He’d taken a spill—drunk off his ass, of course—and fallen down a short flight of stairs outside a Japanese restaurant in Los Feliz. It wasn’t the stairs themselves, but the way his head thumped off the wall at the bottom that put him into a coma. He was out for five days, during which a CT scan revealed a small bleed on the brain—an acute subdural hematoma, to give it its fancy name. A surgeon drilled a burr hole in Luke’s skull to drain the blood, and he rose from his unconsciousness to see Lisa standing over him.

“There you are,” she said, and there’d been such a spirited and certain light in her eyes, as if she never doubted that he would return to her. It was exactly what Luke needed to see in that moment. This light defined Lisa as an individual, and them as a couple.

His head buzzed and his arms were too weak to lift, but he reached out to her with his soul—wrapped it around her eight or nine times, like a long, colorful scarf.

“You’re everything to me,” he said, and he meant it.

Luke didn’t remember too much about his hospital stay, and nothing about his five days in a coma, but he always remembered the overwhelming love he felt when he saw that light in Lisa’s eyes, and those three short words, like three musical notes forming a chord—a perfect harmony.

Lisa spoke them numerous times in the years to come—when Luke returned from shooting on location, when he appeared on-screen in a movie or TV show, when they made love and he moved his firm, wanting body into hers.

There you are.

Soft at times, more aggressive at others, but always spoken with that strong, remarkable light in her eyes.

The words were there but the light had gone. Lisa stood like a human shadow, detached from the things that gave her depth and verve, starved of the nutrients that once fed her soul. Her eyes were dark pits, no glimmer at all. She was thin, horribly thin, maybe ninety pounds, whereas before she had been a comfortable one-twenty. Beneath her clothes—a dirty T-shirt and leggings with holes in the knees—every bone would be showing, stark points and ridges instead of appealing muscle and curves. Her hair had been cut into a short, lusterless Afro that framed her face unevenly. Luke might not have recognized her, except for the tattoo on her right forearm: city woman dreamin’, the title of her first studio album.

She smiled weakly. Her mouth was the same, too, he realized, the shape of her lips, the slightly crooked front tooth.

“Lisa,” he said, but his voice wasn’t there, only a frail, sibilant breath. He took a single shaky step toward her, then fell at her feet and cried.