I didn’t expect the city to feel so feral when I was alone, but Dr. Kassell was right—L.A. was wild. And I felt like I was in the wildest part of it. On a hill, where there was room for animals to congregate and grow into packs. A place where possums raced by my screen door and whole families of raccoons stood on my doorstep, staring at me, as if they wanted to join me on the sofa. At night, when sirens rushed by, coyotes joined together in howling song, vibrating long after the ambulances were gone. This is what I loved about the city and this is what I feared as I went through it alone.

“I’m on the ground floor again,” I said. Not wanting to spell out what I was trying to spell out about living alone as a woman—rape, murder, everything you see on true-crime shows that felt applicable only to women.

I could see she was tapping in a prescription for Xanax, capping it once again at thirty.

“Could I have more?” I asked.

“Have you seen a therapist?” she asked.

I had seen many over the years. Warm auntlike women who wore shawls. Clinical women in hospital coats. My favorite was a middle-aged man I liked to act out father-daughter scenarios with—he would tell me how proud he was of me and then angrily cry that my life had value when I told him I didn’t care what happened to me in certain situations. I had moved away from him to be with Bobby and thought about him at least once a week. I wanted to know if he missed me and thought about me as much as I thought about him. I didn’t want to fill my life up with more office visits. I could hardly bring myself to drive to see Dr. Kassell for my pill refills.

She said, “Have you tried meditation?”

She wrote down a woman’s name and number and passed it to me. I smiled and took the paper and stopped in the bathroom before leaving the office.

There, I spotted a jar of condoms in their “grab what you like” cabinet. I did. I took several handfuls, as if willing some sex into existence. As if there was a newfound urgency to being with someone else. There was not.

While I waited for my prescription to be filled, I went to sit in the bar of the Beverly Wilshire Hotel. There were Lamborghinis, Ferraris, Bugattis, tourists lining the driveway, and I felt like someone important weaving through them all. Tour guides were shuttling out-of-towners past the hotel, urging them to take pictures of the “hotel from Pretty Woman.” And they did, taking pictures of the hotel sign while excitedly whispering that this was probably their favorite moment of the entire Beverly Hills experience.