The second time she had thought herself in love was with the owner of one of the hotel jobs she had breezed through before graduate school. Charlie was older, and she teased him about being a cradle robber. The day he had her fired, he also asked her to dinner. She went and, for a brief period of time, found herself enjoying the glitz of dating someone with both power and money. There were one-hundred-dollar dinners almost every night, and weekend trips to spas in Ojai and Carmel. She had been raised with these things and learned to detest their opulence, but somehow with him it seemed all right. Charlie had grown up poor in Alabama, hitchhiked to Santa Barbara to surf after college, and ended up a personal assistant to a hotel financier who helped him invest in his first property. Charlie was sweet, and he overtipped and intentionally made faux pas that Josie loved. He would pick his teeth during meetings, and ask if the waiter could replace his salad with a side of fried apples at business dinners. She loved his accent, his freckles, his scarred hands from working his way through college as a cook. But he was also a drunk, or in his words a good ole boy who liked his whiskey, and when he was drunk, he did not have Josie on his mind. The first time she caught him with another woman, he cried and begged and swore fidelity, and she took him back, but a few months later at his birthday party, she went to use the bathroom and found him kissing a leggy blonde while getting a blow job from what could have been the leggy blonde’s twin sister. He looked at her and simply said, “It’s my birthday, baby.” Josie’s knees felt locked solid, and she stood there watching until he pulled up his pants and the girls giggled their way out. She managed a brief rant, but the truth of the matter was that she felt calm and astonishingly unaffected.