Because there had come a Reckoning—that awful September morn. A few nights before, he had been coked, tussling in bed with a femme director who thought he would give her work. He had rolled over, fallen, and cracked his head open on the edge of the VCR. There had followed the short, dreadful stay at Cedars-Sinai. And then he had been released, bandaged, gray and visionary, everything changed. He had driven over to Mann’s National Theater in Westwood. Gotten out of his Jag and stood beneath the titanic marquee of his latest film. Hellfire. With a cutout of Jack Nicholson that must have been two stories tall. A rising billboard of flames. And the words Produced by Richard Storm running maybe six feet across, his name as big as his body. And, for the first time, Storm realized that it would all go away. Not just the poster, the credit, the success. But him, Nicholson, the audience—the theater, Westwood—the whole city, Los Angeles, plunked, rootless, in its smoky basin. The far-flung skyline, the Escher-esque coils of freeway, the villas and the slums: the earthquakes would take them, and the ocean waves. In time, America itself would fall, the millennia would make a ruin of it, like Rome. He saw these things: cockroach archaeologists trying to make sense of the rubble of Disneyland—green cows descended from aphids grazing amid the tattered remnants of the St. Louis arch—Charlton Heston pounding the sand next to the fallen Statue of Liberty—he could imagine it all.

And what then would be left of him? Big man. His mother was gone, his father was gone, his graspy bitch of a wife was gone and his house was gone with her. He had no children, no real friends, no relations whom he’d met. He did not even know a line of poetry by heart. He was utterly alone.

Storm set his coffee mug down. Blinked back tears so as not to shame himself before the Duke. Live right, shoot straight, walk tall, he thought. The time had come. Tomorrow, when he met Sophia Endering, he would remember the words with which Harper Albright had described her to him:

If she has a heart at all, it is held in check with considerable force. And if ever she is deprived of her monumental defenses, my guess is you will find her to be as fragile as bliss—and every bit as precious.

Which only underscored what Storm already knew: that love was off-limits to him. Sex, flirtation, even an excess of tenderness were all off-limits, because he would not be able to shield her from the terrible consequences. He wanted to find out if Sophia had seen the ghost of Belham Abbey? Fine. It was to be a purely metaphysical inquiry, that was it, that was all. It might be hard to restrain himself. He might be tempted. It didn’t matter.