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Then I did the thing I have spent every day since lying about the motive for.

I tore the page out.

I'd like to tell you it was clean. One long professional pull along the spine, the way you tear the bad scene out of a good script. It was not clean. The paper ripped diagonally, and then the rest of it wouldn't come, so I had to grip the magazine between my knees and use both hands while a strange low whining noise came out of me.

"Hey!" Dash said. "Hey — that's mine, that's my first spread—"

"I'll buy you the entire print run."

"That's not—"

"I'll buy you the magazine, Dash. The company. I'll buy the company." I folded the page into quarters, badly, and put it inside my jacket. My hands weren't steady. I noticed that with a kind of clinical surprise, the way you'd notice an actor flubbing a line. "How much is Town and Country?"

"I don't think it's for sale—"

"Everything's for sale, that's the whole—" I stopped and made myself breathe. "I'm sorry. Dash. I'm being insane. I'm going to stop, I promise."

I put money on the bar. Too much money, the way you do when you're leaving somewhere you'll never come back to and you'd rather be remembered as generous than deranged.

"Kimo. It has been a genuine pleasure being diagnosed here."

"Mr. Normand." He was still holding the towel. "Whatever it is. Go slow with it."

"Absolutely not."

"That's what I figured."

I got two steps toward the door and then turned back, because Dash was sitting there with his ruined magazine in his lap looking like a kid whose bike had been stolen, and I didn't want to leave him that way.

"Dashiell."

He looked up.

"Never let anybody tell you Town and Country is a big deal." I tapped the cover, gently, once. "Go make something they have to put you in. Something brilliant, that everybody loves. Then you won't have to carry the magazine around. The magazine will carry you."

He blinked at me. "That's really good advice."

"It's the only advice I've got. I'm giving it to you free, which for a Normand is basically a religious experience."

Then I walked out into that postcard light with my ex-husband's wedding announcement folded over my heart like a subpoena.

* * *

By the time I hit the dock I was producing my next feature film, called How To Win Back My Ex.

I couldn't help it. It's what happens. Other people feel a feeling and then decide what to do about it. I decide what to do at enormous speed and let the feeling catch up with me later.

"I need a fucking list," I muttered, taking the ramp two boards at a time. The list assembled itself. It always does.

One. Sell the boat. Today. Take whatever the first idiot offers.

Two. Get on a plane.

Three. Get to that compound.

Four. Find a reason to be there that Blaine's parents can't say no to.

Five. Do not, under any circumstances, examine item four too closely.