I missed him. I missed him all the time.

The only thing that made it a little better was the foyer of the House of Ruin. My mother had already replaced all of the marriage and wedding shots that had hung there. The photos of her and my father had become photos of me and her, looking identical and sisterly. Or just her, grinning at the camera with her medical school diploma in her hands. Only, she should have known better with that last photo. Because even though my father’s face wasn’t in it, he still technically was. That grin she wore had been for him as he snapped the picture.

It didn’t matter for my purposes, though. Because all I needed out of the wall was the absolute reminder that 50 percent of all American marriages ended in divorce, and the rest of them were on their way there.

I would stop loving Cole. That was just the fact of it. This wall was proof that one day, I would stop caring.

I closed my eyes. Not all the way. If I sealed the lids, it would break the surface tension, and then these tears would escape.

“Isabel, you should come with,” Sofia told my back.

My eyes flew open, wide as they would go. I didn’t turn around.

“With? With who?”

“Dad and me,” she said. “We’re going —”

“No, I’m busy.” I could feel her still standing right there, so I added, “Thanks for asking.”

She didn’t move. I didn’t have to turn to know that she was working her courage up to say something. I wanted to tell her to spit it out, but I didn’t have any energy left over to be mean.

“You’re not busy,” Sofia said bravely. “I’ve been watching.

Something’s wrong. You don’t — you don’t have to talk about it, but I think you should come with us.”

I couldn’t believe that I’d been so bad at hiding my feelings.

I couldn’t believe, either, that I had somehow lost enough of my prickly exterior to make Sofia think it was acceptable to call me on it.

“Say yes,” Sofia said. “I won’t pester you.”

“You are pestering me!” I spun. She didn’t look chastened, though her hands were folded in front of her.

“It’s really nice outside,” she added. “I’m bringing my erhu.

We’re going to go sit on the beach.”

She unfolded her hands, and then she took one of mine. Her fingers were very soft and warm, like she had no bones. What the hell. It couldn’t make me feel worse, surely. When Sofia gave a gentle tug, I didn’t resist. At least until I got to the door.

“Wait, my boots.” I also meant my hair. And face. And clothing.

And heart. So many things really needed to be put in order before I left the house.

“We’re going to the beach,” Sofia said. She let go of my hand and swiped up a pair of my mother’s flipflops from the pile of shoes by the wall. She dumped them into my grip and went to get her erhu.

Unbelievably, I ended up driving her to the beach in flipflops and gym pants and a tank top, with my hair like a homeless person’s. I parked at the edge of the lot, where a bunch of sweatily buff boys played volleyball. My uncle (ex-uncle?) Paolo was already there, still in his EMT uniform, which reminded me horribly of the cops in the bass-player episode of Cole’s show.

He ruffled Sofia’s hair like a kid’s (she smiled blissfully) and draped his arm over Sofia’s shoulder. “I was going to bring cupcakes.

But then I thought, no, Sofia is going to make something that’ll make whatever you bring look like crap! So I brought booze instead!”

He didn’t mean actual booze, of course, just local root beer, the outsides of the bottles moist with condensation. Sofia was delighted, as she had, of course, made bakery-perfect cupcakes.

I was impressed with Paolo’s knowledge of his daughter.

They were so keenly cheerful in each other’s presence that I felt like a third wheel as I helped carry things out to an empty spot on the beach. Sofia spread a blanket and her father pulled out a pile of do-it-yourself magazines that he’d collected for her.

I really wanted to see calculation in it, some sense that he’d done all of this to make up for abandoning her with Lauren, but I couldn’t. Because he was clearly just an overworked and overtired EMT who was genuinely happy to steal the time to see his daughter, who he knew really well.

There was only one person who knew me that well.

It would be better after he left town. When I didn’t know exactly where he was. I needed to get rid of Virtual Cole. I’d drop it off tonight. I knew he was going to the studio to finish the album. I’d leave it on his car.

I couldn’t let myself think about it too hard.

Sofia and her father chattered back and forth, both of them talking wildly with their hands, and then Sofia took out her erhu and played. You could hear it up and down the beach, but no one cared. This was L.A. They’d heard everything.

I lay back on my elbows, eyes closed to the sky, my scalp tickling because my hair kept brushing the sand behind me.

My bare feet were off the blanket into the sand, and I dug my toes in.

In my head, Cole kept dropping his head onto my shoulder in the cemetery. He kept becoming a wolf. He kept building everything up and burning it down.

Just think of going to class, Isabel. I told myself. Getting a degree. Becoming a doctor. This is life.

I wondered how long it would be before my father came to visit and take me to the beach before returning to his San Diego life.

Sofia stopped playing.

My uncle asked me, “Do you want to talk about it?”

This was because I was crying. I sat up and pulled up my knees and drew them closer and closer until I was crying into them.

Life sucked.

Sofia put her hand on my back, which normally I wouldn’t have ever tolerated, but I was just too done to protest.

“It’ll get easier,” Paolo said.

But I knew that. That was the worst part. The worst part was that eventually you forgot about the people you loved. The dead ones and the ones who raised you and the ones you wanted to be with at the end of the day.

I had learned before my CNA class that the body produced three kinds of tears, each with a unique chemical makeup. One of them was generated regularly to keep your eyes moist. The second sprang to life when the eye got something in it, like debris, lubricating and washing out the intruder. The third happened when sadness built up inside you. The chemicals produced through depression were carried out of the body through these tears. You were crying your sadness out.

So I knew there was a scientific reason why I felt better after I cried.

But knowing that didn’t take away the fact that I did feel a little better.

Finally, I lifted my head just enough to rest my cheek on my knees. I asked my uncle, “Do you still love Aunt Lauren?”

I waited for Sofia’s hand to tense on my back, but it didn’t.

Paolo made a rueful face. “I like her. She’s a nice woman.”

“Then what happened?”

He thought about it. I thought about how my face probably looked like a battlefield. Sofia gathered my hair into a ponytail and then released it again.

Finally, he said, “We weren’t friends, I guess. It was just love.

Infatuation. So we didn’t really do things together unless it was a date night. We needed an excuse. And after a while, we just didn’t bother making excuses anymore. We had other friends.

We didn’t really grow apart. We just weren’t ever together. It was a failure of friendship.”

I thought about me and Cole. Were we friends? Or was it just infatuation?

I felt Sofia lay her head on my back and then sigh. She must’ve looked sad, because her father looked sad, too. He said, “Only marry your best friend, Sofia. That’s my dad advice.”

I said, “I thought you were supposed to chase her dates away with a shotgun. I thought that was dad advice.”

“Maybe your dad,” Paolo said. “He shoots lots of things, joy included.”

Both he and I laughed, sharp and surprised and guilty. I sat up, shoving Sofia off, and rearranged so that my shoulder was against hers. I held out a hand for a root beer. For the first time in a week, I didn’t feel awful. I might be okay. I might survive this.

I thought about returning Virtual Cole tonight. The options of putting it in Cole’s hand myself or leaving it on his car.

Then I thought of a third idea.

I pulled out Virtual Cole and then my phone. I checked to make sure I had Baby’s phone number programmed in to it.

“I have to make a call. Do you mind?” I gestured to Virtual Cole. “This is actually Baby’s phone. I’m going to return it tonight.”

As I stood, Sofia started to pat my shoulder before realizing that I wouldn’t tolerate it now that I wasn’t crying. She tapped the neck of her root beer against mine instead. We were learning each other.

As I dialed Baby, I wondered if I was really doing this.

This was life. This is what it looked like. This was happening.

Chapter Fifty-Three

· cole ·

The last track took forever, and I was sure it was making pretty shitty television. I’d saved it for last because it was the most difficult — I wasn’t good at slow stuff that was supposed to be pretty. It was easy to hide a lack of songwriting with some thrashing drums or a flailing tempo. People would forgive all kinds of deficiencies as long as they could dance to it.

But “Lovers (Killers)” wasn’t a dance tune. It was going to be the outro, the last one on the album, the last sound in the listener’s ear. I couldn’t cheat.

We were seven hours into the recording process. I thought both Leyla and Jeremy wanted to kill me, but were too evolved to say it out loud. I was making Leyla record her drum part for the ninth — tenth? maybe tenth — time. I sat in the big recording room on the vinyl couch, the room headphones on my head, listening to Leyla playing her kit in the isolation booth. Jeremy looked asleep or at peace on the opposite end of the couch.

On the other side of the soulless studio, T and Joan looked as if they were hoping for sleep, too. This hadn’t been the most riveting episode so far. I kept waiting for Baby to spring something on me, but it seemed like she, too, was tired of playing the game.

Leyla picked her way through the track again. Unlike the rest of us, she improved as the hours stretched, like she unwound into a different version of herself. If she was this much better after ten times, I probably ought to make her do it three or four more times and see what happened. It was a little bit of a shame that it had taken six weeks to learn how to work with her, and now it was about to be over.

Over.

A lot of my brain was on the Mustang parked outside.

Before I’d come over here, I had packed everything I’d brought from Minnesota back into my backpack, and put it in the tiny backseat. Tonight I was staying at Jeremy’s, and in the morning I was doing some wrap-up stuff with Baby and a couple of interviews with some magazines. And then — I didn’t even know.

I didn’t want to go back to Minnesota. But I couldn’t stay here. I saw her everywhere, in everything. Maybe one day I could come back, but not now, not like this. I couldn’t spend every day looking at L.A. but not feeling it inside me.

I dropped my head into my hands, listening. There was no reason to have Leyla redo her drums. She was fine. It was my vocal track that needed work. I sounded like I’d been anesthetized.

Standing, I made a chopping motion across my neck to the sound engineer in the mixing room. I had tried and failed to remember his name, and now, at this late point in the game, it seemed pointless to try again. “She’s fine. It’s good. I need to get back in there, though.”

Everyone in the room heaved a collected sigh, except for Jeremy. He just said, “Eventually, it’ll have to be over, Cole.”

“It’s over when I say it’s over.” I headed into the tiny, glasswalled isolation booth.

In the booth, I slid the headphones on again, and as the engineer adjusted the levels and got ready to record another vocal track, I tried to think of how I’d improve on my previous attempt. Maybe I should just add another layer of harmonies this time around.

Or maybe I should stop sounding like I was heartbroken.

I fidgeted. I was well aware that the cameras could see me through the walls of the booth. It was a goldfish bowl.

“Okay,” the engineer said. “You’re good. Go for it.”

I heard the now endlessly familiar synthesizer loop that began “Lovers (Killers)” and then Leyla’s tapped-in drum, and then Jeremy’s tripping, gentle bass line. My voice sang in my ears, a Cole who was weary and heartbroken and homesick for a home he hadn’t left yet but was about to. I kept waiting for a place that begged for me to put down another layer, but nothing stood out.

I closed my eyes and just listened to my sung miserable confession.

I didn’t want to go.

Because of the headphones, I felt more than heard the door open. A rush of cooler air entered the booth.

I opened my eyes.

Isabel stood in the door, cool and elegant as a handgun.

Behind her, through the glass, I saw the cameras pointed at us, and Baby standing in the double doors that had been opened to the night. In the parking lot beyond, several hundred people were gathered, craning their necks to see inside.

I didn’t understand.

Isabel stepped into the booth. Reaching up, she pulled off the headphones, setting them carefully down onto the stool beside me. I couldn’t tell from her face what she was thinking.

Baby’s smile was so giant and the camera angles so favorably pointed at Isabel that I knew that, impossibly, Isabel must have agreed to be filmed. Agreed to be on the Cole St. Clair show.