The sideways truck, its doors flung open. I see about ten men gathered around it, scratching their chins. And what must be a thousand foil-wrapped tacos splayed out all over the street. I sense the rush hour traffic, compounding in size exponentially by the minute.

  “We’ve got carnitas,” Jake’s voice soothes from above. “We’ve got chicken mole. We’ve got a spicy shrimp, which I’m told is wild caught. It’s wild to catch it here, anyway! We’ve got potato and poblano for you vegans out there. Don’t be shy! All these delicious tacos are a steal at just one dollar each! Why? Because the City of Angels needs us tonight, to do our part, clear this road, and be on our way.”

  Smaller details come into focus as I look around. There’s an uncanny order to the crowd. Are they being shepherded by hidden production assistants from Everything’s Jake? Have they all signed waivers to be extras?

  The line of pedestrians patiently snakes around the palm tree where Jake is perched. When they reach the front, they gather tacos. They pay for them. Then they go back toward their cars.

  “You’ll see Enrique’s Venmo handle right there on the truck,” Jake is saying. “Don’t forget to tip. He’s had a bad day, but we’re gonna make it better for him, right?”

  “We love you, Enrique!” someone screams.

  I shade my eyes with my hand to study Jake in his very bizarre element. He’s working the intersection like I watched him work Oprah and that panel of Everything’s Jake fans, but something’s different about Jake right now. Maybe it’s just that I’m witnessing it in person, not through a screen, but I can see a light inside him. He looks fully alive, the way I used to feel when I performed. Like my soul was wide awake, open to discover anything. That’s why I wanted to be an actor. Not for money or fame, though it seems, in this life, that’s what I got. What it seems I lost somewhere along the way . . . was this, what I see in Jake right now. He’s having fun.

  It makes me wonder. Maybe I was never meant to make it to Santa Monica tonight. Never meant to stand on a beach and—in all probability—fail to get back home. Maybe I’m meant to be right where I am, now. Maybe there’s something here I’m supposed to see.

  I study Jake. Who knows what this is all about. My mom would say: take the message, Liv, and then hang up the phone. I want to hang up, but—

  “What’s the message, Jake?” I ask aloud.

  “There’s someone special whom we all need to thank,” he says, then points to an older lady in a hot pink dress standing below him on the sidewalk. “This is Elena, our volunteer salsa barista. She’s visiting from Dallas, and she thought she was going to see Hamilton tonight . . . instead, she’s here with all of us, helping out. So be kind when she ladles out your habanero sauce.”

  “Elena is everything!” someone shouts and Elena gives the crowd a laughing wave.

  Fenny nudges me, suddenly at my side. “You clearly married very well,” she says, nodding at Jake. “I’ll go get us some tacos?”

  “Uh-huh,” I squeak. I think about how that teen girl and her mom didn’t know the name Jake Glasswell. I think about someone else confusing him for the father of a pregnant woman. Even Fenny’s comment confuses me, because it doesn’t seem like she was referencing Jake’s wealth or fame. It seems like she was referencing just Jake.

  A niggling feeling creeps up my chest.

  “And let’s not forget our cause, everyone,” Jake says into the megaphone. “The reason we’re working together to expedite things. Give it up for Julie over here.” He gestures toward an orange Jeep, just behind the light at Highland. I squint to see a very pregnant woman in the passenger seat.

  “How you doing, Julie?” Jake asks.

  Out her window, she calls something at Jake and gives him a weak thumbs-up.

  “Julie’s about to have a beautiful set of twins,” Jake announces. “A boy and a girl. We don’t know their names yet, but just as soon as we get Enrique and his tacos cleared, she’ll be able to get to the hospital.”

  The niggling feeling is getting stronger.

  “Julie’s taking deep breaths, everybody,” Jake says. “Let’s all join her in taking a deep breath now.”

  I let my own chest rise and fall in a few deep breaths led by Jake. It helps. A little.

  “You got this, Julie!” someone shouts across the intersection.

  “Breathe, Mama!” a woman calls from a convertible.

  “Julie, do you have another song request?” Jake asks the orange Jeep.

  I watch him lean out a little further in the palm tree to hear her words. He nods.

  “Julie would not say no to a little Dirty Dancing soundtrack, everybody,” Jake says. “So can someone with a Spotify account please get these babies out of the corner?”

  A second later, a beamer on the east side of Hollywood Blvd starts blasting “(I’ve Had) The Time of My Life.” The taco line cheers, and by the time the song rolls into its first verse, it’s a full-on dance party in the street.

  On shaking legs, I move closer, into the intersection. I must stand out as the only person not dancing, because that’s when Jake finds me in the crowd.

  I stop walking in the middle of the street. I stare at him. He stares at me. A sense of knowing ripples through me, the answer to the questions just beyond my grasp.

  His face lights up, like someone flipped a switch. I blink and feel a corresponding switch flip in me. He just saw me this morning, and expected to see me tonight, and still, it matters to him this much that our eyes have met, like I’m a touchstone for him.

  I find myself thinking that must be nice. For him. For High Life Olivia. That seems like not a bad way to feel about your spouse.

  But I am not his spouse. And I don’t understand what’s going on here. I raise my hands like what the fuck?

  He grins. He waves. He shrugs.

  Like he can’t believe it either, but he’ll roll with it. With anything.

  And that’s when I know. This isn’t a stunt. This is a natural phenomenon. On the ground: an honest car accident.

  And up in that tree? That’s just Jake, being Jake.

  With shaking hands, I take out my phone and google Jake Glasswell.

  His ancient Twitter feed. A wedding website the two of us apparently made ourselves, which I’ll have to look at later. A LinkedIn page announcing vaguely that he’s a “writer/producer.”

  And then, scrolling down, I see a very basic website for a food truck.

  Jake Au Jus, specializing in unusual French dip sandwiches.

  I click the link.

  Merde! We’re closed, the landing page proclaims, next to a picture of Jake, waving from inside the kitchen of a small red truck. He’s wearing a chef’s hat and a goofy adhesive handlebar mustache that somehow makes him look even cuter. He’s smiling, but I see wistfulness in his eyes. It hits me that I—or High Life Olivia—probably took this picture. But for what? Jake didn’t actually have a food truck, did he?

  I type Jake Glasswell talk show with increasing urgency as a man in front of me dips his girlfriend Patrick Swayze style.

  It looks like there aren’t many great matches for your search, the internet enlightens me. A heavy pit forms in my stomach as I confront an unsettling truth.

  Jake is showless in this life.

  He isn’t famous. He’s just Jake. Husband. “Writer/Producer.” Failed French dip slinger. Megaphone-wielding Good Samaritan in a palm tree.

  I watch him now, chatting with some people in line for tacos at the base of his tree. When Jake mentioned “the show” this morning, I leapt to the only logical conclusion: that he was talking about Everything’s Jake. But if there’s no show, what was that podcast gear for? Is “Ben” a real producer . . . or just a buddy Jake hatched an idea with? Are we looking at a Lorena-and-Olivia-level winging-it situation?

  Further to that: Do all those dollars in our bank account . . . come from me?

  I stare at him and all that charisma. What’s Jake’s deal in this life?

  His fame, his fortune, his stratospheric success. Where is it?

  What if, when we kissed at prom, it took everything from him? And all he gets is . . . me? That could never be enough.

  A cheer sounds from the street. Startled from my thoughts, I see that the men have somehow righted the truck just as the tacos are cleared from the street. Elena is helping Enrique pack up the salsa bar. People are taking selfies with Jake in the background, with the truck, with Julie, who is doing Lamaze in the Jeep.

  One of the men who’d been working on the truck runs to the Jeep and hops in the driver’s seat. Everyone applauds. I see that he’s the actual father, that he lifted an actual truck out of the road for his wife and future children on the day they would be born. Their family will tell that story for generations. And Jake will be a part of it.

  A police escort on a motorcycle finally reaches the intersection. Soon he’s guiding Julie’s Jeep across Hollywood Blvd. People are cheering, laughing, and some are crying as they make their way back to their cars. Fenny finds me in the mayhem, handing me a paper sack of tacos. She gives me a hug.

  “You gonna stay with Jake?” she asks.

  I look at him in the tree. He’s watching me, and I know there’s only one answer. “Yeah. Thanks for the lift, Fenny.”

  “I’ll never forget it,” she says. “See you on set.”

  The traffic jam unjams. And soon the corner is quiet, or as quiet as it ever gets, and I’m at the base of the palm tree looking up at Jake. I feel jittery with adrenaline, amazed, and brimming with questions about how we ended up here.

  “Hey, baby.” His unmegaphoned voice sends a shiver through me. “So that was crazy.”

  “Crazy,” I agree. “And you were . . .” I search for the right words. I can’t find them.

  “I—”

  “You—”

  “Liv, I can’t get down.”

  “What?”

  “I need help. I’m stuck.”

  “Oh! You can’t get down!” I forgot. Jake is scared of heights. I think back to his public panic attack on Everything’s Jake, the climbing wall. I remember Aurora talking shit at him from on high.

  “Oh God,” he says, sounding ill. “This is high school all over again.”

  “High school?”

  “At least then I had the foresight not to climb the trellis,” he says, like I should know what he means.

  And then, I do.

  The trellis. The set for the audition of Romeo and Juliet. Our senior year. I wrote about it in my diary. When I’d seen Jake take one look at me up on the balcony and flee the stage.

  That’s why he’d bailed. He was scared of heights.

  “When I saw that woman in labor,” he explains now, “I leapt before I looked.”

  I put my hands on the tree trunk, wishing I could take his place up there. “You did good, Jake,” I say sincerely. “And you’re going to make it down. Inch by inch. I’ll be here.”

  He swallows. Nods. He holds my gaze, and I see it flow between us, that he can take my support for granted, that it alone will get him out of this tree.

  A sense of power washes over me. It’s a feeling I haven’t known before, something warm and steady in my heart. For the first time since I landed in the High Life, I let myself enjoy a moment’s well-needed peace.

  “You can do it,” I say gently. “Deep breaths. Just like Julie.”

  He cracks a smile, then gets still. We both take a deep breath, and Jake seems, suddenly, ready to try.

  * * *

  • • • • • •

  It takes him almost twenty minutes to descend the tree trunk. His face is pale and damp with sweat, and when he’s four feet off the ground, he panics and drops. Right into my arms. We both thud to the pavement, laughing and only a little bruised. Jake helps me up. He wraps his arms around me and heat fills my chest, my face, my belly. Jake looks down at me and I look up at him, our lips inches apart.

  We’re going to kiss. We’re going to do it. I feel like a firework near a lit match, on the brink of going off. Exploding. Lighting up the sky.

  Something buzzes on Jake’s watch.

  He starts laughing, pulls away from me. And I’m a little let down. I catch my breath as he says:

  “We can still make it!”

  “Huh?”

  “Ben’s inside with Mark.” He points at Grauman’s theater. “They missed the whole thing with the truck, but they’re saving our seats.”

  “What seats?” I ask. Who are Ben and Mark?

  “For the movie!” Jake laughs and pulls two tickets out of his pocket.

  I hold his wrist to read the tickets. His skin is warm and I can feel his pulse, racing like mine.

  Grauman’s Chinese Theatre. A revival of the Audrey Hepburn/Albert Finney classic Two for the Road, which I love.

  We were never going to a red-carpet premiere tonight. Because Jake isn’t famous. We were going to the movies with a couple of friends. We still are.

  “We’ll have to scrap dinner until after,” Jake says, “but if we hurry, we can make the opening credits.”

  Now I grin and wave the sack of tacos Fenny gave me, because sometimes the cosmos is kind. “I took care of dinner.”

  Jake grins and puts an arm around me. Together we walk toward the theater.

  “Is this a perfect night,” he says, “or what?”

  Chapter Sixteen

  I awake in the cocoon again. This time, I’m on my side, facing Jake, who’s still asleep. I take in his sculpted cheekbones, long eyelashes, and lips that could divest me of my secrets. Gazing at the muscles of his shoulder, I’m overcome with desire to reach out and touch him. I pin my hands under my back and let the sunrise sweep over his features.

  It’s not like I didn’t know Jake was gorgeous before. But after last night, he looks different. I see the man behind the beauty, and he’s kind, with depths I hadn’t imagined.

  What happened last night at the taco truck traffic jam was a shock to my whole system. The way Jake rose to the occasion, the way he helped all those people—who he simply was—it unraveled the threads in my Coat of Many Reasons to Hate Glasswell. The one I’d worn for a decade. The one I thought I might feel naked without.

  This morning I’m beginning to entertain the possibility that I’ve been wrong about everything. Even—and especially—high school. Jake hadn’t walked out of that Romeo and Juliet audition ten years ago because he’d seen me on the balcony. He’d walked out because he’d been scared to climb the trellis. I see now that he hadn’t wanted to play Romeo for the star power or the attention. He’d wanted to be the guy who got to kiss me.

  And I shut him down.

  In one reality, Jake took the hint and backed off, coming close to but not quite kissing me at prom.

  In another reality . . . I leaned in, and here we are.

  Some version of Jake knew we should be this all along. But what can any of that teach me about how to get home?

  That’s the question I must keep in mind. I lost sight of it last night. Though thankfully I kept my wits enough about me that I went home alone right after the movie, while Jake and his friends went out for drinks. I saw the two of us coming home together, tipsy and tumbling into our marital bed.

  And we can’t do that.

  Sex with Jake while I’m this mixed up would be a bad idea.

  Is it an incredibly hot bad idea? Sure. Do I wonder how deep-in-love Jake moves in this large, luxurious bed? I’m only human. Are his abs so tight that he possesses the ancient Trojan musculature known as the inguinal crease between his torso and his waist? Ding-ding-ding.

  But the danger signs flashing all around me are too glaring to ignore. Letting Jake in would alter everything, in ways impossible to predict.

  When I heard him come home around midnight, I pretended to be asleep. In truth, I’d been on my phone. I binged all three episodes of his podcast, which is called Clean Slate. In the show, his cohost, a psychologist, shares current research on emotionally intelligent masculinity, which Jake rounds out with personal accounts of his struggles with his own father, who he lost touch with at eighteen. The episodes were gripping, and I heard the unspoken questions inside each of them—

  Do I have the curse? Am I destined to repeat my dad’s mistakes?

  I heard how he’s hurting and hopeful and vulnerable, just like everyone else in the world. I heard his gift for opening himself up for the greater good. He’s talented, even when he isn’t famous. But is he happy? Does he not sense all the great things he’s missing in another realm?

  After I listened to the podcast, I opened TikTok on a whim and started typing in Hollywood and Highland—

  Hollywood and Highland Taco-Debaco autocompleted, and I clicked.

  It led me to a video someone had taken while everyone was dancing to “(I’ve Had) The Time of My Life.” The camera panned from the line of taco customers to the men working on Enrique’s truck, to Jake up in the tree. The caption over the reel reads Expectant Father Saves the Day! Clears Epic Traffic Jam for His Wife in Labor.

  I laughed at the mischaracterization of Jake’s role, but I watched it ten times, zooming in on his perfect, charismatic smile, on his complete comfort guiding a difficult crowd to a happy resolution. Of course people guessed he was the father. Otherwise, he’s just some random guy, too good to be true.

  I was wide awake when Jake came into bed. Buzzing with questions about how this version of him never found the success baked into him back home. I acted like I was sleeping, but I didn’t hate it when he wrapped me in his arms.

  And I don’t hate waking up in them now.

  His eyes open like he heard my thoughts.

  “Big day,” he smiles. His gaze runs from my eyes down to my lips. “I refuse to be distracted by how sexy you are in the morning.”