The night air had a heaviness I rarely felt in Los Angeles. A storm was coming. I breathed it in, still hesitating. Go on to Yegina, or stay here and wait outside for my ride. I called the detective and got her voicemail. Called again. Voicemail again. I stared down the avenue of headlights, thinking of all the mountains ringing this city that I couldn’t see. Then I thought of Ray and the car ride with the fado music, the heartbreak inside it, heartbreak that went beyond logic or explanation, which was Ray’s grief over his brother. You couldn’t just let that kind of heartbreak go. It had to consume you first, with rage or vengeance or self-destruction. Ray hadn’t gotten on a plane last night. Whichever acts he had done in the past twenty-four hours, he had known they would be mistakes. Now I had to make my own. I had a hunch about where Ray was, running out of time. I left Alicia a long message, limped back into Camden, and wove through the crowd. Layla was leaning against a wall with two martinis in her hand, her head tipped back, her long lashes shuttered. She looked like she was preparing for a séance.

“Hey,” I said.

She opened her eyes, gave a sharp, humorless laugh. “Want a drink?”

I stared at the clear liquid in the glass. The sunken green oblong of the olive. I saw Nelson’s hand slipping into Layla’s shirt, holding her breast.

Be yourself, Ray said. Play the part. Play impulsive, innocent Maggie.

“Want to share my cab home?” I said, taking the martini. “They can drop me off first and you can keep going to the Palisades. I can’t handle this place for much longer.”

“Good call,” she said. “One last drink. Then we’ll go.”

THE EFFORT OF SPEECH WAS too much. Everything was too much for my body: the night air, the sidewalk. My legs. My legs couldn’t recall how to walk. They fumbled and jellied, and I stumbled against Layla. She held me up by looping my arm over her shoulder and we lurched along. “You don’t drink much, do you?” she said through clenched teeth.

“Only. Had. One,” I said. In truth, I had tasted two sips of her martini because she was watching me, and then sloshed the rest into a napkin holder when she turned to the stage to clap for Dee. Two sips. She must have put enough sedative in the drink to knock me out.

“I valeted at the French restaurant down the street because they’re always faster,” she says. “It’s just one more block.”

“Cab,” I said.

“I forgot. I drove.”

My phone started buzzing in my jeans pocket.

“Friend,” I said.

Layla muscled a hand into my pocket and I felt the buzzing stop. “You can call her when we’re in the car,” she said, hauling me faster.