So I’d hugged both my parents hard when I told them I was moving back, and I’d found a month-to-month sublet in Marina del Rey with aggressively bland decor. Though it was a safe location, it wasn’t home like my bungalow. And work wasn’t the same place, either. My boss, Jayme, had quit and moved to Hawaii, and the twin designers had new girlfriends and were disappointingly absent and self-absorbed. The Rocque social life had moved on from rooftop hotel bars to a downtown dive coated with dust so vintage that it could be River Phoenix’s sloughed-off skin from the early nineties. With my old pals, I went through the motions of drinking and dancing and grousing about work. I had a one-night stand with an art installer in town for the weekend. He was ten years older than me, wiry, British, funny, and adept at charmingly harmless seduction. I enjoyed myself, but it all seemed to take too long and be over too soon.

Still, the temporary fling was preferable to the Yegina-Hiro dynamic—their overpacked car, the portentous meeting with the relatives, all the pressures of being in love longer than the first few dizzy months. I was happy for my friend, but I wondered if she was happy for herself.

“I hope I see you tonight, too,” I said to Yegina. I wanted to hear how it went.

HOURS LATER, AFTER YEGINA’S HARDCORE had given us all migraines and we’d traded for a dull hangover of Hiro’s Dvořák selections, we inched through the busy strips of Yucca Valley and Joshua Tree. Beyond them, the nowhere gained on us fast. Rocks and scrabble and mountain peaks lined the distance. A long, loping sky unfolded. The sun was setting when we reached Wonder Valley, which was first defined by nothingness on either side of the road. Then we passed car after car parked on the right, and a large sign sprang up, dark letters on white paint, framed by unfinished wood: THE OASIS BAR AND RESTAURANT. A crude mask-like face gazed out from the sign’s center. The lot was so choked with dusty, dented trucks that it resembled a junkyard. Behind it squatted a one-story cinder-block building, beer signs glowing, and behind that, some kind of stage and a giant movie screen, flickering with the black-and-white image of a gun stuck in the back of a woman’s tight jeans. Her behind was the size and shape of a shack, the gun handle its crooked chimney.

“Is that—” said Yegina.

“I think so,” I said. The sight of Brenae Brasil made me cold.

Immediately we were back in the open desert, flanked by another line of parked cars. Yegina’s tires spun in the sand as we turned to loop back.

“She looks so young,” she said.

So young, so sexy, and so dangerous. Another dead girl reversed to life again by her beautiful image.