“I’m about to hurt someone very badly,” she said. “I want to hurt too.”

We figured we would get one take before someone called the cops to report a naked, bloody woman in the labyrinth, so we needed to plan the shot carefully. I was mapping out the camera’s path when my phone rang.

I pulled it from my pocket and raindrops misted the screen as if from a spray bottle, blurring Cal’s name.

I told October I’d be back and stepped off the trail to take the call.

“Yo,” Cal said.

“Hey.”

He was calling to say he would be landing at Oakland Airport the following morning and wanted to know if I would pick him up and take him to the venue.

“This way we can hang out all day,” he reasoned.

I paused, guarded, unsure of how to respond, and Cal said, “Harp, you still there?” as if maybe the phone had cut out.

I turned around and watched October picking things up in the center of the labyrinth—talismans, rocks, crystals, notes people had left there. She was looking at me, holding up a folded piece of paper, pointing to it, but I was too far away to see what it was.

“Harp?” Cal repeated.

“Sorry, yeah. We’re over at Eagle’s Point. I can barely hear you.”

I wasn’t sure I was going to be able to act normal around Cal, and I knew it was a betrayal on top of an already inexcusable betrayal to agree to spend the day with him, given that I’d been having an affair with his girlfriend for the last month. But here’s the rub: I wanted to spend the day with him. I wanted to pretend, for twenty-four more hours, that he and I were still best friends and brothers. I wanted to see what his life was like on tour. And more than anything, I wanted to watch him perform in front of eighty-five hundred people.

“Text me your flight info,” I said.

Before we hung up, I asked Cal if he expected me to bring October. He sighed and said, “Nah, bro. I need to talk through some stuff before I see her. I need to pick your brain. She’s going to come over later with Rae.”

Earlier that year a strong winter storm had toppled half a dozen redwoods in Muir Woods, and a group of rangers had set up audio recording equipment in and around the park to capture the sounds. Imagine a distinct, cacophonous creaking, like a giant door to the sky with a squeaky hinge, and then a loud, sweeping crash, the final thud actually a symphony of thudding, because a skyscraper tree doesn’t fall in isolation. It catches other branches and trees, often dragging down whatever its weight can raze.

That’s the soundtrack I heard in my head throughout my last day in California. I was a rotten redwood, weak enough for the wind to knock me over. But instead of falling by myself, I was going to take my friends—the ones whose roots were helping to keep me stable—down too.