Loved One

Julia, a thirty-year-old jewelry designer in Los Angeles, delivers a eulogy for her close friend Gabriel Wolfe-Martel at Berkeley City Club. Gabe, a twenty-nine-year-old indie musician known by his stage name Separate Bedrooms, died after slipping in a hotel shower following a secret concert at Hotel Frank in Downtown LA and hitting his head on the marble sink. Julia struggles to speak because, a month before his death, they slept together for the first time since briefly dating as teenagers. Afterward, Gabe stopped responding to her calls and texts, leaving everything unresolved.

In the restroom after the eulogy, Julia encounters Elizabeth Thompson, Gabe's ex-girlfriend, a British florist and restaurateur. Elizabeth says with chilling certainty, "I know who you are. I know exactly who you were to Gabe," and walks out. Julia confides in Will, her friend Casey's fiancé and a therapist-in-training, about sleeping with Gabe and his silence. At the burial, she feels rage rather than grief.

The novel flashes back to the summer of 2004, when Julia and Gabe meet as eighteen-year-olds at the Hayes Emily Yarborough Summer of Art (HEYSA) in Barcelona. Gabe's mother, Leora Wolfe, a poet teaching in the program, introduces them. They become inseparable, exploring the city and growing physically intimate. Julia discovers an immediate chemistry with Gabe that feels like finding someone fluent in a language she thought she invented. Gabe reveals he has situs inversus, a rare condition in which his internal organs are mirror-reversed, requiring a medical ID bracelet. Alarmed that he lacks one, Julia secretly crafts a silver bracelet engraved with his condition, the most ambitious piece she has ever made. Gabe promises never to take it off. Days later, he abruptly ends things to pursue a band opportunity, devastating Julia.

Four years later, they reconnect in Echo Park and become close friends. Julia drops out of law school, launches a successful jewelry line called My Grandmother's Collection, and builds a life alongside Gabe as his career ascends, earning a Rolling Stone profile, a Grammy nomination, and larger venues. They date other people, share milestones, and develop the most reliable relationship in both their lives.

Weeks after the funeral, Julia visits Leora in Berkeley. Leora cannot locate several of Gabe's belongings: a guitar stamped with her initials, sheet music for "I Left My Heart in San Francisco," a Mets cap from Gabe's father Ramiro, and the medical bracelet. The only person who has not responded to Leora's emails is Elizabeth. Julia volunteers to track her down, privately hoping to find the bracelet.

Julia flies to London and checks into a hotel near Elizabeth's restaurant, Fleur Bleue, in Shoreditch. After running into Elizabeth by chance at a gallery, Julia is invited to dinner. The evening turns combative: Elizabeth claims Gabe was an alcoholic and reveals that on the night he died, Gabe told her he was going to meet Julia. Julia denies seeing him. Cornered, she lashes out, telling Elizabeth that Gabe called her "a fundamentally cold person." Elizabeth walks away.

Left alone, Julia spots Gabe's guitar on the restaurant wall, identifies it by Leora's initials, and takes it. She brings it to Elizabeth's floral workshop the next morning. When Julia presses Elizabeth on why she clings to Gabe's things, Elizabeth reveals she is four months pregnant with Gabe's child.

They form a wary alliance: Elizabeth will help search for the remaining belongings if Julia keeps the pregnancy secret from Leora. Elizabeth checks her texts and determines she told Gabe about the pregnancy on August 8, just thirty minutes after he and Julia parted ways at a rental house in Joshua Tree. This timing provides crucial context for Gabe's month of silence.

The novel then reveals what happened at Joshua Tree. Gabe invites Julia to the desert, where he is struggling with writer's block on his fourth album. Over dinner at a quirky restaurant called Desert Sushi, Gabe admits he broke up with Julia in Barcelona because he feared she would interfere with his music and confesses he always imagined they would eventually reunite. They sleep together and part with plans to meet again. Then Gabe vanishes for a month. On the day he dies, he leaves a voicemail asking Julia to meet him at Hotel Frank. Furious at weeks of silence, Julia texts that she will come but cannot bring herself to go. She changes into pajamas and falls asleep. She never sees him again.

In London, Julia and Elizabeth search together. They recover the Mets cap from Elizabeth's flat and the guitar from a street market. The sheet music, however, is held by a musician named Toad who plans to auction Gabe's handwritten notes for profit. Meanwhile, five rough tracks from Gabe's unfinished fourth album leak online. Titled Puppy Love, a name Julia suggested at Joshua Tree, the songs chronicle falling in love in Barcelona; fans dub Julia's unnamed character "Barcelona Baby." Gabe's producer Jabari confirms that after Joshua Tree, Gabe spent a week recording obsessively, consumed by music rather than personal relationships.

Leora recognizes a coded reference to pregnancy in the album's last track, a phrase from her own poem, and flies to Barcelona to stay with Roberta Donnelly, Julia's former HEYSA professor. Elizabeth asks Julia to accompany her to meet Leora. In Barcelona, Julia spots Gabe's bracelet on Leora's wrist. Leora explains that Gabe left it on the nightstand at the Joshua Tree rental and arranged to have it shipped to his father, who passed it to her. The bracelet's location confirms Gabe removed it the night he was with Julia, not out of rejection but intimacy, and tried to retrieve it afterward.

Elizabeth confronts Julia and asks the question she has been avoiding: "Why are you trying to prove he didn't love you?" Julia breaks down and admits her deepest guilt: Gabe called her the night he died, she said she would come, and she did not go. Elizabeth tells her that before grief can come in waves, "first you have to step in the water." Julia walks alone to Parc Güell, a Barcelona park she and Gabe explored as teenagers, and allows herself to grieve fully for the first time. Grief does not attack her. She steps into it, and it sinks through her like paint through canvas. Julia and Elizabeth reconcile, acknowledging they had built each other into mythic rivals when the real adversary was their shared grief and Gabe's inability to be fully honest with either of them.

Julia asks Leora for the bracelet. Leora gently declines, explaining that Gabe wore it every day of his adult life. Julia accepts, understanding that both she and Leora made the bracelet to protect him, and neither succeeded. She sits with Leora in silence, performing the only act available to her: being present with a grieving mother.

One year later, Julia and Elizabeth organize a tribute night at a Hollywood concert venue, designed as Gabe's last secret show. Elizabeth bounces baby Cosme on her hip in the aisle. Julia speaks. She imagines three scenarios for what would have happened at Hotel Frank and acknowledges she cannot choose without him. She declares, "I loved Gabe," then corrects the tense: "I love Gabe." In the years that follow, Julia walks through Los Angeles, pausing whenever something reminds her of him, "grateful to run into him again."