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with you than split time with a whole group
    Ray [10:00am] : I know I had to move to Atlanta to “be supportive of my fiancée’s career” or whatever, but I hate being so far from you, Bea.
    Ray [10:00am] : I really miss you.
    Bea [10:04am] : I miss you too.

    Bea insisted she wasn’t nervous to see Ray, but the deep breaths she kept taking (air hissing in through her teeth, then pushed back out past lips pursed in a Lamaze-shaped “ooh”) as she sat in traffic on the 10 told another story. She reassured herself that she was a different person now than the girl who spent all those years obsessed with him, the shy Hollywood agency assistant in love with the most handsome guy in her mailroom class.
    How unbearably cliché,
Bea thought of her younger self as she pulled off the highway and into the winding, moneyed streets of Westwood, where quaint Tudor houses that looked airlifted from a Grimm story lined every block. She’d rather have stayed in her hodgepodge neighborhood on the east side of Los Angeles, but her favorite wine shop was here, nearly an hour away in traffic. For her one night with Ray (pretend though she might that it was no big deal), she knew she had to make the trek.
    Les Caves was easy to miss with its unobtrusive sign and rough-hewn wooden door, and still easier to ignore when one peered inside briefly to see scattered tables laden with disorganized clusters of bottles. But Bea loved it here—loved speaking her broken French with the shopkeepers, loved delighting in the quirky wines they put aside for her, mouth-searingly dry Meuniers and sharply honeyed Savennières.
    “Bea,
bon matin
!” Paul, who owned the shop with his wife, was pudgy and ebullient. Bea often joked that Paul had turned her into an insufferable wine snob, but he always laughed heartily and corrected her that she should be proud to be a connoisseur.
    “
Bonjour, Paul
,” Bea said with a grin.
    “
Et qu’est-ce que tu désires aujourd’hui?
” he asked. “Perhaps something very light, dry fruit and mineral? It is so hot!”
    “
C’est vrai
,” Bea agreed—L.A. was experiencing its annual July heat wave, the few days a year when even the desert nights barely dipped below 90, rendering the entire city unlivable. It had been like this, too, the night Ray kissed her. That one perfect, terrible night five years ago, when he was stumbling drunk on the sidewalk in front of Chateau Marmont, his breath stale with cigarettes and whiskey, tears streaming down his face as he told Bea his mom was sick again, maybe terminally this time. He put his arms around Bea’s neck and whispered, “I can’t do this without you.” She replied, “You don’t have to,” not understanding whether he meant as friends or something more.
    After all the countless nights of drinking together, sharing hushed secrets and whispered observations, feeling so starved to be physically close to him, clamping down nausea as she watched him flirt and kiss and leave whatever bar they were in with yet another gorgeous aspiring actress/model/singer, finally,
finally,
he was looking right at Bea.
    It was too hot, and everything was damp, and she knew it was wrong when he leaned in to kiss her—he was too upset, too drunk, too distracted. But she didn’t care, because she had wanted this so much for so long, and she felt like she had somehow managed to wrench her life onto the right track by sheer force of will.
    After the kiss, she expected him to say something profound—or something earnest, at the very least—but he just mumbled that he needed to call a car, he had an early flight.
    “Oh,” Bea had stammered. “Sure. Of course.”
    He flew home to Minnesota the next morning. He was only supposed to be gone for a few days, or maybe a few weeks, but he never came back, except to pack up his things and drive east. He spent the next few months at home with his family, watching his mother die; then he moved to Virginia for law school; after that, it was