She laughed and said, “Still shooting for half an hour a day, Frank, scout’s honor.”
I told her I was still the same old same old. Mari was the one with this glittering new life on the Gold Coast, not me.
“That’s good you’re working with Ryan,” I said. “She needs you in her corner. I hope she’s doing okay out there.”
“I hope so too,” Mari said.
“You don’t know?” I asked. “You should know better than anyone.”
She sighed and said, “I know. But she’s changed a lot. She had a dream about this place the other week, and it rattled her a little. I think remembering her roots is making her realize how far she’s come.”
I winked at her. “You’ve changed too.”
It shouldn’t have come as a surprise to her, but she sort of frowned and said, “I guess I have.”
I could have sat there catching up all day with Mari and been content. But when she said, “Can we swing back to the studio?” I knew she had something up her sleeve.
When I walked back into my shop, it had been transformed.
There was space cleared, a little stage set up at one end of the barn, lights hung, and a group of chairs set out. And in the middle of it all was Ryan.
I don’t even know what kind of exclamation came out of my mouth, but she came up and gave me a hug—it was so good to see her. She had become sotall. And she did seem different, in a way. Like Alice in Wonderland when she has those snacks and becomes too big for her surroundings. I wondered if Hamilton felt too tight on her now, like it’d shrunk around her.
But when she smiled, she was the same old Ryan.
“I’m here to make up for all the times I said I’d call you back but didn’t ... or missed your birthday ... or lost track of time,” she said. “Can I play something I wrote just for you?”
I’m not ashamed to admit I got choked up. “You’ve already taken over my studio, so you can do whatever you want,” I said.
She played a whole little concert for me and for the others who were there—Mari, her songwriting partner Jasmine, someone namedSarge, I think? And that young guitarist of hers was there too. He was a handsome young man, and I raised my eyebrows at Ryan when she introduced us.
She gave me alook. So I knew they must have been together.
None of my business, though!
Mari
I let Frank believe that we were there just for him—I didn’t tell him about the location scouting or the music video or any of that stuff. He needed his moment with Ryan, and he got it. She played her exclusive show, and we spent the rest of the night with him talking and catching up.
I was watching Ryan closely the whole time we were in Hamilton. We stayed with the rest of the crew in a hotel over in Hathorne—that’s Hamilton for you, no hotels—but she and I took a walk down Bay Road like we used to as dusk came on and the others went to pick up dinner.
“Is it like you imagined it?” I asked her.
“It’s nice and quiet,” she said.
I’d forgotten how much I missed it. I missedseasons; I missed the smell of pine trees and that faint sea air you could feel even fourteen miles inland. The empty street was a far cry from downtown LA.
But I imagine Ryan meant the solitude too. We’d been lucky in keeping this visit under wraps, and I’d struck a deal with our local outlets that they would get exclusive content as long as they waited to publish until after we were gone. It felt strange, in fact, to walk down the street without worrying about someone coming after us.
“I never thought I’d be back,” she said. “At one point, I thought I’d want to settle down here. But after I’d been in LA long enough, I guess I sort of ... forgot about it. I remember growing up here like it was a different lifetime.”
“I do too,” I told her, and the second I said it, I was surprised to realize that I meant it.
“Sometimes I wish we’d never done it,” she said suddenly, stopping short.
“Left Hamilton?” I asked.
“Yeah,” Ryan said. “What have we become?”
