It was early Saturday, technically, just past 3 a.m., when my estranged partner called.

"Hey," he said, breezy and indifferent.

I was driving to the bay with the pills, physician-assisted, legal under California's End of Life Option Act, though approval hadn't been easy even with a terminal diagnosis. Not off the Golden Gate or anything theatrical. Just quietly, somewhere nondescript.

I'd hiked John Muir once and thought off-handedly, 'oh, this would be a pretty place to die.' I didn't want to die in Los Angeles. I'd loved that city once. We'd started looking at houses just before the collapse. I dreamed a life there with him, even a family.

People looked at me like I was a madman when I said I was excited to raise children in LA. As if anything short of fescue lawns and hand-whittled rattles imported from Iceland amounted to child abuse.

What I wanted was a child raised in a world that looked like the world. Multicolored, noisy, unpredictable. If that meant a bit of chaos, so be it. Better they learn to breathe in it, adapt to it, than grow up brittle like their father. Not me. The other one. The one on the other end of the line. The one who was now…"She's gone crazy!" he screamed. A familiar refrain, but months of separation had taught me to expect it.

He sounded like a dinosaur. One of the ones with frilly necks that spit poison. I told him that one once. That he needed to stop sounding a velociraptor before the neighbors called the police.

"You mean a dilophosaurus," he corrected, in expected 'ackshually' fashion. "I'd know. My father was supposed to be the cinematographer for Jurassic Park. Spielberg loved him after Christine, but he was already working on Geronimo at the time and…"

I didn't want a child that turned out like him. I used to feel guilty about that. Before he condemned me. Before he walked off without looking back, leaving me with the consequences of his cowardice. Before he traded the beautiful life we shared for a one bedroom in a seedy part of Hollywood, just down from the Chinese Theatre, across from a predatory acting academy where impressionable young talent with strong jaws and empty heads might overlook his grating personality the moment he name-dropped his father's Emmys.

I wanted one who'd grow up well-adjusted. Who could name their feelings instead of bottling them up until they burst. Who knew who they were and didn't need constant approval from strangers with bleached teeth. Someone with a spine. A conscience.

"She has a fucking brick and she's smashing my car to pieces," he continued. "My CAR! My beautiful car. What have I done to deserve this? Freckle, put that down!"

Enter Freckle. The self-described hell goddess we jokingly shared custody of. At her best, she was among my favorite people alive. At her worst, I wanted nothing to do with her. A self-styled bruja, a prophetess of chaos, always dragging around a patchwork tote with an Eckhart Tolle and a dozen orange prescription bottles that rattled like charms, whether for treatment or theater, no one could ever say. A swirl of mental illness and addiction. Except Freckle didn't melt under pressure, she exploded.

"He's coming to take care of you!" he shrieked, now wielding me like a weapon. "Did you hear that?! Jeff's coming!"

Then, to me, quieter, almost unsure, "You are coming, right?"

I hadn't said a word. How did he even know I was still on the line, buried somewhere beneath his spiraling monologue of panic and rage? I thought about it. About turning back from wherever I was, somewhere outside Bakersfield, maybe heading toward him. I could still make it back before sunrise.

I thought of those mornings, the ones where fog clung to the hills and tops of the palms swayed like slow dancers. I thought of how lucky I'd felt.

"My guys," he used to say, beaming at me and the dog, carrying in a breakfast tray.

"My special guys," he'd say, with a smile that made you forget the world outside even existed.

And I thought of the night I first met Freckle. How she ordered three martinis, shrimp cocktail, crab cakes, lobster tail, a bone-in ribeye, and, waving a hand at us, "Whatever these two are having."

"Remember when you came back from Mexico and said Ryan was 'the best partner ever'? That's

Then she pressed on, with absolute certainty. "Anyway, that's when I broke your window, climbed the tree with Jon, dumped salsa on myself, and summoned Jeff. It was a ritual. I wasn't confused, I knew exactly what I was doing. Where will you ever find a man like this again? You should be thanking me."

The next day, she threatened to slit my throat in the dead of night, said my sheets would run redder than every last cunt in Orange County.

That was the price of loving him. His world lived at the edges. Exhilarating at first, until it wasn't. Until I got sick, actually sick, terminally sick, the kind where doctors start talking about quality of remaining time. Then he disappeared. Then I was alone.

"Don't do it!” Him.

"Don't come, Jeff!" Freckle’s voice now. "He has some ugly twink in his bed and he just wants to make you jealous!"

The line went dead.

Then I remembered who he was. He was no lost boy. An almost forty-year-old middle manager with an inflated title, a bad temper, and escapist tendencies he mistook for grit. He forgot birthdays. He skipped anniversaries. He wouldn't sit beside you in a hospital room. No matter how long I stared at the empty chair, it wouldn't summon his snoring body. He wasn't coming. He never was. He was not a man you could count on.

I kept driving, but not to the bay. The opposite direction. Back toward Los Angeles, the city I'd said I didn't want to die in. Maybe I wasn't ready to give him that satisfaction either.