Instead, he focused on the fact that she had known he would be up early tomorrow and away all day. She said he’d told her so. He combed through his memory of the evening but couldn’t recall making that revelation. He might have. He just couldn’t remember. And it seemed that he should remember.

What he did remember, and what he kept returning to more than anything else, was what she’d said in response to his complaint that in spite of hours of nonstop conversation, there was still a long list of essential things he didn’t know about her. She had charmed him by imitating a schoolgirl and launching into a long list of likes and dislikes.

The first three items he remembered word for word: My favorite color is blue, favorite flower the calla lily, favorite time of the day sunrise.

Emily Carlino’s favorite color had been blue. Her favorite flower was the calla lily. And she loved to be up before sunrise because, as she’d said: Life is so fragile and uncertain that every daybreak is a miracle, almost a triumph. That first blush in the sky is all the hope of the world distilled into light. I watch the dark fade, and say to myself, “Okay, I’m still here,” and the more sunrises I see, the more I feel as if I’ll live to see another twenty thousand.

The seams in the beam-and-shiplap ceiling ran as straight as lasered lines, and each piece fit as tight as in a completed puzzle.

The orderliness of the ceiling annoyed him. He switched off the nightstand lamp.

In the dream of the cellar maze, she came to him out of an unraveling shroud to say, I am Maddison, who was Emily. Can you love me? When he replied, I already do, he was happier than he had been in a long time—and afraid.

| 15 |

In his Porsche Cayenne, David departed Newport Beach at 6:40 Saturday morning and followed Interstate 405 north to Los Angeles. As he had felt in the crush of Manhattan and in Orange County’s multitudes, so he also felt when he arrived in the City of Angels and its teeming suburbs at 7:50—alone among the millions. The city was buzzing, and fast-moving traffic swarmed the freeways. Yet he imagined himself invisible to everyone, not a man at all, but a spirit in denial of his death, racing north in the mere idea of an automobile, a modern ghost motoring from one haunt to another.

Interstate 405 to US Highway 101, then west and northwest toward Oxnard, Ventura . . . Santa Barbara. Inland on State Route 154 to the Santa Ynez Valley, past Lake Cachuma, and then northeast on a county road of sun-fissured blacktop crumbling at the edges.

The six-acre parcel tucked into the low foothills of the San Rafael Mountains. The nearest town, Santa Ynez, lay more than ten miles away. These acres had once been part of a much larger property planted with grapes. The sun-graced valley boasted in excess of a hundred wineries; but for some reason, this enterprise had failed.