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“It’s how they control everyone. I grew up with a stolen compass. It’s taken me most of my life to find it,” he said, easing to a stop at a red light.

“But you’ve found it?”

He looked at me like the answer belonged with me. “Yes.”

He asked me about my job. I probably told him too much, but I was ready to vent.

“She sounds like a nightmare. I can sympathize,” he said.

“Yeah, I’m getting the sense you know what it’s like to work for very high-maintenance women.”

The bay flew past us, puckered and gunmetal gray under the fading sun, and then we left the real world behind for the redwoods and sword ferns, dense as a black bruise against the periwinkle sky. The fog was gathering in patches, swallowing the road, then spitting us back out, like it couldn’t decide if it should help us.

Every few miles the forest would break open and the Pacific would appear far below a jagged drop, sudden and terrifying, abyss-deep and slate blue, frothing with sneaker waves.

“I pulled a kid out of there last year,” Damian said. “The ocean here has an appetite. You have to respect it.”

“Did he live?”

“He lived.”

I glanced again at the ocean. I’d never thought of it as a creature that swallowed people into its well-of-souls throat. But then, I’d never thought of face cream as a bottled woman, or a dead fox as a premonition. Nothing was ordinary anymore.

Damian took an exit, and we wound down a steep narrow road toward the beach. Sea stacks rose from the surf like the teeth of a drowned god.

The turn was unmarked. Damian took it like he knew it well, and my heart sank. He’d taken women here before. I wanted, more than anything, to not be his assignment.

The road narrowed to a tunnel of cypress and madrone, the jeep’s headlights now brighter than the dying light. We climbed a driveway narrow enough that I’d flinch at an oncoming car, but the road was quiet.

The drive opened into a small gravel lot. We parked by a stone wall draped with rosemary that had gone shaggy from the salt air.

He opened the door for me. The air smelled like cypress, salt, and woodsmoke. The Pacific was out of sight, but still a constant pulse below us, against the bluff.

The building emerged from trees as weathered redwood and stone, low and long, its windows lit warm. A wooden sign over the door read Gray Coast Cellars in carved letters worn smooth by years of fog. A small black cat sat on the doorstep watching us approach.

Damian took my hand. We paused at the doorway. He looked at me like he was asking for permission for something.

“I’m okay,” I said.

We stepped inside.

A woman greeted us at the door and led us to a table on a weathered deck jutting over a cliff. Strings of lights bathed half a dozen tables in gold, and soft music drifted from a speaker above the door. Fog blurred a single candle on the table to a soft halo. The scene was warm and intimate until you looked over the deck, where I could just make out the steep drop through the fog, to the jagged black rocks and crashing waves below.

The sound of a cocktail shaker came from across the patio, where a bartender worked at a bar that served customers on the inside, but was also open to the elements and had a view of our table on the deck. I reminded myself not to look at him, which was both easy and hard because I didn’t want him to look at me, but I wanted to know what kind of a person does this. How much he knew about any of it. How he landed a job like that. How many others had done the same.

I’d spent three years booking people like him. Florists who knew which arrangements not to photograph. Drivers who knew which guests to collect from the side entrance. And I knew that no one got discretion like that out of a stranger for free. You got it from a retainer. Someone was paying him.

Damian looked criminally handsome in a vignette of fog, string lights, and candlelight. The way his gaze traveled over me told me he was thinking along the same lines. He reached across the table and took my hand. The words I was about to say scattered like beads.

“Try to relax,” Damian said. “I know that’s hard.”

I relaxed my shoulders and smiled. His hand was warm and felt like it was holding me together.

“You’ve been here before?”

“Yes. But I don’t know a thing about wine,” he said. “They just told me to order the Pinot Noir.”

I couldn’t look at red wine. I could still feel Aurora’s thumb marking my forehead with viscous red liquid.