When she gets to his door, she knocks several times in quick succession.
“Hello?” she says. “It’s Bailey Michaels.”
There is no answer, which makes it easier. She pulls the blue key from her back pocket and lets herself in.
For an extra two hundred dollars a month, the super has allowed for this arrangement that Hannah has made with him. He has allowed for Bailey to have access to his apartment for the sole reason that once (only once) she might need to walk through his apartmentto use his private exit. His separate exit. The only exit in the building that isn’t attached to the lobby and the front door.
The exit that leads into the building next door, which the super also manages. It takes you to a different lobby—unseen by anyone who is watching from the street, who may be focused on Bailey’s lobby door.
Now, Bailey walks out of the apartment and into the adjacent lobby, and the elevator banks that take her down to parking level four.
She has a car waiting here. This isn’t the car she uses every day. This is a different car, a small Jetta that Hannah’s best friend, Jules, purchased and registered under her name. Not Hannah’s. Not Bailey’s.
She pulls the red key from her back pocket and unlocks the Jetta, remembering Hannah’s instructions. There is a full tank of gas. And there’s a full trunk.Don’t open the trunk. Get in the car and move.
Bailey reverses out of the garage quickly, using the exit that takes her out to Venice Boulevard, around the corner from her own garage entrance. Where they (whoever they are, wherever they are) won’t think to be looking.
She turns left and then left again until she is heading in the direction of the Pacific Coast Highway and Hannah.
Only then, and only for a moment, does she let herself cry.
Malibu Road Is Private for a Reason
On the highway, the taxi passes the exit for Entrada Drive and my workshop.
Despite my heart racing, despite the fact I know it’s not possible, I feel a pull to ask the driver to turn that way, to get to pretend (for a little longer) this is any other day. To spend it at my workshop in Rustic Canyon, a beautiful slice of Los Angeles right off the Pacific Coast Highway—hilly and quiet and incredibly private.
My workshop is on a small road that dead-ends into a cul-de-sac. It’s in a ranch-style house with hedges out front and a large side yard. It has plenty of room for my lathe, my oversize bookshelves filled with wood blanks, and for the sizable storage shed that houses my larger pieces in various stages of production.
There are only a handful of other houses on the road, which is across the street from a Eucalyptus Garden, the backyard offering foggy views of the ocean and the mountains and Malibu out in the distance.
I open the window as we pass the exit, my workshop hidden by that beautiful canyon. But I stay quiet, and the driver keeps going, not taking the exit, heading past Topanga Canyon and toward Malibu. Toward Malibu, and toward my destination: a beachfront house on the end of Malibu Road.
It’s a house that belongs to one of my clients—a client who is now married to my former fiancé, Jake.
The client is an actress who I started working with shortly afterI moved to Los Angeles, building furniture for nearly every room of her Malibu beach house. She is bright and sarcastic and beautiful—and I had a feeling, as soon as I met her, that she and Jake might like each other. I had such a strong feeling that, even though I wasn’t in the business of setting up my former fiancé, I felt compelled to introduce them. And I’m so glad that I did. They fell in love and got married and are expecting their first child together. Jake now the best version of Jake there seems to be.
They spend most of their time in New York City, but they kept this house on Malibu Road, Jake’s name not on the deed.
That part—not putting Jake on the deed—they did for me. For me and for Bailey. So no one would think to look for us there. At least not quickly.
I ask the taxi to let me off half a mile away from their house, at the Malibu Country Mart—a large outdoor shopping area dotted with fancy stores and bakeries and restaurants, a sign announcing that paparazzi aren’t welcome. The surfers and the beautiful locals are all more interesting to look at than I am, which makes disappearing here feel possible.
I pay the driver in cash and slide into the local coffee shop in case he is watching where I go. In case he, or anyone, figures out that it was me who he dropped here.
The coffee shop is already bustling inside and on the back patio, Malibu locals taking in the early morning sun and heat from the comfort of their cappuccinos. Their oversize green juices.
I head out a different exit without ordering anything and jog toward the northern edge of the Country Mart—and the crosswalk that runs across the highway. Toward a small residential neighborhood on the other side, the beach and ocean just beyond it.
As soon as the light turns, I race across the highway and pastRalph’s supermarket and the animal hospital and the gas station. I jog through a parking lot that lets me out on the private (and quiet) of Malibu Road, Jake’s house in the distance.
The house is a stunner: all glass and beach views, my rustic wood furniture visible through the filmy windows, the large steel doors.
I don’t enter through the front doors though. I have a remote to the garage in my bag. Bailey has the other one. I let myself in, closing the garage quickly behind me.
I head into the house, passing through the small mudroom, and into the large great room—a living room and a home office and a kitchen all wrapped into one.
I turn on the lights in the kitchen and the television in the living room, finding CNN on the remote, as I pull a new burner phone out of my bag.
