“FUCK! She hung up on me!” I look over at Sean, and he can’t believe it either. “Don’t look so amused. I’m going over there.” I tear through the large expanse of our home’s foyer, snapping up my keys from a bowl on the marble table that belonged to our great-grandmother. I hate this fucking table. I give it a kick. It doesn’t budge. Now I look like an idiot, and my foot aches. “FUCK!!!”

Sean had to break into a jog to catch up to me. “You’re driving all the way over the hill again? Do you know if she’s even home?”

“Where else would she be? She hardly ever goes out; remember what the private detective showed us?” Sunlight slices into view as I yank open the front door, making me squint and pull out my shades immediately.

Sean crosses his arms across his blue James Perse t-shirt, and squints against the light, too. “She could be at Millennium.”

“Which is right by her house, so I’ll go there, too, if I have to. You coming?”

“Yeah, I guess I am. I don’t want you to do anything stupid.” He slides his sunglasses out of his pocket and puts them on, locking the door to follow me.

I throw him a look as I open the door of my Tesla S, glaring at him over it. “Stupid? Like what? What am I going to do?”

“I don’t know Jack. I never know with you.” He dips out of sight into the passenger side.

I snort, look into the sun for a second, adjust my shades and jump in the car. “That’s just the way I like it.” I buckle myself in and the car turns on automatically. “I’ll never get over that.”

“It is pretty cool,” he admits. “I should have gotten a Tesla.”

“You wanna go get one right now?”

“Shut up.”

“I’ll shut up when you give up the guilt and shame thing. We earned this money.” Driving with the windows down around the u-shaped three-car driveway, we leave the mansion shrinking behind us in the rearview, Mom somewhere inside passed out on painkillers.

“How you spend it is the problem I have with it, Jack.” He stares out the window, tired of having to repeat himself, but not as tired as I am of hearing it. “Plus we haven’t earned it.”

Ignoring him, I turn the radio up. He’s a haunted soul with demons that tell him we should come up with a passion, but what’s the point?

Some days I feel like time is just passing me by, but I pick up a glass of something strong and that feeling washes away. What am I going to do? Get a job? If I did, I’d have to own the company because no boss is going to want to have me as an employee, a constant reminder of how meager his paycheck is. And there’s no company I want to run. We own hotels and restaurants, and a couple of steel mills, but other people run them, people who know how. That’s what happened when our ancestors did the dirty work; they enabled themselves to eventually delegate and let someone else do the day-to-day management. Today, we’re no longer necessary, Sean and I. It’s probably why Mom’s popping pills; she’s got nothing to keep her engaged with life.

And that’s what Sean wants for himself, and for me: a passion. Well, I wanted to make movies. But the producers who come asking us to invest in their projects, they want our money and not our ideas. They want all the glory and all the work, while we pay for it. We invested in a few good ones that we believed in, and I’ll admit, I was more than a little excited to help create the finished product, but when Sean and I showed up to help, they looked at us like we were albatrosses around their necks, rather than a part of the team. We got the message.

Sean’s written some scripts. He won’t show them to me, but he mentioned one night when we were a couple sheets to the wind that he’s got two finished and one he’s working on now.

That night under the fog of whiskey, we dreamed about what it would be like to do what Edward Burns does–create our own films and release them how and when we want to. Sean would write them.

We’d hire who we admired: actors, crew, composers, all of it. I don’t know if I could trust myself to direct it all the first time out, but we could co-direct, and that could work.

Get our feet wet. Find our way, together.

It wasn’t until the sky lightened to gray that we realized we’d talked that whole night away.

Passion.

I felt passion for something other than partying and women that night. I could see myself bringing a story to life and showing it to people, to take them on a ride like the ones we go on every time we see a film and leave the theater surprised it wasn’t real.

But actually doing it is the hard part.

What if the films are shit and we’re laughing stocks? People already love to hate us, and man are they looking for a way to take us down.

But it would be so cool…

As we blow past Mulholland Drive and start the descent on the other side of the hill, I ask Sean, “Remember that night we talked about making movies?”

Sean’s silent for a second. “Yeah. What about it?”

I turn the wheel with the curve of the road. Who am I kidding? We’d make fools of ourselves. The whole world would be watching, not for the movie, but for the failure Sean and Jack Stone must be when it came to having actual talent. I put the idea out of my mind and answer, my tone dead, “Nothing.”