Anton, as usual, got right to the point: “Go to Bloomingdale’s at Beverly Center. Women’s section. Ask for Binx. She will—”

“Blink?”

“Binx. B-I-N-X.”

“What kind of name is that?”

“It’s a name. Jesus, you and your questions.” He sighed, his breath exploding against the receiver. Something Anton despised, his stickmen asking questions. “She will give you clothes. Meet me tonight, at eight, place called Inge in Beverly Hills.”

Click, and he was gone.

CHAPTER 16

AVA LIVED IN what the people in Sebastian’s business called a “dramatic contemporary.” The description was certainly accurate. Her home, a modern architectural marvel of stone and glass, sat on half an acre high above Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood Hills West, and featured dramatic and stunning ocean views. Sebastian came out here, to the spot where he now stood, because it offered him a direct line of sight to the side and back of the house, with its lower-level lounge and infinity pool and space. Because the home was constructed mostly of glass that stretched from floor to ceiling, he had a good, solid view into the majority of the rooms.

He dreamed about Ava often now, their time together and the good memories—all of it had been resurrected in the days following his attempted assassination. Sebastian felt oddly reborn, and he’d had this need to search for her. After an hour’s worth of work he found out she was still living in LA. He found her address.

Finding out personal, intimate stuff was trickier. Ava wasn’t on any social media, which he thought was strange until he remembered how fiercely private, like he was, she had been when they were together. When they were teenagers, she’d had no desire to use her phone to post pictures and every single detail about her life for the world to see. She was still that way now, it seemed.

Her twenty-two-year-old daughter was another story. She posted everything about her life. Using hacks Frank had taught him years ago, Sebastian learned Ava was separated from her husband. A search of public records revealed she had divorced Charles early this year, in January.

His mother’s steadfast belief in God, and all the time he’d spent with her at church, hadn’t instilled much in the way of faith. If God did, in fact, exist, He was a lot like Sebastian’s father—a sperm donor who had given him the gift of life and then left, never to be seen or heard from again. Then came the miracle—and it was a miracle—of getting his life sentence overturned. Then, in AA, he learned to form a God of his understanding—sort of a Build-A-Bear approach to spirituality—and what Sebastian came to believe was that things did happen for a reason. And maybe the reason behind getting shot was to wake him up to the fact that he wasn’t fully living out his true life’s purpose. He didn’t think it was a coincidence that he’d been thinking about Ava the moment he was shot.