the cottage, and a narrow garage. Inside it, her car’s headlights catch on spiderwebs, shining intricacies. So, she’s not the only one who hasn’t been here, she sees. Maybe it was too much for him as well, this physical reminder of an easier time.

  The backyard is no bigger than a postage stamp, but neat and tidy. She tips back the third clay pot by the fence and holds her breath. The key is there. A relief. The windows are dark, and when she jiggles the knob and opens the back door, there’s the scent of old wood and pipe tobacco. She flips on the light, surveying the kitchen. There are chipped mixing bowls in the corner, ones they used to mix pancake batter in the middle of the night. Pot holders, still hanging from a hook on the wall, stained red from a day when Frankie made cherry pie and the filling boiled over. And on the counter are dog-eared cookbooks, just waiting for hungry hands. Holding them in place is an orange enamel pitcher that’s weighted down with sand.

  And then she sees the trash can and the glimmer of broken glass. Someone has been here. Her heart races as she thinks of Nico, one of the few who knows about this house. Could he be here? Waiting?

  “Frankie.”

  She startles. There, looking as though he’s just woken up, is Jack. In one second, without thought or worry, she’s in his arms, her cheek against the cotton of his shirt. “You’re all right,” he says.

  “I didn’t see your car.”

  “I didn’t tell you? A tree branch got it. I’ve been either borrowing O’Shea’s or he’s driving me in his. But he said you were coming here and you needed me, so I had him drop me off.”

  She feels his fingers trace a circle on her back, and closes her eyes. “I’m sorry,” she says. “Well, really, you should be sorry you didn’t ask me to use those details in the movie, because you’re not entitled to my life, but I’m sorry I didn’t read the script before getting mad.”

  She feels a laugh build in his chest. “I am sorry,” he says. “I told you I’d have them reshoot if you want. I mean it.”

  “No. I might like it the way it is.”

  He pulls back to look her in the eye. “You too, you know. You’re not entitled to my life. I know it’s your job to fix things, but if it’s my mess and I want to fix it, you have to let me. I can’t be with someone who doesn’t trust me with my own life.”

  “Agreed.”

  He raises a brow, surprised. “Good.”

  “Though it’s not really my job either. Not anymore.”

  A pause as he takes this in. He pulls out a chair for her, from the kitchen table, and then takes a seat.

  When Jack hears that without a doubt he did not cause June’s death, his relief is enormous but temporary, because Frankie continues and tells him the rest. The house grows quiet, the kitchen light throwing shadows. Any solace he must have felt is gone, because he gets up, pacing and frustrated, until she tells him her plan.

  Close to nine p.m., there’s a knock on the front door. Jack peers behind the curtain and then signals to Frankie that it’s okay. Though Frankie wasn’t sure that Magda would come, she had a hunch that the promise of learning about that night would be too great a lure.

  Jack opens the door, motioning to the living room as Magda steps inside, her eyes wide at the sight of him. Frankie, sitting in an old armchair with a plate of spaghetti, stands to greet her.

  “Spaghetti?” Frankie asks as she sets the plate on the coffee table.

  Magda just shakes her head, surveying the room. “Whose house is this?”

  Jack raises his hand, and Magda turns, taking in the pile of scripts, a fishing pole leaned in the corner of the room, the brown tweed coat and hat that he uses when he tries to leave the house with a slight disguise, and a NuGrape soda bottle on the coffee table. “Of course,” she repeats a few times as if everyone has a secret house that is them, a place like an essence that’s left behind after everything unnecessary is boiled away.

  Now she must register that Frankie’s barefoot and comfortable. She looks to Jack, also barefoot and comfortable. “Well, you two are full of secrets.”

  Frankie smiles. “You have no idea.”

  Jack’s already looking for wine. “I’m going to say you might need a beverage for this. I’m sticking to soda from here on out, but I’ve got a bottle hidden somewhere.”

  So as Magda takes sips that soon increase in speed, Frankie tells her the version that she and Jack agreed upon, which involves the truth about the studio and its pressures, its vise grip on those under contract, as well as June and her problems, the doctor who gave her “medicine” that helped her meet deadlines and obligations but hurt her health, the secret baby she lost, the one she couldn’t have with the man she loved, the truth about her and Tank, and of course the truth about Frankie and Jack.

  “Good Lord,” Magda says.

  And then Frankie tells her about the call June made to Nico before she swallowed a bottle of pills.

  In the pause, Frankie waits for Magda to make the connection.

  “But she was shot,” Magda says, refilling her glass. And then her hand shakes, and she spills. She sets the bottle down.

  Frankie nods. “Right.”

  “He shot her.”

  “Only when she was already dead.” That, Frankie will stick to. Medically, she’s murky on what really happened, and fairly convinced that at this point no one could ever learn the truth, but the bottom line is Magda knowing what Nico did could only put her in danger. “He did it to save her reputation. He knew people would still love her if she was a victim.”

  “I need air.”

  “There are chairs out back,” Jack says.

  Outside, Frankie takes a seat in one of the wicker rockers, and Magda sits heavily beside her, head lowered. The moon is partially shaded but so clear that the curvature is obvious in a way it’s normally not. With the dimension, it feels real, and for the first time, Frankie grasps just the edge of life’s enormity, that she is one little person, on one little planet. And whereas, any other day, that might make her feel small and insignificant, now it is a comfort, because it means she belongs to something bigger, something she could never fully see. But just because you don’t see it, doesn’t mean it’s not there.

  She thinks of her mother. Of all the signs she’s asked for, all the times she’s craved to hear her mother’s voice or feel her presence, anything to prove that something so monumental as a life hasn’t completely disappeared. Could the signs have been there the whole time, unseen? She thinks of the man at the gas station. The colors in the sky. The woman who let her take her place in line. The list could go on, she realizes. So many moments like the grasp of a hand that helped her up. And maybe it’s all just coincidence and luck, existence a tangled and beautiful confusion, but she wants to believe that it’s true: Her mother has been here the whole time.

  This, she thinks, looking up, is what they are all a part of. A stunningly vast and endless fabric, limitless and constant and full of possibilities. A big picture that is composed of all that is small, and all those who worry they won’t matter.

  Magda still has her head lowered, trying to take deep breaths. “Keep going.”

  Frankie looks away from the moon. “I thought I was helping. Spelling it out like tonight makes it seem black and white. But it wasn’t. At least it didn’t feel like it was. I think I was afraid to see the parts that were wrong; I guess that’s the bottom line.”

  Head still lowered, Magda nods. “You and me both.” At last, she looks up. She touches the corner of her eye as if to press a tear in place. “And you didn’t mind losing him?”

  At first Frankie thinks she means Nico. Then she sees that she’s glancing back at the window, where Jack stands at the sink, washing the plates. “I told myself I couldn’t lose what I didn’t have.”

  “You didn’t believe he loved you.”

  “I didn’t believe I was worth loving.”

  Neither says anything more, the steady pulse of crickets and frogs the only sound. Then Magda leans back in the chair, tilting her head to take in the moon. “I’m familiar with that song and dance too, by the way. But the matter at hand. I’m assuming you have a plan?”

  Frankie nods. “There are two problems. The first one is June. Because I hate to admit it, but Nico was right: We reveal she did this to herself, and it hurts her all over again. It destroys her reputation, needlessly. And she’s not here to defend herself. I don’t want to victimize her again. But there might be a way we can honor her by exposing the studio, just enough that maybe something changes.”

  “I’m all ears.”

  “But the second problem is Nico. We push him too far, and he pushes back—and he will push harder. What he did by having Dottie leak this alibi rumor, that was a message.”

  “I figured.”

  “He can frame Jack. Easily. But if we get ahead of it, if we’re fast, we have the element of surprise. We can take what he put out there and spin it.”

  “Even though he’s got the necklace? And the cops in his pocket?”

  “Yes.”

  Magda laughs. “He’s got all the evidence. What exactly do we have?”

  “We have you. The power of the press.”

  Chapter 34

  The Last Lie

  Wednesday, March 15, 1933

  The first day of trading after the closure of Wall Street, the world wakes with an excited start. Already, the country is looking at a gaining Dow Jones Industrial Average, and hope is in the air—a new feeling, invigorated and motivated. On the radio, the announcer talks about new starts and new beginnings, and for the first time ever, Frankie wakes to languid late-morning sun through the window, and Jack’s arm around her. No longer is she worried they’ll be caught. No longer are they trying to hide.

  “I won’t move in,” she says.

  “Ah, see, I like to start the day with good morning.”

  “I’m here while I figure things out and get another job, but I’m not making the same mistakes my mom—” She stops. For as long as she can remember, she saw her mother’s life as a warning: a woman weak enough to constantly be overpowered by a man’s lure, to always hope that the next time would be different. Suddenly, she wonders if she’s been seeing it wrong, if her mother’s strength was actually the ability to hope, the bravery to hope, in the face of everything. To try again. Or maybe not. Maybe it’s a bit of everything, because that’s how life is. The one thing she knows is being brave enough to love, or even being open to love, is also a kind of strength. She remembers Nico telling her to tread carefully, that fearless people take too many risks. But Frankie wasn’t fearless. She held anything that could’ve really hurt her at arm’s length. Where was the bravery in that?

  “I don’t know what I’m doing,” Frankie finally says.

  “I think you’re in bed, in Venice.”

  “I don’t have a plan, past today.” She stares at the ceiling.

  “You know what that says to me? That you have a whole lot of options.”

  Later, O’Shea calls to report that he did as instructed and returned the car to the studio. Officially, Frankie has broken free.

  Then they wait. An entire day of nothing but each other. Luxurious in its mundanity. They make pancakes for lunch, they take a bath, they organize the bookshelf, searching for a four-leaf clover Frankie once pressed between the pages of one of the novels. And later they sit on the porch, watching shifting reflections on the canal. Algae and settled water and a whiff of sea in the air, an ocean promise. She thinks of going to the beach tonight, to sit on the sand and dig her toes into the cold, to take in a view that speaks of the past and the future, of here and distant lands, because it won’t matter if people see them together. Not after tonight.

  “A picnic,” she says.

  “On the beach. It’s a date.”

  But tension starts to creep in. They’re waiting for the evening edition of Magda’s paper to be delivered, and for the chaos her article will unleash. Working to their advantage is the fact that it will be too late for Nico to do anything to counter, though, still, Frankie watches the clock on the kitchen wall, and every noise sounds like the thwack of a newspaper and the repercussions it will bring.

  “A watched clock doesn’t deliver a newspaper,” Jack says. “You feel like sandwiches?”

  There’s no bread, so they do peanut butter and strawberry jelly on saltine crackers, dozens and dozens of surprisingly delicious little sandwiches.

  Jack watches her. “You were wrong, by the way.”

  Frankie, chewing, looks up.

  “You told me I had people fixing things and cleaning up my messes, so I didn’t know repercussions. But I was living the repercussion. And I did it, willingly, for years. I went along with everything, because I figured I was lucky, and I’d reached the goal. Big house, money, fame. That’s the pinnacle, right? The be-all end-all?”

  “Supposedly.” A pause. “I figured you weren’t really willing to risk it all.”

  “You’re wrong there too. Because how lucky could I be if I can’t do what I love, or be with who I—” He stops, and smiles.

  Wiping jelly from the corner of her mouth, she says, “I think I like being wrong.”

  Then there’s a knock on the front door.

  They freeze. Glance at each other. They arranged to have a special messenger deliver a paper to Nico at his house, which should be happening right about now, so there’s no way it’s Nico at the door. “The paper,” Jack says.

  Halfway on the Welcome Mat is the evening edition, the words We Lied in big capital letters on the front page. They take it to the kitchen, where Frankie reads aloud. The article is written from Magda, directly to her readers.

  Excuse the interruption of your evening, but a development in the death of June Finney has just come to light, and I promise it deserves your attention. RCO Studios, in a brave and bold move, has disclosed to yours truly that the facts of June Finney’s final days were different than they’d reported.

  Here is what is still true: June was killed in a robbery gone wrong, and Jack Sawyer had nothing to do with her death.

  Other than that, the studio admits that much of the June-and-Jack lore was just that: fiction, a tale, a myth, an invention to make the public happy . . . a lie. Though their supposed romance captivated fans all over the world, June and Jack did not, in fact, have a love to end all ages . . . at least not with each other. In fact, June Finney was desperately in love with someone whom she wanted to spend the rest of her life with, a man who was not Jack. Jack, similarly, was in a relationship with a woman who was not June. While the public, at times, feels as though it’s their right to know the details of their favorite stars’ personal to-dos, this reporter will opt to respect their privacy and only say this: They found love. And that’s all that needs saying.

  Sources close to the couple claim they’d planned on publicly calling off their engagement so they could be with the people of their choosing when June’s life was cut short. You may have caught wind of the swirling rumor that Jack was not with a friend in Malibu on the night in question, and that his alibi couldn’t hold a drop of water. That’s because Jack was with the woman he was seeing, a woman who, for obvious reasons, couldn’t be mentioned without opening Pandora’s box.

  “We made a choice to keep up the charade of their relationship,” studio publicist Frankie Donnelly said. “After all, the American people had just lost their favorite star. We didn’t want to destroy their favorite love story as well.”

  But now RCO is taking the world by storm with this rare and gutsy mea culpa.

  “What we realized is we chose wrong,” Ms. Donnelly continued. “It wasn’t fair to anyone, including the man June loved unquestioningly and unwaveringly right up until the end. And though we are respecting his privacy, he deserves to know how much he meant to her. Just as the American people deserve to know that what was presented to them wasn’t always truth. The ability to dream and imagine a life that’s different than your own is no small thing. Films are extraordinary and important and have been a gift to the world during these hard times. But though people deserve the ability to dream, they also need the truth that makes dreams attainable. Perfect is not possible. June Finney had flaws. She struggled and made mistakes. But instead of letting her be true to herself, faults and all, we tried to make her into what we thought the public would want, even going so far as to deny her real love. This was wrong, and it’s time for a rewrite. It’s time for us to be more truthful and accepting of our very human celebrities. The public deserves this, the many talented actors and actresses at RCO and every studio deserve this, and certainly June Finney deserved this. Hollywood’s stars are earthbound, after all, and nothing is perfect, including us. We will try to do better.”