“I wasn’t asking, Grace, you haven’t been here for over a year.”

We’re both silent while I figure out what to say next. I take a banana from the fruit bowl in the middle of the kitchen island, then realize I didn’t buy it. I did pay for the bowl, however, and the marble island. I turn the banana over in my hand and try to work out what to do next.

“Do you think your new girlfriend can teach me about nonverbal cues? Or is the catastrophically self-absorbed actress a lost cause?”

Dylan shakes his head but I can tell he’s trying not to smile.

“You’re not catastrophically self-absorbed, Grace. Humans have just never been your strong suit. It’s different. And she’s not ‘new.’”

I think of all of the questions Dylan has every right to ask of me that I know he isn’t going to because he doesn’t want to hear the answers. Dylan packs up his laptop and a camera I haven’t seen before, and puts them in his camouflage backpack.

“You still dress like a teenager,” I say.

“The kids at work call me sir,” he says, and he’s smiling slightly now.

“You’re not even twenty-four.”

“I’m working with sixteen-year-olds all day. I’m an old man,” Dylan says.

“More surfers?” When I met him, Dylan was making a film about surfers in Malibu. He spent three years following a group of kids, and then he turned it into a Sundance-winning documentary about teen suburban malaise and prescription drug abuse.

“The same ones. It’s harder. They’re hyperaware of their online presence and, like, their ‘aesthetic’ this time around.”

“And nobody has been maimed yet.” I can’t resist. He never denied that his first documentary would have been less gripping if one of the surfers hadn’t gotten into a car accident while high and lost a hand during the shoot. No pun intended. I hate puns.

Dylan stops by the door, and something flickers across his face.

“What are you doing today?” he asks.

“I’ve got an NA meeting this morning.” The lie slips out of my mouth easily, a throwback to a former version of myself. Dylan nods, relieved that I’m not going to be pouring out lines of coke in front of autistic children in his house.

As soon as he’s gone, I walk up to the pool on our roof. The water has a layer of something oily on the surface and a cluster of dead insects floating in one corner, but I get in anyway so that I can lie on my back while the winter sun explodes behind my closed eyes. I feel weightless for the first time in a while.

* * *

? ? ?

I arrange to meet Laurel at Gjelina, a restaurant on Abbot Kinney Boulevard. I stand in front of my untouched closet for nearly half an hour before I leave, stroking the silk dresses and cashmere sweaters that hang from the bar across the top. I pick out a rose-gold, floor-length Calvin Klein slip dress that I wore to the Met Gala on my eighteenth birthday, an evening I mainly spent hiding in the toilets to avoid the lethal combination of small talk and selfies—not because I thought I was any better than anyone there, but because I didn’t understand them.

I pull the dress on over the stained Winnie the Pooh T-shirt I’m still wearing, and then I stare at myself in the mirror until it’s time to leave. I walk to the restaurant with my skirt trailing on the ground over my Converse, picking up pine needles and dirt. Everything seems too bright.

Abbot Kinney is the same as when I left, only more. It’s a ten-minute walk from the coast and it has transformed from a local neighborhood with a few restaurants into a bourgeois, farm-to-table influencer heaven—Beverly Hills by the sea. I push past teenage girls posing with brightly colored juices outside storefronts painted pink just for them, while women with bodies like Victoria’s Secret models line up for coffee outside the minimalist spot with the amphitheater seating. There are fewer stores selling healing crystals, more stores selling $800 shirts, and men with full beards wandering aimlessly at eleven a.m. on a Friday, holding babies with names like Hudson and Juniper in slings around their necks.

When I get to the restaurant, Laurel is exactly as she always is, short black Afro, her obnoxiously skinny frame draped in layers of organic cotton. Only the crease between her eyebrows has changed. I resist the urge to reach out and touch the smooth, waxy skin.

“You need a project,” she says almost as soon as we’ve sat down. A wave of mild resentment washes over me, and I wonder if I liked having her around before because she reminds me of my mother.

The server comes over to take our order.

“Can I have the flatbread with goat cheese and caramelized onion?”

Laurel looks horrified. “What the fuck?”

It turns out it’s totally okay to drink so much that you have to be carried out the back door of a strip club, but the moment you order carbs for lunch, you’re certifiably insane.

“You know they call it a flatbread but it’s really a pizza. A pizza. Do you want me to take you to an Overeaters Anonymous meeting? I’ve heard that everyone goes to the one in Silver Lake.”

“Jesus, Laurel.”

“Okay. But let me know.”

I pour some sugar into my black coffee, but I don’t mix it because I like the warm sugary paste that collects at the bottom. Laurel is watching me closely. I forgot that this is how everyone looks at me here, as if they’re waiting for me to break.

“So should I start telling people that you’re back?”

People. She only knows people because of me.

“No.”

“Okay, no problem. You need to settle in. Do you want me to speak to Maya about starting up barre and Pilates again?”

“I don’t want to do barre or Pilates.”

“Okay, sweetie.” Laurel raises an eyebrow and looks somewhere over my shoulder like we’re on a reality TV show and I’m being unreasonable. Then she starts to flick her hand at me, pinching the air around me.

“Stop adjusting my energy,” I say irritably.

“I’m cleansing your aura. Why did you come back, Grace?”

The waitress brings my pizza over, and I inhale the scent of melted cheese. Why did I come back? I think of everything I’ve ever left behind, of the memories that come back for me just when I think I could be safe, and I feel a kick of shame somewhere deep in the pit of my stomach. I came back because I was drowning there, too, Laurel. I came back because I have nowhere else to go. I came back because I wanted to start over, but now that I’m here, it’s like I’ve forgotten how I ever pretended to be normal.

“Because my mom made me,” I say, but Laurel doesn’t smile.

“How was it with you guys?” she asks seamlessly, as if she remembered all along that my mom and I don’t get on.

“Okay, I guess.” I shrug. She reaches over and covers my hand with hers. She’s wearing large crystal bracelets, and they rest uncomfortably on my wrist. I resist the urge to move my hand.

“Are you on something?”

“Why is everyone asking me that?”

Laurel frowns at me. “Do you think you should go to a wellness retreat or something for a while? Or you could join that church everyone goes to? With the tattooed pastor? He wears cowboy boots.”

“What?” I say, squinting at her. “What about cowboy boots?”

“Trust me, it’s a real thing.”

“I am not joining a church,” I say slowly, “because it’s a thing. Anyway, my mom’s half-Jewish.”

“What’s that got to do with anything?” Laurel says. “Look, I’m just worried you’re not ready to be back in LA. People are going to want answers.”

“I don’t have any answers,” I say, and then I shrug again. “Being back here, I don’t know. I feel numb. It’s not the worst.”

“Numb isn’t good for people like me or you,” Laurel says, but she can’t quite frown in the right way because of the Botox. “Where did you go, Grace?”

CHAPTER ELEVEN

A good memory, this time. One of the few that I cling to as if it could slip away at any moment, as good things have the tendency to do.

Six months after I landed the role in the assassin trilogy, the studio held fan events in three key cities—New York, Beijing and London. The movie was a remake of a comic book, so there was already a network of die-hard fans that came with the territory. They seemed desperate to stake their claim on this new incarnation from the start, devouring and sharing every piece of information from the moment the franchise was announced, so the studio took advantage of it.