He started walking early, but he stayed out so long that the beach began to populate. Off to the right Anthony could see a dad wrestling with a pop-up beach cabana while two little children ran heedlessly toward the water. To the left a clutch of teenagers was beginning to form. The boys were shirtless, lean-torsoed, suntanned, and floppy-haired, and the girls were the same, except bikinied, with long, silky, shampoo-commercial hair and come-hither postures. Anthony was pretty sure they didn’t want him to come hither.

His phone rang, and the name Shelly Salazar popped up on the screen. Without thinking, he answered it.

“Where’ve you been, Anthony Puckett?”

“Shelly?” said Anthony. Shelly Salazar was the freelance publicist Cassie had hired for Anthony before his career went downhill faster than a German bobsledder. Shelly Salazar was in her late twenties, Anthony guessed, and she possessed a sort of off-color fearlessness that Anthony was both cowed by and envious of. Very millennial. She claimed, when Cassie had hired her, that she’d worked with the Annes/Anns (Tyler and Patchett) as well as the Richards (Russo, Ford?).

“Where. The ef. Have you been? I’ve been calling you, calling Cassie, calling everyone. Nobody answered! Didn’t you get my messages?”

“I got them,” Anthony admitted.

“We have work to do on the PR front, Anthony!”

As Anthony watched (in, he assured himself, an appropriately avuncular fashion), one of the girls shimmied out of her shorts and waded into the water. Anthony thought it would have been a little bit cold—it was still early in the season, and also early in the day!—but she didn’t so much as flinch. Maybe this really was the Caribbean of the East.

“I’m taking some time away,” he explained, squinting at the threads of clouds. “Thinking about starting something new.”

“Yes,” said Shelly Salazar. “That’s exactly what you should do! Write something new, write something better, and begin it all with an apology.” Her voice took on a different timbre, low and sonorous, like she’d just tasted an exotic fruit and was reporting on the sensation. “If you start with an apology, and if that becomes the thing, we can get you into every magazine, on every read-this list. Bustle, Lit Hub. Lenny Letter! The Times.”

At the mention of the Times Anthony shuddered.

“Well,” said Anthony. “I don’t know if I can write something better.” Simon’s Rock had been good—it had been really, really good, he’d funneled all of himself into that book, until— “But I can definitely write something new. I think.”

“Doesn’t have to be better.” Now Shelly sounded like a forties lounge singer hopped up on cigarettes and absinthe. “It’s the apology we’re going to sell. If people buy the apology, they’re going to buy the book. So you’d better make sure that apology is a goddamn piece of art.”

“Right,” said Anthony. He sighed. “Okay.”

“Holy shit,” said Shelly. “I just had the Best. Idea. Ever. Do you think we can get a picture of you and your father together?”