Maybe she could detect it in my voice, because she didn’t try to fight me. She just said, “OK, whatever.”

I hugged her and kissed the top of her head, and just when I was going to let go, she wrapped her arms around me and hugged me back.

EVELYN’S EYES ARE WET. THEY have been for some time. She stands up and grabs a tissue from across the room.

She’s such a spectacular woman—by which I mean she, herself, is a spectacle. But she’s also deeply, deeply human. And it is simply impossible for me, in this moment, to remain objective. Against all journalistic integrity, I simply care about her too much not to be moved by her pain, not to feel for all she has felt.

“It must be so hard . . . what you’re doing, telling your story, with so much frankness. I just want you to know that I admire you for it.”

“Don’t say that,” Evelyn says. “OK? Just do me a favor, and don’t say anything like that. I know who I am. By tomorrow you will, too.”

“You keep saying that, but we’re all flawed. Do you really believe you’re past redemption?”

She ignores me. She looks out the window, without even looking at me.

“Evelyn,” I say. “Do you honestly—”

She cuts me off as she looks back at me. “You agreed not to press. We’ll be done soon enough. And you won’t be left wondering about anything.”

I look at her skeptically.

“Really,” she says. “This is one thing on which you can trust me.”

Agreeable Robert Jamison

Now This

January 8, 1990

EVELYN HUGO MARRIES FOR THE SEVENTH TIME

Evelyn Hugo got married this past Saturday to financier Robert Jamison. While this is the seventh trip down the aisle for Evelyn, it is the first for Robert.

If his name sounds familiar, it might be because Evelyn isn’t the only member of Hollywood royalty he’s linked to. Jamison is an older brother of Celia St. James. Sources say the two met at a party of Celia’s just two months ago. They have been falling head over heels in love since.

The ceremony took place at the Beverly Hills courthouse. Evelyn wore a cream-colored suit. Robert looked dapper in pinstripes. Evelyn’s daughter with the late Harry Cameron, Connor Cameron, was the maid of honor.

Shortly after, the three left on a trip to Spain. We can only assume they are off to visit Celia, who just recently bought property off the southern coast.

CONNOR CAME BACK TO LIFE on the rocky beaches of Aldiz. It was slow but steady, like a seed sprouting.

She liked playing Scrabble with Celia. As she’d promised, she ate dinner with me every night, sometimes even coming down to the kitchen early to help me make tortillas from scratch or my mother’s caldo gallego.

But it was Robert she gravitated toward.

Tall and broad, with a gentle beer belly and silver hair, Robert had no idea what to do with a teenage girl at first. I think he was intimidated by her. He was unsure what to say. So he gave her space, maybe even more of a wide berth.

It was Connor who reached out, who asked him to teach her how to play poker, asked him to tell her about finance, asked him if he wanted to go fishing.

He never replaced Harry. No one could. But he did ease the pain, a little bit. She asked his opinion about boys. She took the time to find him the perfect sweater on his birthday.

He painted her bedroom for her. He made her favorite barbecue ribs on the weekends.

And slowly, Connor began to trust that the world was a reasonably safe place to open your heart to. I knew the wounds of losing her father would never truly heal, that scar tissue was forming all through her high school years. But I saw her stop partying. I saw her start getting As and Bs. And then, when she got into Stanford, I looked at her and realized I had a daughter with two feet placed firmly on the ground and her head squarely on her shoulders.

Celia, Robert, and I took Connor out for dinner the night before she and I left to take her to school. We were at a tiny restaurant on the water. Robert had bought her a present and wrapped it. It was a poker set. He said, “Take everybody’s money, like you’ve been taking mine with all those flushes.”

“And then you can help me invest it,” she said with devilish glee.

“Atta girl,” he said.

Robert always claimed that he married me because he would do anything for Celia. But I think he did it, in at least some small part, because it gave him a chance to have a family. He was never going to settle down with one woman. And Spanish women proved to be just as enchanted by him as American ones had been. But this system, this family, was one he could be a part of, and I think he knew that when he signed up.

Or maybe Robert merely stumbled into something that worked for him, unsure what he wanted until he had it. Some people are lucky like that. Me, I’ve always gone after what I wanted with everything in me. Others fall into happiness. Sometimes I wish I was like them. I’m sure sometimes they wish they were like me.

With Connor back in the United States, coming home only during school breaks, Celia and I had more time with each other than we ever had before. We did not have film shoots or gossip columns to worry about. We were almost never recognized—and if people did recognize one of us, they mostly steered clear and kept it to themselves.

There in Spain, I had the life I truly wanted. I felt at peace, again waking up every day seeing Celia’s hair fanned on my pillow. I cherished every moment we had to ourselves, every second I spent with my arms around her.

Our bedroom had an oversized balcony that looked out onto the ocean. Often the breeze from the water would rush into our room at night. We would sit out there on lazy mornings, reading the newspaper together, our fingers gray from the ink.

I even started speaking Spanish again. At first, I did it because it was necessary. There were so many people we needed to converse with, and I was the only one truly prepared to do it. But I think the necessity of it was good for me. Because I couldn’t worry too much about feeling insecure; I simply had to get through the transaction. And then, over time, I found myself proud of how easily it came to me. The dialect was different—the Cuban Spanish of my youth was not a perfect match for the Castilian of Spain—but years without the words had not erased many of them from my mind.

I would often speak Spanish even at home, making Celia and Robert piece together what I was saying from their own limited knowledge. I loved sharing it with them. I loved being able to show a part of myself that I had long buried. I was happy to find that when I dug it up, that part was still there, waiting for me.

But of course, no matter how perfect the days seemed, there was one ache looming over us night after night.

Celia was not well. Her health was deteriorating. She did not have much time.

“I know I shouldn’t,” Celia said to me one night as we lay together in the dark, neither of us yet sleeping. “But sometimes I get so mad at us for all the years we lost. For all the time we wasted.”

I grabbed her hand. “I know,” I said. “Me too.”

“If you love someone enough, you should be able to overcome anything,” she said. “And we have always loved each other so much, more than I ever thought I could be loved, more than I ever thought I could love. So why . . . why couldn’t we overcome it?”

“We did,” I said, turning toward her. “We’re here.”

She shook her head. “But the years,” she said.

“We’re stubborn,” I said. “And we weren’t exactly given the tools to succeed. We’re both used to being the one who calls the shots. We both have a tendency to think the world revolves around us . . .”

“And we’ve had to hide that we’re gay,” she said. “Or, rather, I’m gay. You’re bisexual.”

I smiled in the dark and squeezed her hand.

“The world hasn’t made that easy,” she said.

“I think both of us wanted more than was realistic. I’m sure we could have made it work, the two of us, in a small town. You could have been a teacher. I could have been a nurse. We could have made it easier on ourselves that way.”

I could feel Celia shaking her head next to me. “But that’s not who we are, that’s not who we have ever been or could ever be.”