I stepped out onto the shadowed patio overlooking the moon-splashed ocean and the rigs lit up like golden Christmas trees among the darker shapes of the Channel Islands. Either the satellite had swung by overhead and was gone or my assistant had decided not to text anymore, because the phone was silent.

Inside the house I saw the TV on and the shapes of the dogs on the rug in front of the door.

And since I didn’t need to worry about Pest getting chomped on, I put her down on the patio, where she acted like the slats of wood under her feet might blow up if she left all four paws down on it at the same time.

“Go on, Pest,” I said. “You’ll be fine.”

She took me at my word and did a very funny mincing run to the far edge of the patio, where the hillside was dirt and grass and, from the way she was behaving, full of good-smelling things.

If she rolled in some dead animal, Tommy would not be pleased.

I kept one eye on her and called up my assistant, Beth’s number. She answered right away.

“Please be Jada,” she said in a kind of breathless murmur-laugh.

“It’s Jada.” The name I’d grown so used to felt completely weird to say.

“Oh my God, oh thank God,” Beth said. “You’re okay.”

“I’m okay.”

“Your mom doesn’t have you?”

“She doesn’t. She’s trying but she doesn’t have me.”

“Where are you?”

“I’m not…I don’t think it’s a good idea for me to tell you,” I said, leaning up against the railing. “I mean—”

“No. I get it. I totally get it.”

There was an awkward silence between us, and what I’d done to her in Los Angeles was looming so large in my head.

“I’m so sorry, Beth,” I said.

“Don’t worry about it,” she said in that typical way she had. Brushing off everything.

“No. No, what I did was so shitty.”

“It wasn’t you. Not really. It was the drugs.”

“Yeah, but the drugs were me too.” I took a deep breath. “I think… I was hating myself. And hating what I was doing, and I didn’t want someone I like and respect and admire as much as you to watch me sink so far down.”

“Jada,” she said, and I could hear the tears in her voice and for a moment we were quiet.

“It means a lot,” I said. “That you answered my texts.”

“We were friends, remember? Before all this shit happened.”

“Oh my God,” I said with a sigh, putting my head in my free hand. “I can’t remember anything before all this shit happened.”

“You want an update?” she asked.

“Do I?”

She laughed. “No. But you should get it anyway.”

My assistant filled me in on my mother’s continued efforts to stir up shit about me. With my ongoing silence it wasn’t just gossip magazines interested anymore. The Today Show had done a segment on my disappearance.

“Have you seen any news?” she asked. “Or been on Twitter? Your Facebook page?”

“No. I have no phone or laptop. It’s been kind of…nice, actually.” If you’d asked me two weeks ago if I could survive without my laptop and my phone, I would have said it was impossible. Ed Sheeran always made such a big deal about not having a phone, and I’d rolled my eyes at him behind his back. But he was right. It was nice not having that leash.

“Well, don’t look. It’s a dumpster fire, for real. You’re better off just being oblivious.”

“Oblivious of what, exactly?”

“Everyone’s talking,” she said, her voice apologetic. “Liz, Ben… all those people you thought were your friends.”

“I never thought they were my friends,” I said, pinching my nose. “I knew they were using me.”

“They’re all over the tabloids, telling all kinds of lies.”

“I’m not surprised,” I said. This was just part of the payment for what I’d done. That explosive rise to the stratosphere. It didn’t come for free.

“It kind of gets worse,” Beth said.

I laughed. “Of course it does.”

“The cops came by my apartment,” Beth said. “Asking questions.”

The cops. Shit. That was worse.

“What did you say?”

“That you’d been using, but as far as I knew you were somewhere getting clean and healthy.”

“Well, that’s true.”

“I also told them that your mother was a liar and a control freak and a terrible doctor.”

“Also true,” I said.

“But because I didn’t know where you were, they seemed to think there might be more to your mom’s story. And…there’s still more,” she said.

At this point it was almost funny. The utter destruction of my life.

“Goody!”

“Sherman dropped you.”

It wasn’t anger, exactly, since I’d thought it was sort of inevitable, but it was the creeping, twisting, agonizing pain of shame. I’d had everything, and I’d thrown it away.

“There are other managers who would snap you up in a heartbeat,” she said and that was true, but coming back from this was going to be one hell of a slog.

“Okay,” I said with a deep breath, putting one foot in front of the other. I’d get out of this hole. I would. Somehow.

“Can you tell me when you’ll be home?” she asked.

It was time to put a deadline on this. To set up an expiry date for when everything went sour.

“Two days,” I said and then immediately wished I’d said three. Four. A week.

Years.

Because now I only had two days to figure out what I was going to do with my mother. My life.

And Tommy.

“You want me to set up some meetings?” she asked.

“Beth… are you sure you want to work for me? I treated you so badly.”

“Of course I want to work with you. But with one condition…”

“Name it.”

“You start using again and I’m out. For real.”

“Agreed.” So agreed. So totally agreed.

“Okay! Let’s set up some meetings. A few maybe. Just to see. The most serious and reputable of the bunch?”

“That sounds good. I’ll see you in two days.”

We said our good-byes and hung up, and I stood at the railing, watching Pest sniff every board that made up the patio like she was trying to figure out a puzzle.

“Two days then?” a deep voice asked out of the shadows, and I turned toward the corner where Peter always had his chair set up. His newspaper and his coffee.

I hadn’t seen him in the shadows. And he’d heard my conversation.

“Two days,” I said, heat in my cheeks, thinking of what I’d said to Beth. “You could have told me you were there.”

I sensed, really, rather than saw his shrug. And then a gleam of a glass and the clinks of ice cubes.

“You’re drinking?”

“Whiskey. Want one?”

“No.”

I wouldn’t be drinking. Not for a long time. Not until this ache I had in the back of my throat was gone. This desire for the curtain that drugs could pull over the worst of my life, hiding all the flaws and all the mistakes I’d made from myself for at least a little while.

“I almost told Tommy,” I said. “About you.”

“Why didn’t you?”

Because I wanted to be loved for a few minutes.

“You should have let me tell him at lunch,” Peter said.

I was glad I hadn’t. Because it would have cost me everything that happened after. And those memories had to feed me for a long time.

“You thinking of leaving this mountain and never telling him?” Peter asked.

“I’d like to,” I said with a laugh, but it wasn’t funny to Peter because he stood up fast and crossed out of the shadows to stand next to me at the railing.

“Why do you want to lie to him, Beth?” he asked.

“Because the truth is hard,” I said with a gasping, frantic laugh.

The truth was so hard and I felt like I was in danger of being crushed by a million rock hard truths.

“You lie to that boy and you’re as bad as me,” he said.

“You’re not that bad,” I whispered, forgiving him because I wanted to be forgiven too. “Your reasons weren’t malicious. Or evil. They were just desperate.”

“You think he’s going to see it that way?”

“He might,” I said, more hope than anything else. “If we explain it the right way.”

“What’s the right way?” he asked. “He’s already been here a day and we haven’t told him. Worse, now we’ve lied to him. And I think about that boy sitting in an apartment for days—” His voice cracked, and I did what I’d never done with Peter: I touched his shoulder. I put my arm around him.

For a moment he stood still in my half embrace. Like he was ready to reject it. But then he hung his head and slumped just slightly into me.

“You tell him, Beth,” Peter said. “Or I’m going to.”

I nodded, swallowing down my fears. “I will.”

“Tomorrow,” he said.

“Tomorrow,” I agreed.