The dress had come and gone and she’d missed it, apparently. “Sorry we missed you,” the FedEx tag on her door said. That was all they’d left her with, a tag.

How could you have missed me? she thought, her heart thudding. I only just went down to throw the garbage away. She stared at her white front door, which was covered in rust spots. So many that it looked diseased.

“I wasn’t even gone a minute,” she told the door.

The delivery had been inexplicably delayed for a few days now. She’d seen this online, using the Track Your Package feature, which she had been checking hourly, then half-hourly, on both her laptop and her phone. According to the graphic, which resembled a giant red thermometer, the dress had been packed in Marly-la-Ville, France, then it had been shipped off to somewhere called Le Mesnil-Amelot, then Fort Worth, then made pit stops in random-seeming places in California (Oakland, Ontario—why?) before it at last reached San Diego, where it had languished all night in a warehouse facility downtown. She’d noted its movement toward her like inevitable weather, a coming storm, or the journey of the moon across the sky. It had still been in San Diego when she’d last checked. But now it seemed it was here in La Jolla. And the delivery person had attempted to deliver. And she’d missed it.

She sat on the white couch in her empty living room, gripping the door tag in both hands. Some supermarket roses stood in a cracked vase by the window. “I was here, I was right here.” She said this to no one but the room itself, its white walls and fogged windows. Beyond those windows, the beach. Pots of rotting flowers sat just outside, dead leaves trembling in the ocean breeze. There was an old spiderweb still clinging to the railing by her front door. The web had been there for months, maybe years. Every time she passed it, she thought, I should really throw some water on it, I should really take a broom to it, I should really clear it away. She stared at the door, where the FedEx man had no doubt stood only moments ago, holding her package, which contained the dress, the chartreuse, in his hands.

“I didn’t even hear him knock,” she told the room, incredulous.

She looked down at the door tag, at the tracking number, about a thousand numbers long, until she saw swirling stars instead of numbers, then black.

When she opened her eyes, the sun was in a different place in the sky. Lower, though still shining, still bright.

A walk, I should take a walk.

Outside, the ocean roared like a lion, light playing on the waves. There was a shimmering on the water, on the distant edge of the horizon. She walked along the shore, watching the waves crash and the palms sway. Pelicans sailed through the air in V formations. It wasn’t dark, not yet. Night was still far away. Ridiculous to be upset about the chartreuse. Just a delayed delivery. Just a dress. Not even the right color for her, probably. Probably in the end she’d have to send it back. “The truth,” she told the sidewalk, “is that I didn’t even want it.” It had been an impulse buy from Farfetch, one of those sites along with Mytheresa and The RealReal which she’d been haunting with increasing frequency. She’d been in search of a new Mage, a particular type of dress, the namesake design from the label. She’d been hunting those dresses for a few months now. High-end, French, chicly esoteric. Prized for their saturated jewel-toned colors, their impossible falls and cuts. She’d already acquired several lengths and shades: rust, forest, jade, and four more blues beyond sapphire—azure, pigeon, powder, royal.

It’s the material, she thought as she scoured the web for more. That’s what’s winning me over. Or is it the cut?

She had bought the first one, the sapphire, at an actual shop in New York, just before she left her job, set her life on fire. When she tried it on in the dressing room, she’d felt a shiver as she looked at herself in the mirror. Yes, she’d murmured to her reflection. This.

“Can I help you?” a clerk had called softly through the curtain. There were no doors in Mage. There were hardly any lights. When the clerk spoke, he barely spoke at all.

“No,” she’d whispered back. “No, thank you.”

I don’t need help, she’d thought. The Holy Ghost is here, it is moving through my flesh.

She’d smiled at herself in the three-way glass. The dim lights above her flickered.

It wasn’t silk but it looked like silk, that was its trick.

Later, when she’d found the chartreuse on Farfetch, she’d clicked. An unlikely color. A perfect cut. The model, a sullen blonde with messy pageboy hair, looked vaguely sick in it. Miserable. Almost tantalizingly so. “Chartreuse,” it said beneath the photo, and nothing else. Chartreuse, that was a drink, wasn’t it? Made by French monks. Carthusian. In the seventeenth century, something like that. Distilled from herbs and flowers. She had a flash, maybe even a memory, of her mother enjoying a glass. A difficult color to pull off, of course, that glowing yellow-green. It didn’t suit everyone. It didn’t suit the pale blond model.

Probably it won’t suit me, either, she thought, staring, though she herself wasn’t blond or pale.

It was well past midnight at this point. Her overheated laptop was whirring and burning on her stomach. She watched a video of the model turning round and round in the chartreuse, her arms spread as if she were being crucified. Outside, there was a red moon over the dark water. She could feel the mirror in her bedroom closet shining, hungry. Her dresses were hanging in there in the dark, on black velvet hangers, so many colors and cuts, but they were all dead to her behind the door. The mirror had seen them already. One finger, a few clicks, that was all she had to do. Add to cart. Checkout. Then Google would know her, the machine would let her. Everything was in the cloud, after all, needed only to be drawn up by a touch, her touch. And then it would be done. Always a hesitation with the credit-card click, that was part of it. The held breath, the raised finger, the uncertainty, a sense of underlying stakes, of drowning in dark water, her bank balance moving inevitably toward the red, the flash to a future in which she was a very old woman wheeling a shopping cart along the sidewalk. The cart was filled with dresses, all those dead ones in her closet. And herself, aged and broken, pushing the unwieldy cart of her brightly colored sins, leaving a trail of Angel in her wake. And then, in her mind, she saw her mother’s ghost. Her diabetic feet shoved into the gold Louboutins she never took off. Looking at her through the cracked windshield of a leased silver Jaguar, glove compartment overflowing with tickets she’d never paid in her lifetime. Get in. Quickly, her hand moved to the keyboard and clicked. She breathed. Took a Xanax and shut her burning laptop—done, it’s done, and that’s the last one for a while. For a long, long while. She lay back and closed her eyes. Promise yourself. I promise. The sullen model continued to turn round and round in her mind, arms splayed. And then it was herself she saw turning and turning like that. Enjoying a glass of Chartreuse by the dark shining waves. In the dream she had red hair, which complemented the dress beautifully.

2.

Outside now, on her walk, it was getting darker. The sun sinking lower in the clear sky over the water. Somehow she’d veered away from the shoreline and was walking in the village. She didn’t love the village. It reminded her that she was a stranger here. That hers was, in many ways, now a pantomime of a life. Everyone here was rich or they wanted to be, and they all looked it. Even the flowers and grass seemed moneyed, the streets literally perfumed, the water sparkling in the distance like liquefied diamonds. That’s why you came here, that’s why you left everything behind. Heaven, she often said, to remind herself that it was. She wasn’t running away from anything. No, this was where she lived now, this was how she lived now, and it was wonderful. She could afford it, thanks to her uncle, God rest. For a while, anyway. And how lovely to have no idea where she was going or what she was doing anymore. To have no destination at all. No reason to be home and no reason to be not home: isn’t this what you wanted?