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mascara when she was wearing the extensions, hence no mascara could track down her tear-streaked face. That was even better.
    At least it was a beautiful day to be dumped: impossibly blue skies, temperatures in the high seventies, and a steady west onshore breeze that made Santa Monica as smog-free as rural Montana. Even the traffic was cooperating—miraculously, there was none. It was almost as if the universe were egging her on, steering her to her destiny of Dumpdom. Sam made the twenty-five-minute drive from Bel Air to Santa Monica in less than nineteen minutes and didn’t even get caught by the lights at Sunset Boulevard and Bundy. Pulling up in front of the Monsoon Cafe, a restaurant that her father had once owned, back in the days when actors believed that restaurants were worth the aggravation, she handed the Hummer keys over to the black-jacketed valet along with a twenty and instructions to park it someplace where he could get to it quickly. When she was ready to leave, she wanted to be out of there.
    Eduardo had suggested they meet at the promenade’s central fountain, about a ten-minute walk north from where she parked. In the movie version of her life, Sam realized that she would film this walk in slow motion. With each step she took, there’d be a flashback to some memorable moment in her time with Eduardo, complete with a soaring musical score guaranteed to evoke tears. One step: their first meeting at Las Casitas in Mexico, when he’d come across her skinny-dipping in the moonlight. Another step: their first real date, at the same resort, when they rode on horseback through the water to a small, deserted island a quarter mile off the coastline, where Eduardo had arranged for a romantic meal. Then the time when he’d acted so selflessly, so sweetly gone out of his way, agreeing to accompany Sam to her senior prom.
    Quite honestly, her relationship with Eduardo had changed her. Sam knew she owed all of her fortunate L.A. status to her pedigree and her brains, because in the looks department, she simply could not compete. Oh sure, she would have been in the top third in say, Peoria—wherever the hell
that
was—but in Beverly Hills? Money could buy almost anything in the way of physical promotion, and girls in Beverly Hills had money to spare. Even with her sucked-in this and her altered that and blah, blah, blah, her ankles remained thick, her body pear-shaped. She did not turn heads on Rodeo Drive like Cammie did. Even petite Dee did. And Anna definitely did. But not Sam.
    Eduardo—objectively gorgeous by anyone’s standards—saw her differently. He thought she was beautiful. It was as if he saw her through a different lens than the rest of the world. It had taken Sam a long time to believe him, but she finally did. Talk about winning a girl over. And now he was going to pull the metaphorical rug out from under her! Buh-bye. The end. It’s been fun. Let’s do lunch sometime. She even knew why he was breaking up with her—her name was Gisella, and she was an up-and-coming young fashion designer. Peruvian like Eduardo, and—again by objective standards—much better looking than Sam. She had the ability and the skills to design a dress that would make her own ass a Degas in comparison to J.Lo’s velvet painting. She spoke the same language. She knew the slang. They knew the same people back home in Lima. Though Eduardo tried to reassure her that he wanted her and not Gisella, Sam knew better.
    How would he pull it off? Sam wondered as she made her way past a mime performing for a small crowd of tourists on her way to the fountain. He’d say they ought to make a clean break because he was going to go back to the Sorbonne in Paris in a few weeks, and she’d be starting film school at USC. It was the right thing to do.
    The promenade was absolutely jammed. Street musicians weren’t just allowed, but encouraged, and she found herself going the long way around big circles of people watching a