Page Forty

Inés doesn't push. That's the worst part.

She just takes out her phone on the loading dock behind the Marquee on Sunset, the next afternoon, with the LA heat coming up off the asphalt in waves, and scrolls to a photo, and turns the screen toward you without a word.

It's dark and blurred and shot from the ground through rain. The Ferris wheel, lit up against a purple sky. The top car, a pale box, two figures inside it. One is tall, with dark hair plastered to his head, leaning toward the other. The other is wearing a denim jacket with a patch on the shoulder. You can't see the patch, not really. It's a smudge of color.

You know what it is. It's the Chicago flag. Your mom sewed it on when you were nineteen. The jacket is in a storage unit in Pilsen.

"Two men," Inés says quietly. "That's what I see. I could be wrong. It's a bad photo."

"It's a bad photo," you agree.

"I'm not going to print it," she says. "It's not enough. And I don't print what I can't stand behind." She puts the phone away. "But I'm going to keep looking. I thought you'd want to know that."

"Why would I want to know that?"

Inés smiles, not unkindly. "Because you just said 'it's a bad photo' instead of 'that's not me,' Ethan."

You play the worst set of the tour. Not bad. Just absent. Ksenia notices. Haruto notices; he looks at you three times during "Night Bus," which for Haruto is shouting.

After the show, there's a party.

It's at a glass house in the Hollywood Hills that belongs to someone at Crowfoot, all white couches and infinity pool and a view of the whole city lying under the haze like a spilled jewelry box. Ksenia vanishes into a crowd of people who have heard of her. Haruto finds the one dog at the party and devotes himself to it. Daria is working, even here, phone pressed to her ear on the balcony, sorting out tomorrow's drive to Phoenix.

Ravn is in the center of the living room.

Not by choice. You can see that from across the room. Jago has a hand on his shoulder and is steering him, gently, from one cluster of people to the next. Executives. A radio programmer. Two influencers with ring lights in their purses. And beside Ravn, never more than a foot away, a young woman so beautiful it's almost a joke: long dark hair, cheekbones, a slip dress the color of champagne.

You know her face. Everyone does. She's the girl from the "Ferris Wheel" video, the one riding the wheel alone in slow motion while Ravn sings. Lada Prochaska. The internet decided she was the girl the song was about. Nobody ever said she wasn't.

A photographer lifts a camera. Jago says something, and Lada slides her arm through Ravn's, and they both smile.

Ravn's smile is perfect and completely empty. It's the billboard. It's not him.

You go outside. There's a terrace past the pool, half dark, lined with lemon trees in pots. You lean on the glass railing and look at Los Angeles and try to breathe.

"You're the bassist."

Cassia Brakspear sits on a lounger behind you with her boots up and a bottle of mineral water. She's got freckles all over her face and arms and a look like she's been deciding something for a while.

"I'm the bassist," you agree.

"I've seen you play six times now. You're good. Your tone's great, by the way. He's lying when he says it isn't."

"I know."

"Good." She swings her boots down. From the inside pocket of her denim vest, she pulls out a notebook. Black leather, soft as an old glove, the corners worn round, held shut with a rubber band. She holds it in both hands for a second, looking at it.

"He's going to kill me," she says.

"Who?"

"You know who." She holds the notebook out. "He leaves it everywhere. Catering. Bus. Once on a plane, and I had to chase down a flight attendant in Denver. He writes everything in there. Every song. Every stupid thought."

"I can't read his notebook."

"Page forty," Cassia says. "Then decide if you want to keep pretending you don't know him." She stands and puts the notebook in your hands, and her face goes softer for a second. "He came off that Ferris wheel two years ago and didn't shut up for a month, Ethan. I've been waiting a long time to meet you."

She walks back toward the party before you can say anything.

You stand on the terrace with the notebook in your hands. The rubber band is warm from her pocket. Inside, music thumps. Somebody laughs too loudly. A camera flashes.

You shouldn't.

You take the rubber band off.

The pages are thick and soft and crowded. His handwriting is a mess, small and slanted and full of arrows. Set lists. Phone numbers with no names. A drawing of a lobster with sunglasses. Half a verse about a gas station in Ohio. You turn pages without reading, counting, your heart going so hard you can hear it over the party.

Thirty-eight. Thirty-nine.

Forty.

It's dated at the top. The date of the last day of Driftwood. The handwriting is different on this page, faster, less careful, like he wrote it in one go while something was still happening to him. There are coffee rings. There's a smear that might be rain.

At the top, in capitals, underlined twice:

FERRIS WHEEL, 4 A.M.

And underneath, smaller, in the same pen:

(for Ethan, who counted the bolts)

Your name. Your name is on the page.

You read the first verse. It's the song. Almost word for word. Rain came sideways off the water. Counting bolts. Salt in your hair. Something small to hold.

The second verse. Your eyes find it before you're ready.

His thumb on the low E, steady as the sea.

His.

And over it, in a different pen, in bright red ink, in neat, square, confident handwriting that isn't his at all, someone has struck through the word and written above it:

her.

Beside it, in the margin, the same red pen: Better. Trust me. J.

You stand on a terrace above Los Angeles with the city glittering below you and the bass of a party shaking the glass at your back, and you understand, all at once, with your whole body, what you have been running from in taxis and bars and vans for an entire year.

The best-selling love song in America isn't about a girl.

It's about you.