She remembered standing in front of the Bowery Ballroom venue a million times, under-dressed, over-made-up and teetering in heels, getting her name checked off the list for a show before she headed in to drink 10 free vodka cranberries in the air-conditioned dark backstage, make eyes with some  ...

Jack Fletcher had walked in in his big red flannel jacket, and he wasn’t alone. He was holding a thin shiny blond girl’s hand whom Amy recognized from that awkward morning at Yoga. He nodded at Danny, but his eyes moved right over Amy, like she wasn’t even there.

She could see the yellow yolk of the full moon bleeding over the water outside. She couldn’t wait to run down the beach again. If she closed her eyes, she could feel her feet sinking into the sand and the cool rush of salty air on her skin. She rubbed at her thin legs under her long white nightgown.

Amy kept stealing glances at the girls while she thought they weren’t looking. There was a warmness to them, and old soul familiarity. They all looked her in the eye. There was no immediate other-women-weirdness, as Amy had been used to from the city.

Amy thought of the way he left her, without remorse, about the unreturned text messages, as if she had not only never even mattered to him, but never even existed. About the affair with Cassandra, and all those horrible tabloids, and then of the last two and a half months in bed. Her blood  ...

But in two months of invalidism, she had grown to feel an intense compassion and understanding for Leanne. She knew Leanne didn’t even like to be so hard around the edges, as she herself called it, but she had built up a wall of armor over years of doing battle with a lifetime of loss.

She and Monica used to go after work if they didn’t go to a movie premiere, rock show, or store launch. They’d flirt with the moody rockabilly bartender and get free vodka sodas and take home fledgling rock stars, who looked at them with moons in their eyes, like Amy or Monica -- either one,  ...

Amy smiled weakly, but she was still thinking about what Leanne had said; she’d spent a sleepless night in the dark with those words, looking at the emptiness, taking responsibility for it. And thinking about changing, about how badly she wanted to.

The unfinished books she had begun to collect; the Power of Now, collections of Rumi and Hafiz, Leanne’s borrowed books on the Goddesses, Awakening Shakti and Dancing in the Flames, sat now like dogs at her feet waiting to be touched. She had nothing else to do now, but to receive the wisdom.

She had never heard anyone sound so passionate in her life, it lit something deep within her. Her heart swelled with the crescendo.