She returned to walking, step by step, on the recently poured sidewalk. The Athletic Club was right before her, flags of the world undulating above its four concrete pillars. But this was awful—she couldn’t go through the lobby, the receptionist would stop her. “Let me through—I know he’s dead”—it sounded like a line some girl would use to see him.

When they were apart for more than a week, she would send him a note that read, “Be good, and if you can’t be good, be careful.” After the first time, he’d just held up the old note, to show he’d kept it. And when he’d returned to her the next time, he held up a subtitle card he’d written himself. On a black background, wreathed by the Mutual Studios wheat-sheathing, It just read, “Good.” She lived in mild fear of the reunion when he would hold up a card that read, “Careful.”

Edna walked to the alleyway that ran behind the Club, and found the white linens-truck that was always parked in a tactically advantageous place in the early morning (she wasn’t the first person in the history of the Club who might need to use a discreet entrance). Tossing the wrapper to the ground, she stepped up to the truck cab, and from there was able to grasp the lowest rung of the fire escape.

Her boots caused the slats on the ladder to ring like a pitchfork, until she learned how to muffle her step. It was quick work, up two switchbacks, and then she was outside Charlie’s window. There was his work desk, with the neatly tied piles of correspondence that he had never answered. Stacks of books on the dustless floor. There was his standing wardrobe. His upright piano, which he had moved in after the violin had been approved. And there was his bed, empty.

She held her fist to her mouth, teeth biting into her knuckles. The windowpane was beginning to glow pink, then orange with the sun. She could hear pigeons. And, on streets far away, the clomping of horses’ hooves, and an impatient car horn. She squinted harshly toward the sounds—how could the world go on if Charlie was gone?

“We’re like a couple of lost dogs who like each other,” he’d said on a picnic, down on the deserted beach near Balboa. He had tried to braid her a necklace of kelp; she had saved a single bead of it and meant to keep it, but she lost it almost immediately, when they were still kissing. When he was about to go before the camera, she would call out, “Go on, be cute,” which punctured his balloon quite nicely, and thinking of it now made her stomach clench into a knot, and she wept. “Oh, Charlie,” she whispered, looking again into his window.