Everyone I’ve ever wanted to meet is here and they want to meet me and Reese Witherspoon wants to hug me—yeah, she does—and her husband wants to talk to me and Joaq wants to get a drink and Love is proud of her book-selling boyfriend, crushed and destroyed, but proud.

Barry Stein takes me aside. “Do you like cigars?” he asks.

“Absolutely,” I say, and he will be useful in my negotiations with Megan Ellison. I will get Stein to offer to buy my shit and then turn around and make deals with ME. For now, it starts with friendship. Forty is right; I won’t burn bridges. And first, I have to build them. I have to walk out onto the lawn and watch Barry Stein wrestle with his bowtie and search for a polite way to segue into business talk, as if there is a polite way to segue into business talk.

He chews his cigar. He spits. “You know,” he says. “Forty and I, we kicked some ideas around lately. You and I, I think we should talk.”

I nod. “Absolutely.”

“I think his work should not die with him.”

“Absolutely.”

I smoke a cigar and Barry wants me to call his office and set up a meeting. Inside, the food is incredible. Kate Hudson is hugging me. There are crab cakes and antipasto and drinks that never stop, gimlets and steak tips that melt and cold chunks of lobster. Forty’s favorite songs play, most of them about the fucking drugs that almost killed him but didn’t kill him and George Clooney shakes my hand—Good speech, kid—and the greatest part of all of this is the beautiful truth of it.

I killed it with my speech and I did not kill Forty Quinn.

It’s silly to play games, to wonder how he might have lived. What was Julie Santos even doing in Beverly Hills? What if she had continued to go straight on Santa Monica, all the way to the Pacific? It’s like in Match Point with the tennis ball and then later with the ring. All of life is slightly dependent on magic. So is death. If his body had been found in the spring, if his skin had started to disintegrate, his shit staining the hot water, his body stuffed with cocaine, well, the funeral would be different. I mean, I would have killed it and found a way to bring the light, but it would have been a darker day. Thank God, if there is one, for Julie Santos and her left-hand turn.

“Joe,” she says, and she is Susan Sarandon. She hugs me. She pulls away. “I just needed to do that.”

I hope Reese saw and I hope Amy saw but what really matters the most is that Love saw. She wraps her arm around me. “You did so good,” Love says. “Do you even know?”

It’s not the time for me to brag so I am humble, supportive, stroking her arm and kissing the top of her head and she steps away, family obligations.

People like Forty Quinn are their own worst enemies, increasing the odds of an untimely death by chugging codeine, and with his death, I am liberated. I can go anywhere I want and I wander into the lobby, the pink and green of it all, freedom. I sit on a circular sofa and Love finds me. She plants herself on my lap. She strokes my hair. “Let’s stay at the Aisles tonight,” she says. “I don’t want to stay here. I want my own bed.”

When a girl wants her own bed and she wants you in it, this is how you know it’s real. “Whatever you want,” I say, and I will give it four weeks until I tell her that I’m inspired by Forty’s work, that I think I’d like to try writing something on my own.

I put my hand on her stomach. Forty can’t take this moment away, the quiet love in this ballroom and the inaudible sound of a new heart beating.

54

I wake up early. Happy. I’m still high on the funeral, on Kate’s ass, Reese’s eyes, Amy’s intensity, my baby. And I missed it here at the Aisles, the tennis court, the sand and the grass forever mixing, never melding. I’m a runner now and the beach looks different to me, useful. It’s my track. And what a great feeling it is to revisit the puzzle of your life and say, ah. I know what that beach is there for. It’s there for me.

My body doesn’t want to sleep. I think it has something to do with all the change. The last time I was here, I killed Delilah. Love had no idea who I was, but she wanted to find out so she invited me to go to the film set with her. She stood on that beach and watched me coming in on the Donzi and she did not know where I had been or why I had been out there. The miracle of life, of the girl in my bed; she loves me more now than she did then. And now there is so much new love in my life, meetings and opportunities and purpose. I will take care of Love. I will honor Forty’s legacy and see his projects to fruition. I will be strong for my child and I will protect myself.

I am too happy to be still and Love is like Sleeping Beauty. Her twin is dead; this will take a while. I kiss her perfect little forehead and I put on pink shorts with whales all over them and I put on a T-shirt and I grab my sunglasses and I leave Love’s room. I hum “Thunder Road” and I walk through the house that Forty will never walk through again—it’s real!—and I smile.

Outside I walk down the path, barefoot on the sandy grass, the grassy sand. I hear the waves and they are slow and lazy and when I reach the beach, I am startled because there is a mist as dense as snow, a Stephen King kind of mist, thick and white. Suddenly I am a kid again and monsters could live in this mist and how surreal it is to hear the water but not be able to see it.

I remember feeling this happy once, when I was a kid. Snow covered the streets and they were perfect and white, as if the world had been coated in vanilla ice cream. My mom said school was canceled and I could go outside. I’d seen snow before, but there was something about the snow that day. It was early, before the people would come and destroy it all, and I clomped outside and it was up to my knees and I was the first one to walk in it and I was so fucking happy to be first, to see my footprints, giant and deep, to know that I had all day, that there would be no school, no homework. There is magic in a snow day and how strange it must be to grow up in Southern California without that possibility. It will be my first question for Love when she wakes up.

I walk into the mist toward the water and I hear a dog barking. Boots and Puppies. I whistle. The dog barks. He sounds afraid. “It’s okay,” I call out. “Come here boy.”

But he only mews, sounding almost like a kitten. “Hey, little guy, it’s okay.” I pat the sand. I am reminded of the puppy in Single White Female that won’t run to Jennifer Jason Leigh, and then she kills the puppy because it didn’t love her. And then I think of Forty murdering Roosevelt, Love’s version, and Love crying when their parents gave Boots away, Forty’s version. There really is no such thing as the truth but there is such thing as happiness, and I can picture the amazed look on Love’s face if I brought her home this dog.

Dogs like authority, so I command. “All right, get over there, pup. Right now.” But the whimpering sounds farther away. I start running, making my way through the swirling white, and fifteen yards in I stumble and stub my toe. Fuck. Sand is harder than you think.

“Would you just come here already? I’m not gonna hurt you!” I keep going and the puppy is still crying out there, somewhere. “It’s okay! I’m here.”

The ocean ebbs and flows beyond the fog and I hear the dog again, and I crouch. I want to be prepared to hug him, to get coated in puppy slobber, to be loved—this is why people in Franklin Village keep dogs—and I think I see him. He is as white as the mist, with a little black mouth and black eyes and a pink tongue coming into focus. The dog is panting, running, and I wonder what we’ll call him. He looks like a Charlie or a Cubby or a George. I whistle to him. He ignores me. Fucker.