She’s taking a sweet picture with her niece Adora, the flower girl, but as soon as she turns away, I open my mouth—

  Masha serves me the hand with a side of death glare. “No.”

  I sputter. “No . . . what?”

  “No to you. No to this.”

  “Masha!” My voice cracks with emotion.

  “This is my day, Olivia,” she says, her tone ferocious, non-negotiable. “You were invited because Eli is loyal to Jake, but you’re not going to make my wedding day about you.”

  “I would never—” I break off and look at Masha’s family closing in around her. They look protective, wary. And not surprised.

  “Why is everyone acting like this?”

  “Because we know what to expect from you.”

  “Olivia has an early call tomorrow,” Glasswell says, taking my arm, “we should probably get going—”

  Since when does Glasswell speak for me in fights with my best friend? Since when do I have two fights with my BBS in the space of twenty-odd hours?

  “This is all his fault,” I point at Glasswell, who shakes his head at me.

  He leans close. “No one’s going to get that joke. Let’s go—”

  “Hold on,” I say, “we’re talking.”

  “No,” Masha says. “You’re talking. I finished long ago.” And then my precious Masha turns and walks away.

  Chapter Ten

  I drift like flotsam from the party and wash up at the valet stand. The night is warmer here, pressed against PCH, hissing with cars. A streetlight hums overhead, painting me in tragic light. I take off my shoes, feet throbbing, lean against a brick wall, close my eyes, and implode.

  My best friend just served me the kind of contempt I’ve only seen her give telemarketers. When I left the wedding tent, two of her cousins applauded.

  If someone would just tell me what’s going on, maybe I could fix it. But the only person interested in talking to me is Glasswell.

  My throat constricts.

  Masha’s rage had a fermented quality, as if her complaint against me had been roiling for months. Far longer than last night’s rehearsal dinner. What is happening?

  “Hey.”

  “You again,” I say to Glasswell without looking at him.

  He sweeps me into a full-body hug—torsos, hips, ankles, hearts. I feel his pulse, calling and responding to mine. He feels . . . safe. I’m past the point of How dare he. My heart has become homeless. I need something to hold on to.

  I release myself into Glasswell’s arms and cry.

  “It’s okay,” he whispers into my hair.

  “She hates me.” I shake with fresh sobs, realizing the words are true.

  Masha. My ride or die of twenty years. The gentlest soul I know.

  Through the curtain of my tears, I see the valet standing nearby. I don’t usually care what strangers think of me, but I find myself wiping my eyes, trying to keep it together.

  The valet clasps his hands behind his back. He keeps Glasswell and me in his peripheral vision, in the uniquely Angeleno manner of being one brunch table down from Zendaya and pretending not to care.

  “Want a better view?” I ask the valet, stepping aside to offer him unobstructed access to Glasswell.

  “I—what?” the valet stammers.

  “Sorry,” Glasswell says. “We’ve had a rough night.”

  “Do you have your claim ticket?” the valet says.

  “I’m not even in line,” I say, thinking of my poor LEAF all the way back at the hotel. “I stopped here because there was a wall to lean on—”

  Glasswell looks at me. “It isn’t in your purse?”

  I wave him off. “I didn’t park here. You go ahead.”

  He smiles. “I’m happy to drive you home, Ms. Dusk. If you’d like.”

  There’s something in his voice that catches me off guard. A warm buzz spreads through my blood. Gently, he lifts my purse out of my hands. I watch as he opens the complicated vintage clasp—first the slide of pearl, then the twist of its gold-plated shell. It opens more easily in his hands than it ever has in mine. He reaches into the precise silk pocket—the one sewn under the label—where I keep valet tickets. And pulls one out.

  As he hands it to the valet, my eyes fall on my phone in my purse.

  “I’ll be right back,” I say to Glasswell as I slip around the corner. I swipe up on my phone’s lock screen. I don’t recognize the image—unknown mountain, unknown snow—but I can’t worry about that now. I’m seconds away from my mother’s soothing voice.

  Lorena will know what to do. I tap my Phone app, then the star for my Favorites, but I don’t see my mother’s name. In her place . . . is Glasswell.

  How did he get into my phone? I’ll kill him. This is one step too far.

  But it doesn’t end there. I don’t recognize any of my Favorites. Who are these people? Why does one of them go by “Eddie Redmayne”? There’s a panic rising in me that I can’t confront. Clues point in a direction very far from my world.

  Stay the course. Call your mother.

  I force myself to take a breath. I dial her cell.

  “Hello?” It’s a gruff voice. An older man’s voice. Not Lorena.

  “Who is this?” I say.

  “Who is this?” the man says.

  “Where’s my mother?”

  “Your mother?”

  “Lorena Dusk! Why are you answering her phone?”

  “I’ve never known a Lorena in my life.”

  “Well,” I say, sobs returning, “you should. She’s beautiful and kind and she has her own podcast—”

  “You have the wrong number—” the man says.

  “I produce the podcast,” I say, starting to hyperventilate. “I don’t read all the books like I should, but it’s our podcast and it doesn’t matter no one hears it and you need to put her on the phone right now!”

  I look at the phone and see the man’s hung up. I look past the phone, at the concrete, suddenly sensitive to its texture. I become dimly aware of my body’s reckoning with how terrified I feel. I can’t do this—whatever this is—without my mom. Without Masha.

  It’s only nine. I’ll get a Lyft. I’ll go to my old house. I’ll climb the stairs and enter the ice locker Lorena calls a bedroom. She’ll be wearing a silk robe with a thousand faceless people printed on it. She’ll be wearing retinol eye pads and watching The Thin Man on TCM. She’ll pat the empty side of her sleigh bed and I’ll climb in. I’ll give her the sign we invented after my dad died—one hand over the heart, one hand over the lips.

  Hold me when I don’t have words.

  A car horn sounds. Glasswell idles at the curb in a red Jag. He rolls down the window.

  “Did you fuck with the Contacts in my phone?” I say while the valet stands there staring, like this is a black box play for his amusement.

  “Come on, Liv,” Glasswell says, “let’s go home.” He pops open the passenger door.

  I decide to call his bluff. It’ll save me forty bucks on the Lyft ride to Lorena’s. I slide into the car.

  As Glasswell turns south out of the lot, I don’t reflect on what a failed evening tonight was. I rifle through my purse, looking for my keys. “Should I put the address into the GPS?”

  “You’re really taking this role-playing thing to the next level,” Glasswell smiles again, which doesn’t make any sense.

  My keys aren’t in my purse. I’m about to tell Glasswell to turn around—maybe I dropped them in the sand—but then I see a set of keys in the center console, attached to a tan and green valet tag. I pick them up. And suck in my breath. There’s the spark plug my dad gave me when I turned sixteen and got my license. The first key chain I ever had. Instead of my bent plastic Nissan key, this one holds a sleek black Jaguar fob. Along with several other keys I don’t recognize. What I don’t see—what I’m looking for—is the Magic 8 Ball chain bearing the key to my childhood door.

  “Can you just drop me at home?” I ask Glasswell, curling into a ball.

  “Where else is there to go?” he asks and squeezes my knee. His touch is brief, careless, but it sends the same sex wave through me as his breath did on my neck. I turn and find him watching the road like what he just did was nothing. But I still feel it in my toes.

  Glasswell touches the navigation screen and sets our course. I watch the cross streets of my neighborhood populate the screen. I see the dot on the map where my house sits inside the labyrinthine hills of Laurel Canyon. I don’t care how he knew my address. All that matters is I’m going home. We’re thirty-nine minutes away. The traffic looks easy. I can make it.

  Out my window the ocean is the same—original and endless. The beach-blown narrow mansions are familiar, too, as is the curve that dips beneath an underpass and grasps the south edge of the 10, the mile-wide artery that will pump me almost home. Maybe it was only the wedding where everything was out of whack.

  I make a mental inventory of the comforts I’ll gather around me the second I get home. Box of frozen pizza bagels. Freezer-door bottle of Cazadores. Six and a half unseen episodes of Stranger Things. Softest of chenille pajamas, a Christmas gift from Masha. Gram Parsons in the green knit sweater he wears on chilly canyon nights.

  If I can pile into my bed with all of the above, I will feel like myself. If I can make it to my bungalow, I intend never to complain about anything again.

  Glasswell handles the screen again, cueing up a song. I’d rather ride in silence, but when the opening words of Whitney Houston’s cover of “I Will Always Love You” come on, I’m too surprised to complain.

  I remember Lorena used to blast it in her Volvo 240 wagon, driving Masha and me to baseball games when we were kids. I remember Glasswell following me out of prom when this song came on . . .

  I try to roll down my window, but it’s locked. I look at Glasswell. He reads my need exactly. The window unlocks, I open it, hang out my heavy head, and sing. I sing to Masha and Eli, to the moon and the universal ocean, to Lorena, and my dad, and that old man on the phone. I get to the second verse, and belt out the line where Whitney wishes her beloved “joy and happiness.” But my voice breaks off before the next line.

  The line that wishes them love.

  Masha and I used to argue over what these lyrics meant. She claimed to find them profound. I thought they were funny, because they suggest that having love is more important than being happy. As a kid, I thought maybe I’d understand this line when I got older, but I still don’t.

  But then, Glasswell starts singing the line where I left off. His voice is a bright, surprising tenor. I stare at him. My eyes widen. Hearing him hit all the notes of love, then break into the stunning chorus—the meaning of the line finally lands.

  That joy and happiness are temporary. That love is . . . all the time.

  Where did this revelation come from? How did Glasswell’s voice AirDrop it to my brain? More importantly, why does it feel like he’s singing this, of all songs, to me?

  That’s when I know. The knowing curls up in my stomach, settling in for the long haul. This is bigger than a very bad night. Some piece of reality has been shaken loose. I’m not in the same world I woke up in.

  But where the hell am I? How did I get here? Why am I with Glasswell? What do I do?

  I want to ask him all these questions, but then again, I don’t. I reach for the button to set “I Will Always Love You” on Repeat.

  * * *

  • • • • • •

  When I feel the dark, romantic curves of Mulholland Drive, I open my eyes and gaze over Glasswell’s shoulder at the view. Mulholland is the highest street in LA, snaking the zenith of the Hollywood Hills, offering alternating views of downtown and the San Fernando Valley.

  When I was a baby and couldn’t sleep, my mom says she’d get in the car and just start driving. Usually she’d end up on Mulholland. This road, above all others, soothed me, soothed her. She used to tell me that an Angeleno’s never alone in pain or pleasure. And there’s no surer way to know that than looking out from this old, audacious road.

  There’s no better time to drive Mulholland than at night, no better view than the Valley’s distant, waving trees making house lights twinkle, the ground doing an impression of the sky. At the far edge of this dazzling expanse, the San Gabriel Mountains tear the horizon into sheaths.

  Now Glasswell veers down the steep palm and pine-lined path that leads to Laurel Canyon proper. Soon, I see the Gothic wall sconces of my landlord’s house and just beyond them, my near-invisible driveway. My body tenses with desire to get out of this car and be alone.

  “It’s right there,” I say, indicating where to turn, but Glasswell’s already missed it, like everybody does. My driveway’s narrow as a needle’s eye, especially at night. “Reverse!”

  “Did you fall asleep?” Glasswell says, turning up the driveway after mine. The driveway that leads to the top of the summit. To the mansion up the hill from my backyard.

  “No—” I start to say. But then Glasswell slows before vast gates and presses a button above the rearview mirror.

  The gates swing open wide.

  My jaw drops.

  “What are you doing?” I ask. I point down the driveway, down the hill, down the far side of the wheel of fortune. “My house is . . .”

  A smile begins in Glasswell’s eyes. “Yes . . . ?”

  I should stop talking. All the things I used to know have become question marks. Each new protest out of my mouth makes me sound more bananas. And Glasswell seems very confident that I don’t live where I think I live. Where I woke up this morning, and every morning for the past three years.

  He’s still driving—there is so much driveway to drive up, I see for the first time. We approach a wide French-style fountain and a detached four-car garage. The garage door rises. There’s a Porsche Taycan, a Lucid Air, and two Zero motorcycles inside.

  “When did he buy this place?” I whisper as the knowing inside of me balloons. Still, I don’t want to face what it’s trying to tell me. I wouldn’t know how to face it if I did.

  On unsteady legs, I get out of the car and close the door. I breathe in the musty smell of the dark garage, which somehow is familiar. Though I’ve definitely never been up here, I feel like I’ve seen these rakes and shovels, these surfboards on ceiling-mounted racks.

  At the door that leads outside, Glasswell turns back, waiting for me. “You coming?”

  I need to see my bungalow. I need to know how deep this rupture with reality is.

  “I’m exhausted,” I say, “so I think I’ll just . . .” I gesture toward the slope of hill that leads down to my hobbit hole.

  “Crash on the hanging daybed?” he says dubiously. “I don’t know. A lot of wildlife out there.”

  Since when does he care if I get scratched by a racoon? “Good night.”

  He blinks. “You’re really not coming in?”

  “Not even if I were blackout drunk,” I say. Which I very well might be.

  He sighs, rubs the space between his eyes. “I don’t get it. But you know where to find me.”

  I watch him turn and walk toward the faux-Loire chateau.

  Only after he’s gone do I realize I don’t know how to get out at the gate. I wander the yard, looking for the fastest route down. It’s lush with laurel trees and jacarandas. Fanning from the pool is a vast deck from which it looks like you could take a running leap and hang glide to your massage appointment in West Hollywood.

  An iron fence looped with twinkling lights lines the perimeter of the lawn. This fence looks over into my backyard. I’ve only ever seen it from below. I rise on my toes, hold my breath, and look down.

  The lamp I always leave on in the kitchen casts a warm glow out the window. My heart swells at the sight, and I want to be inside, locking doors and drawing curtains. But I hear voices. Voices coming from my property. People sliding open my back door.

  “Stop!” I shout. “Thief!”

  They don’t hear me, of course. The distance and the echo are too far. And quickly, I realize this is for the best, because now a woman emerges from my back door carrying—

  A candlelit birthday cake.

  The happy birthday song carries up the canyon. She places the cake before a man, and a troop of guests applaud as he blows out the candles. Someone cuts the cake. They all sit down and eat. Leisurely. Like they own the place.

  My gaze gropes around the yard and finds the furniture is different. There’s a cold metal table instead of my warm teak one. A grill where my hammock used to be. Thick cotton maroon drapes where white lace curtains hung this morning.

  A different dog runs across the yard.

  My stomach twists. “Oh my God. Where is Gram Parsons?”

  The birthday boy flips a switch that sends a white shaft of light through the canyon, illuminating the cliff twenty feet down the hill from where I stand. Trumpets blare—the unmistakable fanfare of a Twentieth Century Fox film.

  They’re projecting Gwyneth’s Great Expectations on my cliff!

  But it isn’t mine. Not here. Not anymore. That much is clear.

  I spin away and fall to my knees. Across the yard, on the other side of the pool, I see Glasswell through wide glass French doors.

  He’s in a gorgeous kitchen, brightly lit. He’s changed into a white T-shirt and black joggers. He’s cooking something on a steaming range.

  He lives up here.

  And those birthday burglars live down there.

  Where do I live?

  The room next to Glasswell’s kitchen is also lit, also exposed by broad French doors. It’s a library—an exquisite one, lined with books on three walls. I see some expensive-looking leather-bound editions and some very cool art books, but my gaze is pulled toward the top shelf of the far-left corner of the room. Something looks familiar.