CHAPTER 30

.30.

I was walking back toward the house, my shoes heavy with damp sand, when I saw her.

She was a small, silhouette-thin figure sitting on a driftwood log near the water’s edge, no light near her but the glowing cherry of a cigarette. She hadn’t been there ten minutes ago. In the silver-grey wash of the moon, she looked fragile, like a piece of sea glass that had been tossed around until all its sharp edges were gone.

I stopped. Becoming the shadow that startled a lone woman in the dead of night was the last thing I wanted. But before I could retreat, she spoke. 

“Can’t sleep either, huh?” Her voice was low, hushed almost. It carried a jagged edge of exhaustion.

I stayed where I was, my hands in my pockets, looking out at the black horizon alongside her. It was a strange, silent agreement – two strangers turned toward the same dark mirror, sharing a confession in the salt air.

“The ocean’s too loud tonight,” I said.

She let out a short, dry laugh that turned into a cloud of smoke. “It’s never the ocean. It’s the noise inside your head that keeps you up. The ocean’s just the only thing loud enough to compete with it.”

“I’m a fish out of water,” I admitted, the honesty coming easier to a stranger in the dark than it had to my own parents on a piece of stationery. “I don’t know the rules of this coast.”

“Nobody does, honey,” she said, her voice softening. “They just spend a lot of money on clothes and cars to pretend they do. Most of the people you see in the papers are just children playing dress-up, terrified that someone’s going to turn the lights on and see them for what they really are.”

She took a long pull from her cigarette. “I’m so tired, stranger. I’m so overworked I’ve forgotten what it feels like to have a day that isn’t a script. Sometimes I think I’d give it all up – the contracts, the cameras, the screaming fans – just to have a normal life. One where I don’t have to be ‘on’ from sunrise to sunset.”

“Why don’t you?”

“Because the tiger doesn’t let you off its back just because you’re tired of the ride.”

We lingered in that sentiment for a moment – a writer who couldn’t write and an actress who couldn’t stop performing. For a heartbeat, the world felt honest.

Then, the spell broke. A male voice, thick with sleep and irritation, drifted down from the deck of one of the nearby beach houses. “Honey? It’s freezing out here. Come back to bed!”

The woman stood up, brushing the sand from a silk robe I hadn’t noticed before. She looked at me then, and even in the dim moonlight, I saw the glamour mask slide back into place – the wide, luminous eyes and the pout that could launch a thousand movies.

“Goodbye, stranger,” she said.

She walked away toward the stairs of the neighboring house, her gait regaining a practiced, bouncy swing. For a moment, I mused whether she was doing it for me.

It wasn’t until the screen door clicked shut behind her that a name surfaced from my memory and hit me: Lana Lowe.

Lana Lowe, the actual Tinseltown’s “Glamour Girl.” I’d been sharing the dark with one of the most famous women in the world, and she’d sounded like she was mourning someone who hadn’t even died yet.

What a crazy place, I thought. The sharks didn’t stay in the water here. They were everywhere: in the bedrooms, the studios, even in mirrors.