I could have told this story when people in my Vermont hometown asked me what L.A. was like. But I didn’t. Sunny. Crowded, I replied instead. I saw some movie stars. I miss the fish tacos. I said these things, because it was easier to offer up what my rural neighbors expected. To let them conclude I was over the city, and back in Vermont for good. They laughed and let me alone, relieved to have their convictions confirmed. If anyone probed deeper, I talked about my job at the art museum and my Hollywood bungalow, but the tales were flat and they had no endings, because I couldn’t say the truth. I lost a love in L.A. I almost died there. And hardest of all: For one brief hour, I was certain I had all the clues to save a missing woman, a brilliant and generous artist, probably a genius. And then someone told me she was already dead, murdered and abandoned in a shallow grave.

I did miss L.A., though. I missed it in pieces. Hiking the steep, sunny sides of Runyon Canyon. Eating frozen rosewater topped with saffron ice cream. Ducking into dim bars in Echo Park, loud guitars blistering in my ears. I even missed the rush-hour river on the 101, how it made me stay late downtown for happy hours on hotel rooftops, until the dazed afternoons grew cool and sharper with darkness, under heat lamps and towering skyscrapers. And I’d had good friends in L.A., women, mostly, also living on the sliding edge of our late twenties, torn between who our mothers had been and the career divas we were told we could become. Together, we’d catch our reflections in long windows, those slim, agile strangers gliding to the next block.

But when I thought about my last month in Los Angeles, of the night I had driven across the city, mad with fear, and climbed into my ex’s empty bed and put on his missing girlfriend’s clothes, it made me curl into a tight ball inside. Who was that Maggie, and how had she become so unhinged, so obsessed and reckless? I didn’t want to meet her gaze in the mirror. Yet I knew her well. That Maggie had been inside me for a long time, ever since a freezing spring years ago, when a young woman’s body had washed up on a Vermont lakeshore. The third day I was home, I drove past the bay where my source had been murdered, and my neck ached all the way down to my fingertips, as if I had been holding myself rigid for hours.