It took only basic sleuthing to find out Brett’s plans—one call to the credit card company. Still, when we drove up to the Malibu Shores, I feigned shock and surprise. To our knowledge, the paparazzi hadn’t followed us, but just in case, Brett checked in under an assumed name while I took the back stairs up to our third-floor room.

The hotel sat on the same stretch of beach as the Colony. In the years since I’d lived here, much of the sand had eroded. Houses that once had a comfortable apron of beachfront now suffered the battering of surf and rocks against their exposed wooden and cement pilings.

Brett laid our suitcases on the sofa. I pulled several bills out of my purse and handed them to him. “Thanks, Barney.”

“Will that be all, ma’am?” he played along.

“Uh, not quite,” I teased, pulling him to me. He yanked his T-shirt off, and I began undoing his belt buckle.

The phone by the bed rang. We stopped and stared at it.

“Who is that?” I asked.

“I don’t know. Did you tell anybody we were coming here?”

“Of course not. You surprised me, remember?” I wasn’t lying, exactly. I had left a message for Nicole outlining our plans, but only because I wanted to make up for having been so shitty.

“Don’t pick it up,” I cautioned on the fourth ring. If it was Nicole, I was going to kill her.

“Hello?” Brett picked up the phone. “Yeah? Yeah? Okay, fine.” He hung up and frowned at me.

“What?”

“It seems they’re gonna bring the paper in the morning.” Brett laughed and wrestled me onto my back.

“I love you, Jackie Gold,” he said tenderly.

Winter sunsets in Malibu are normally spectacular displays of reds and orange, but on that day, the sun wouldn’t break through the clouds. It hung passively, like a flashlight shining through the back of a sheet.

I lit a cigarette on the balcony and peered over the railing. Three floors below, the sea swirled in and around giant rocks exposed by the stormy pull of the tide, their crevices filled with driftwood and sea treasures, their jagged edges coated with slippery green moss. Under the sea foam, something white caught my eye and as the tide receded, I saw a seagull floating dead, its foot caught in the ring of a plastic six-pack holder. I watched as over and over the waves roared in, the seagull carcass crashing upon the rocks, only to be pulled back under when the ocean water swirled away.

Brett came up behind me wearing a hotel robe that on his muscular frame was several sizes too small. He took the cigarette out of my fingers and put it to his lips, then followed my gaze to where the shackled seagull tossed in the tidewater.

“Jackie?”

“Huh?”

“I have a very important question to ask you.”