She went to the window, looked down at the traffic on Sunset. Her parents had never been very comfortable with her singing career. Her mother, in particular, had treated it as though it were some sort of nuisance disease, something nonfatal that nonetheless interfered with your life in serious ways, preventing you having a real job, and for which there was no particular cure, other than simply letting it run its course and hoping for the best. Her mother had seemed to regard any income from singing as a kind of disability pay, something you received for having to put up with the condition. Which hadn’t really been that far off Hollis’s own attitude to art and money, though unlike her mother she knew that you could have the condition yet never qualify for any compensation whatever. If being the kind of singer and writer she’d been had ever proven absolutely too difficult, she was fairly certain, she’d simply have stopped doing it. And perhaps that was really what had happened. The sudden arc of her career, the arc of the Curfew, had taken her completely by surprise. Inchmale had been one of those people who’d apparently known since birth exactly what he was supposed to do. It had been different for him, although maybe the plateau, after the arc up, hadn’t been that different. Neither of them had really wanted to see what an arc down might look like, she thought. With Jimmy’s addiction as a punctuation point, a blank, heroin-colored milestone driven into whatever that plateau had been made of, and with the band stalled creatively, they’d all opted to drop it. She and Inchmale had tried to go on to other things. As had Heidi-Laura, she supposed. Jimmy had just died. Inchmale seemed to have managed it best. She hadn’t gotten that positive a feeling about Heidi’s life, seeing her this time, but then Heidi was as difficult to read as any human Hollis had ever known.