Why am I so nervous? she wondered, wiping her sweaty palms on her knees. It’s not like she was a virgin. Far from it. Well, actually not that far. Still, it wasn’t like she had no experience. But Jude had obviously had so much, and with sophisticated girls who went to boarding school, not townie guys who lived in their parents’ basement. Ugh. She had to stop thinking like this. But she couldn’t. The thoughts were coming at her fast and furious and relentless, like bullets from a machine gun, rat tat tat tat tat. And then she stepped on a piece of broken seashell. The shard sliced into the flesh of her big toe. The pain it caused her, though, was weirdly welcome, offering her a strange kind of relief—sharp and bracing. It calmed her mind, let her focus on the task at hand.

As she crouched down to pour water from her Evian bottle over the bloody toe, wrap it in one of the many Band-Aids she was carrying around in her bag, she was relieved to see that the light was on in Jude’s first-floor bedroom, the window thrown wide open. She crept up to it. She heard a voice inside talking, and her stomach dropped to her ankles because at first she thought that meant he wasn’t alone, that Cybill was with him. But she listened for a while, and his voice was the only voice. He was on the telephone, she realized.

“He said no? But did you tell him it was me?” he was saying. There was a pleading note in his voice that Charlie had never heard before, and wouldn’t even have thought that cool, bored, contemptuous voice was capable of making. “Yes, I understand it’s late, but it’s not that late. Just tell him I really need to talk to him.”

Silence while he listened to the person on the other end of the line.

“What do you mean, he won’t take my call?” Jude faltered on the word mean in a way that let Charlie know tears were on the way. But instead of crying, he got angry. “Remind him I’m his son, the only one he has. Can you do that for me? Yeah, I’ll wait.”

Again, silence as he listened.

Sounding frustrated now, he said, “No, don’t wake my mom. She has a hard enough time falling asleep as it is. Okay, fine, yeah, sure, my dad and I will talk tomorrow, no problem. Tell him it’s a bit much, though, not returning my calls for five days straight. Kind of an asshole move, tell him. I get that he’s a busy guy, too busy to be a father, but this is getting fucking ridiculous.”

A third silence.