Something in my periphery catches my attention. I look starboard and see a fishing boat gliding over the waves, out on a morning troll.

  When the boat draws nearer, I make out the word Tongva on its hull. I blink, incredulous, and then, looking closer, I see a man and a woman on board, both wearing baseball caps. The man’s cap has the Italian flag on it. The woman’s cap features the three-legged symbol of Sicily.

  I gulp.

  Masha and Eli.

  I stand instinctively. Fate has entered the chat.

  “Are you alright?” Lucia asks in a Spanish accent.

  “That’s my . . . friend,” I mumble and climb out of the hot tub. I unhook Gram Parsons from the handrail and pick him up, offering a prayer of gratitude for his life vest. The Tongva is very close—no more than fifty feet away, stern-by-starboard.

  I find myself standing on the starboard railing, Gram Parsons in my arms. Behind me somewhere I hear Fenny shouting, “Olivia, no!”

  Then all I hear is water, all around me. I surface in the cold Pacific with Gram Parsons bobbing beside me, and swim like crazy toward my best friend.

  * * *

  • • • • • •

  “What the hell are you doing here?” Masha asks as Eli hoists Gram Parsons and me onto the Tongva.

  “Surprise?” I try jazz hands.

  “No,” Masha says. “I’m jet-lagged, and your face isn’t helping.”

  As Eli throws a towel around Gram Parsons and me, I recognize Brandy’s “Sittin’ Up in My Room” coming from a Bluetooth speaker. On deck cushions I see remnants of a galbi feast, crushed cans of PBR on the side.

  “I like your style,” I say to Masha.

  “Where’s Jake?” Eli asks.

  I turn and look at the Wet Dream, where the crowd on the deck is now dispersing—all except for Aurora, who stands at the railing, her arms crossed, glowering at me.

  “Jake’s home,” I say. “I think.”

  “Well, he can come get you,” Masha says.

  This is going to be about as hard as I thought. In my arms, Gram Parsons shakes off, getting dry.

  “You have a dog now,” Masha says. “There should be tougher laws on who’s allowed to own animals.”

  “This is Gram Parsons,” I say, extending his paw to shake hands. “He’d love to hear about your honeymoon.”

  “Ugh,” Masha says and spins away. “I told Eli this was going to happen—”

  “You told Eli I was going to swim from a yacht to your rented fishing boat on the high seas off of Catalina Island?”

  “I didn’t predict all the specifics,” Masha says, “but I wasn’t far off. Eli didn’t believe me. I called this as soon as I saw the Instagram pictures of the baseball game. I knew you’d use the one week I’m away, on my fucking honeymoon no less, to weasel your way onto the Yankees.”

  “It was an accident—”

  “How do you accidentally play baseball on your enemy’s team?”

  My eyes widen. “You are not my enemy.”

  Masha laughs at the sky like Captain Ahab. “Since when?”

  “Since we were Broken Bone Sisters.”

  “Don’t you dare use that phrase.”

  “Masha. Please. Let me tell you my story.”

  “I know your story, Olivia. It’s in Us Weekly every month when I get manicures.”

  “You don’t know this one,” I say. “It’s truer and crazier than anything I’ve ever said.”

  We look at each other, and her eyes look so much like my favorite person’s eyes that it’s hard to watch her look at me and see nothing of our lifelong happy bond. But even this Masha used to. Once upon a time, even this Masha was my Masha. We were the same pair of best friends, until I left for New York and we drifted apart and then, somehow, things between us got accusatory and defensive. But the longer we lock eyes, the closer I get to that flicker of connection, the inner flame of friendship that nothing can extinguish. Gram Parsons whines in anticipation. Masha swallows and looks at her phone.

  “Five minutes. You can re-bait my hook—”

  “Mash,” Eli says warily. “You sure?”

  I smile and hand Masha Gram Parsons, whom she allows to lick her nose before setting him down at his favorite place near the stern. On some level, in some realm, my dog and my BBS know each other. And in this simple exchange I can feel it. The way, every now and then, one life echoes another, like how a melody in a guitarist’s hands was formed by fingers in another space and time.

  “Where’s the bait?” I ask.

  Eli unzips his Los Angeles Ballet fleece, throws it to me. “I’ll be in the cabin,” he says to Masha. “Call if you need me.”

  In a Styrofoam cooler I find fresh skipjack tuna on ice. “Do you have any Party Skirts?” I ask.

  “In the tacklebox,” Masha says.

  I thread the pink and purple bristles through the eye cavity of the skipjack. Then I hook the dead fish through the gills. Before I cast the bait into the water, I hold it up for Masha to see.

  “Just like Lea Thompson in Some Kind of Wonderful,” I say. The BBS have watched that movie sixty-seven times. Then I do my best Mary Stuart Masterson: “ ‘You break his heart, I’ll break your face.’ ”

  “Liv, don’t,” Masha says.

  “How was your honeymoon?” I ask.

  “Great,” Masha says, like she’s answering someone at the DMV.

  “I missed you.” The words slip out, and I hear how obvious it is that I mean it. I see Masha hear it, too. Whether or not she wants to admit it, she knows me.

  She sighs. “What’s all this about, Olivia?”

  Though I practiced my approach several times with Fenny, I find myself speaking from the heart.

  “A week ago, at your wedding, something happened.”

  “I know,” she says. “I could have handled that better—”

  “That’s not what I’m talking about,” I say. “From what I’ve learned in the last week, I don’t blame you for what you said at the wedding. For the past ten years, you and I have been living in two completely different realities.”

  Masha rolls her eyes at the ocean. “Here we go. The pressures of the rich and famous.”

  “Mash,” I plead, badly wanting to take her hand, to seize her shoulders, to reach her somehow. “Please listen to me. Here’s the thing. In the reality I’ve been living in, we’re still best friends.”

  She sighs. “Olivia, if that’s what you wanted—and sure, there was a time when I wanted our friendship back, too—then you wouldn’t have dropped me when you left home. You might have made time for—”

  “I’m not being clear enough,” I say. “The Olivia you know . . .” I pause, unfamiliar with the details of how I dropped her. “Does the word sucks cover it?”

  Masha nods.

  “But I’m talking about an actually different reality. Like a waking dream, or science fiction. Where you wake up in a house you don’t recognize and a life you don’t understand. It happened to me. It’s happening now. And where I come from? Where I really live?” I take a stabilizing breath. “It’s not just that we’re best friends, Masha. You’re my favorite part of my life. I don’t have a lot else there, but even if I did, you’d still be my favorite part.”

  She looks at me. “I don’t understand.”

  “We get tacos at Guisados on Tuesdays and we go Christmas tree shopping at the crack of dawn on Black Friday. We see every Marvel movie in the theater, and we’re saving for a trip to Egypt. The last time you went fishing was a week ago when I took you out on this boat and played this music and served this beer and ate these ribs. And when you reminisced about my dad, you let your eyes get misty, and I did too, and we both knew it wasn’t so much about my dad as that whole era when our lives were laid out before us like wrapped gifts we could shake but not yet fully know. You caught a big ass halibut and it was awesome. You were happy and you were scared about your wedding. And I was your maid of honor, and you had this tiny perfect ceremony with eighteen people and a gold palette and a celebrity yogi officiant.”

  Masha’s jaw drops. “That’s the wedding I wanted.”

  “I know,” I say as goose bumps fleck my arms. “And it was all going perfectly, until your officiant—”

  She cuts me off. “No one believed me—”

  “I know, your mom said if you went with a non-rabbi officiant, you’d rue the day—”

  “Rue the day,” Masha says at the same time.

  “In the life I’m coming from,” I tell Masha, “I pulled your mom aside in her backyard and spoke to her.”

  “What’d you say?”

  “I said, ‘The rue is due to you.’ ”

  A smile teases the corners of her mouth.

  “I don’t understand,” Masha says. “How did you know? I didn’t even tell Eli. He couldn’t have told Jake.”

  “Because I was there. I was there for all of it.”

  “No, you weren’t. You were too busy. Too important. And you have been for a long time.”

  “I’m a Lyft driver, and a bad waitress, and a furloughed part-time drama teacher. I’m single and can barely make my rent. I know in your version of reality, that’s not the Olivia you know, but having lived in her shoes for this past week, I really have to tell you that even that Olivia is not too busy and certainly not too important for you. For our friendship. She really misses you, Masha. All the time.”

  “What about Jake?” Masha says.

  “What about him?”

  “You said on the planet you come from you’re single. When did you two break up?”

  “We were never together. We’re more or less strangers.”

  “That’s not possible,” Masha says. “I can maybe believe the rest, but I don’t think there’s a force strong enough to keep you and Jake apart.”

  “That’s really nice,” I say.

  “I wasn’t trying to be nice. I hate your relationship. It cost me my best friend.”

  “Masha, you know how in The NeverEnding Story, Bastian enters the book?”

  “Yeah. The book needs him to kill the Nothing.”

  I take a deep breath, about to drop the most insane part of my hypothesis. “I think kissing Jake Glasswell at prom is my NeverEnding Story. And my Nothing.”

  “You mean—”

  “In the life I’ve been living these past ten years, we didn’t kiss. We actually got in a fight and I never spoke to him again—well, not until I saw him at your wedding last week.”

  “And then what happened?”

  “I was standing before him at your altar—maid of honor, best man positions, you know. And your yogi officiant, who in this life is somehow a rabbi—”

  “Rabbi Dan? Who married us? Hangs out at the weed café?”

  I close my eyes. “That’s the one. He did something. He said some words about lives being inextricably entwined, and the next thing I knew, I was in a different dress, a different life, in a marriage to a stranger—and I was a pariah at your wedding. In your life. My mom won’t even speak to me.” I start to cry. “I hate it here. I want to go home. But—”

  “But you’re in love with Jake,” she whispers, tears streaming down her cheeks.

  “But I’m in love with Jake,” I wail. “So I’ve been trying to figure out how to stay. I thought if I could make up with you, and my mom—and let me just say, the attempt with my mom went twenty times worse than this, if you can believe it.”

  “I can . . . I heard the podcast on the way here.” She sighs. “So you’re having to choose between true love—I mean, I suspect that’s what it is, right?”

  “The truest.”

  “And what you say is a true bond with your mother and best friend. It’s an existential crossroads. I can see why you’re here.”

  “There’s one more thing about the other life.”

  “What?”

  “Jake is very famous.”

  Masha laughs.

  “No, he is. He could probably run for president. Most of the country is as in love with him as I am here, and I feel like I’m robbing them of the joy of him, robbing him of the chance to live out that amazing experience.”

  “Is he happy?”

  “I have no idea. We’re not in touch, so it’s not like I’d know.”

  “Is he happy here, with you? I know what it looks like from the outside, but you can never really know.”

  “He’s happy. Almost nauseatingly happy.”

  Masha leans over and pukes off the side of the boat.

  “What was that?” I ask.

  She makes a retching face.

  “You don’t get seasick,” I say. “You have a stomach of steel.”

  “Had a stomach of steel,” she groans and wipes her mouth.

  I hand her a PBR . . . which she holds and doesn’t open.

  “Hang on—”

  Pale-faced, Masha smiles.

  “How long?” I ask.

  “Six weeks.”

  Ecstasy spreads through me and I scream. I throw my arms around Masha, who goes stiff. “Let go.”

  “Sorry, I forgot,” I say. “You like to hug where I come from.”

  She looks at me sadly. “You really love me where you come from.”

  “Take the love you can remember from high school,” I say. “Square it twice for every year since we stopped being friends.”

  “Go home, Olivia,” she says.

  “What?”

  “What you just said—that weird math of love—it sounds really nice. I’m jealous that you have that. I’m jealous that you know an us with that history, that bond. Even if you and I patched things up—and I am going to have to sit with that possibility for a while—there’d still be this big decade-long gap that we’d be missing. There’d still be a whole lot of pain to move through. Which isn’t an issue in your reality. Not to mention your mom. I know you have a lot of money, but your show . . .”

  “It’s so bad.”

  “Awful. I’m sure you can navigate a new career,” Masha says. “That’s the least of your worries.”

  “So that only leaves . . .” I can’t even say it. I’m too sad.

  “Jake?”

  I nod.

  “Listen, you’ve told me some crazy shit today, and I’m having to stretch my mind to accommodate it. And I can—actually, I really can. There’s just one thing I can’t imagine, and that’s a world where you and Jake don’t end up together.”

  I stare at Masha, wanting her words to be true. But it feels terrifying.

  “Tell him the truth. Go home and tell him everything you told me. Bring him out on a boat and hold him captive in international waters until he believes you. It’s not the worst move.” She raises one shoulder. “Then you can start your romance that very minute. And it won’t be tied up in this invisible darkness, like losing your mom and me. It can be pure and strong and whole.”

  “You don’t understand,” I say. “Jake is so out of my league—”

  She waves me off. “Yeah, I’m not receiving that. And I don’t even like you. I mean, I sort of like you. But I know love when I see it. You and Jake are the real thing. You’ll make it on the flip side, too.”

  Gram Parsons crawls onto my lap, sensing a breakthrough. I rub the ridge between his eyes and smile at Masha. “You see, that is exactly what the real Masha would say in this situation—”

  “Don’t real-Masha me. I’m the real Masha.”

  “Got it. Yes.” I nod and let out my breath. “Mash, do you think there’s any chance that I could just stay here and work really hard at friendship with you, and you could help me—”

  “Olivia, go home.”

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  I find the note on the kitchen counter in our empty house. It’s written on hotel stationery from the Hotel Fasano in Rio de Janeiro.

  Liv,

  Went to Zuma to clear my head. Packed your board. I’ll be at our spot.

  Love,

  J

  P.S. Sunset’s at 6:14.

  What I’m not used to about marriage—at least this particular marriage—is that a person can be mad at their spouse and still want to see them. Jake and I haven’t made up. I owe him several deep apologies for how I behaved in Catalina. Still, I feel between the lines of his note the undertow of his love.

  It touches me and amazes me and stumps me (where is our spot?). And even though I’ve never mounted a surfboard in my life, I know I’ll be there, wearing a wet suit and my heart on my sleeve.

  I picture Jake writing this note: hips pressed lightly against the counter, one beautiful bare foot crossed over the other, sexy reading glasses on. I can see the way his elegant fingers held the pen. There’s a ring of condensation on the marble countertop from his tangerine La Croix.

  I look through the kitchen window, yearning to remember our stay at the Fasano hotel. I wish I could access what the shampoo smelled like, whether we had an ocean or a garden view. Did our luggage get lost? What carefree Brazilian clothes did we buy in the meantime? I want to remember making love at sunrise, on fancy sheets after a sultry night of samba in secret clubs.

  But this stationery sparks no memories. There’s no nostalgia in its fibers. I feel only blankness, a cold and empty hole. As good as it feels to be with Jake, I’m not a part of his past. I need to find Yogi Rabbi Dan and go home.

  But first, one more sunset with my perfect husband.

  I feed Gram Parsons and head toward the master suite to change. I want to pack this evening’s beauty into my heart like a souvenir I can keep with me forever. One night away from him, and I’m so jittery to reunite I feel like I’ve shotgunned seven cups of coffee.

  How will I make it if I go home? If I have to spend the rest of my life without him?

  I face myself in the bathroom mirror. “Maybe I don’t have to. Maybe I can stay.” But not even my reflection looks convinced.