Normally I listened to NPR in the morning, but I switched over to Live 105 to receive my brother’s communiqué. It was the station he’d listened to when he was alive, so I figured it would be the music he could control best as a spirit. There was a commercial on when I tuned in, and this seemed fortuitous. It meant Sam had extra time to play a mind trick on the DJ and get him to put on a relevant song after the commercial was over.

I still remember the commercial playing that morning. It was an ad for a discount diamond store that I’d been hearing since I was a kid. Now you have a friend in the diamond business.

When the commercial was over, the DJ started jabbering about a contest the station was having: Starting tomorrow, if you were the fifth caller after you heard the next song, you would win a trip to a music festival in Southern California, where this band would be playing in a couple of months.

The DJ said Cal’s name, along with something about the song being the first single off Callahan’s new, critically acclaimed third album. I changed the station straightaway because I wasn’t emotionally equipped to hear the song. And because I didn’t need to hear it to understand the point Sam was trying to make.

It was the same point Sam always made.

And when I took the East Blithedale exit into Mill Valley a few minutes later, I was thinking about Cal, and Sam, and even Bob, and my heart felt so heavy I was afraid my chest was going to collapse in on itself and kill me. I would die on some artist’s front doorstep, having never taken a real chance on anything.

I hadn’t touched my guitar in years.

I’d just broken up with a glib acupuncturist named Meadow, a well-meaning woman for whom I’d often felt an emotion akin to disdain.

And I couldn’t help but wonder what I’d be doing right now if I’d gone to Brooklyn with Cal.

THREE.

October’s property is up West Blithedale Canyon, just two miles past Mill Valley’s small, quaint downtown, and only another few miles on foot to the top of Mount Tamalpais, one of my favorite spots in all of Marin County, where on a clear day you can see the whole Bay Area in a spectacular 360-degree view.

The gate at the bottom of October’s driveway held a small, beautifully welded sign that read “CASA DIEZ.” There was a keypad to open it, but since I didn’t know the code, I pressed the call button and watched the mechanized gate slide open a few seconds later.

A long gravel road took me up a steep hill and around a hairpin turn, opening into a rustic compound completely hidden by an array of trees—redwoods, oaks, poplars, madrones, and even a couple of elegant California buckeyes, their rosy-white floral fireworks in full bloom.

I saw three buildings situated in a semicircle around the end of the driveway, all made of wood, painted farmhouse red but heavily faded from weather and age. The front of the building immediately to the right was a big wall of windows; I knew it was the studio, based on Rae’s directions—and the fact that I could see a stack of canvases piled up against the wall.