The loneliness of Phoebe’s twenties had been crushing—those boardrooms and movie sets so vastly male, feeling like a speck in a sea of white faces, the only one still filling up her tank ten dollars at a time because she knew the gravy train could stop anytime. She wouldn’t survive it again.

“Malcolm? Get the studio.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. Let’s do it. We’ll figure out how later.”

“All right. And hey, Love?” Malcolm said.

“Yeah?”

“You look beautiful tonight.”

Phoebe smiled. Did she? Could she?

“How do you know? You can’t even see me.”

“Trust me on this one.”

22

Holly

Once she hit the PCH, Holly drove as if on automatic pilot. Where was she going? How long would it take to get there? She had no answers. North, that’s all her inner compass told her. The ocean on her left, the cliffs on her right. But then it hit her: she was going home to Frazier Park.

Only there was nobody home, hadn’t been for years. She’d sold the two-bedroom ranch years ago, after her dad died. There’d been no reason to hold on to the place. If something had happened to her and Ted—if he had a heart attack and died, or they divorced; if she had to start over—she’d been sure she would never start over in Frazier Park. The staff had boxed up her family’s things and brought them to the guest suite in Pacific Palisades, where they made tidy piles of memories for her to sit with and decide which ones she wanted to live with every day. She didn’t need to decide about the rest, they told her—everything would be saved. Somewhere, there was a bin with all her dad’s old socks and all of her mom’s yarn and crossword puzzle books, somewhere an external drive with all of her baby photos. She didn’t know where. The guest suite was where her parents were supposed to stay so they wouldn’t have to make the long drive back to Frazier Park at night. The guest suite was where the children were supposed to jump on their grandparents on Christmas mornings. It wasn’t where she was supposed to say goodbye to them, one tchotchke at a time. Holly wished she could go back in time, if not to the last day they were all healthy, then to the day before she sold the house. She should have kept it. She wished she could take off her shoes and feel the carpet her father had put down, the one she’d sprawled across after school to watch I Love Lucy. She wished she could sit by the window where her mom used to knit and grade papers.