“Everyone in the industry was dealing with the same thing at the same time,” I tell her. “Ad revenues were declining and all the magazines were wondering how to reckon with digital. Should we give it all away? Can we make people pay? Do we publish original stories online and, if so, does that alter the nature of the stories? A magazine has to have a digital aesthetic almost as refined as its print aesthetic, and no one really knew what that meant. Anyway, I can’t think of an editor less prepared to answer those questions than Mort.”

Back then, the end of journalism seemed like the only conversation my colleagues wanted to have, but despite our apocalyptic visions, we had no clue what was really coming. We always pictured ourselves unemployed, not retrofitted into single-person, twenty-four-hour news franchises, each expected to dispense scoops all day and night and be funny online. I wonder if the Vice writer is funny online. She probably has to be.

“Mort was in denial?”

“I wouldn’t say denial. He had the numbers crunched, he had a bird’s-eye view of the revenue streams. It’s more that he genuinely, wrongly thought it was all a kind of fad, that like the dot-com boom it wouldn’t last, and any outlet invested in digital was doomed. He just couldn’t see it. His idea of the future looked like the ’90s. He was the sort of person who’d say the fate of print magazines was secure because no one was ever going to take a computer monitor into the bath.”

“And what about you?”

“What about me?”

“In that last year,” she says, “you seem to drop out of the magazine, and the next time anyone hears from you, you’re out of the industry altogether. What happened?”

I can tell this is her big question—the one she’s been saving for the end. I picture her with colleagues: “Once I have her comfortable, I’m going to find out why Whitney Chase stopped writing.”

The truth amasses on my tongue.

I say, “Personal reasons.”

2.

As soon as Mom opened the door, I knew she’d had an attack. She was using the quad cane and there were purple pockets stuffed beneath her eyes. She saw me notice too, because after leaning into a brief hug, she quickly turned and shuffled down the hall.

I’d landed in Los Angeles in late afternoon, and almost felt like a tourist as I crawled down the freeway in a rented Toyota Highlander, then edged Elysian Park on my way to Los Feliz. It was so different from my New York world, where everything was fronted hard by brick and glass, I sometimes couldn’t believe I’d grown up here. When I parked, I saw the succulents reaching for the street, and pink flowers, like weeds, overgrowing the neighbor’s fence.