Jess sat at one of the Tahitian’s bamboo tiki bars with a beer and a cigarette, using a tin ashtray identical to the one Chloe had shown her back in L.A. Grass-skirted waitresses worked the room, balancing trays as they steered through the slots and card tables. As each woman passed Jess glanced at her name tag, smiling and looking away whenever she was caught.

Vince was out looking around the casino floor. They’d been there for an hour or so, though it was hard to tell. There were no clocks; no one wore a watch. It felt like these rooms moved outside of measured time.

Jess had been to Vegas before, dragged along by friends for a weekend or birthday celebration, but always felt so depressed by the greed and bad taste that she failed to contemplate the place itself. She had never been alone here, sitting quietly in this strange disconnect.

She could make something here. Jess felt the first surge of possibility, the beginnings of an idea. For the past two years she had tamped those feelings down, but she let this one run for a moment, testing the space like a toddler allowed to roam for the first time. Jess watched the idea grow and detour, expanding into questions and possibilities, until she finally caught herself and pulled it back. It didn’t vanish completely, though. She still felt it, a thin bright remnant alight in the back of her mind.

She tried to remember the words of that old manifesto, the dialogue with Gabe she wrote down and hung in the bathroom of her first studio. She needed the reminder then, when every morning she awoke filled with criticism and doubt—her own and that of what seemed like so many others. She couldn’t remember all of Gabe’s questions so she focused only on her answers, the list forming her own koan or incantation, a long string of defiant negations and then that final, single yes, which always felt like an opening she could step through, past the lines that had been drawn.

The bartender came by and she ordered another beer. When he returned with the bottle, Jess asked if Martha still worked there.

He scratched his ear and gave a quizzical look and said he didn’t know who that was.

Jess turned on her stool, facing the playing floor again, the waitresses out taking orders. She would have to go to each one until she found someone who knew.

“Martha Reed?”

A young waitress stood beside her now, bottle-blond, runaway thin.

“Is she here?” Jess asked.

“She moved a while back. Out of town.”

“Do you know where?”

The girl squinted. “Somewhere out in the desert. Near Twentynine Palms, I think she said. She sold me all her stuff before she left.”