Ever shifted slightly, and she could see, almost feel, the musculature under his shirt. He gestured to a small stone bench with lion’s claw feet. “Do you want to sit?”

She joined him, and they sat staring out into the garden. Even at a distance, the heat from the flames in the fire pit warmed Izzy’s skin.

“Why did you come?” he asked. “I mean, I guess I’m supposed to know just by looking into your eyes for half an hour.”

He didn’t seem like the rest of these people, although she wasn’t a hundred percent sure she could trust her judgment. Still. “My boyfriend went missing,” she told Ever. “I thought something really bad—but it looks like he just took off. And I found out that a few months ago he went to one of these retreats in Desert Hot Springs. So, I came here.”

“To find him?”

She brushed her fingers along her throat, trying to swallow down the lump there. “I don’t know what I’m doing anymore.”

“Grief fucks with you,” Ever said.

She nodded. They turned and looked at each other. He put down his beer and leaned forward, elbows on knees, and tapped his lips with one finger. Cyrus had done that sometimes, and she felt her heart stutter, and the breathless gap that followed.

But this was not Cyrus. She wished she hadn’t come. Izzy’s eyes filled again. Her tears blinded her for a moment and she wiped them away—No crying, no more crying—gazing into the green lights surrounding the pool.

“Want another beer?” Ever asked.

No, he was not Cyrus. But he looked like Cyrus. And his hands were warm.

She forced a smile and the muscles in her face felt stiff, as if she hadn’t smiled in weeks. Maybe she hadn’t. She heard her own voice say: “Only if you want to carry me home.”

He brought them both another bottle, but neither of them drank a sip. They sat and talked about nothing for a while.

“What happened to you?” Izzy asked then because the unspoken agreement had dissolved as the shadows inside them spilled and merged with the shadows around them. “What’s the very worst thing?”

“Why do you want to know?”

“Because you know mine.”

He looked at her for a long time, considering. Then: “My girlf-riend and I moved out to Joshua Tree together,” he said.

She waited.

He went on: “Because she was sick. Leukemia.”

So that was what the move to Joshua Tree was about. “I’m so sorry.”

He hunched his shoulders and looked at his hands.

“What’s her name?”

“Emma Lee,” he said. “She passed recently.”

“I’m sorry,” she repeated. “What’s the best thing that ever happened to you?” she asked, maybe too quickly, wanting to soften the pain.

“Emma Lee. Was he yours?”