In myths about everyone from Hercules to the Buddha, rewards do not come without a struggle. There are labors to be undertaken, tests to be passed, hardships to overcome. Happy endings are the product of tragic beginnings. Jay had withstood (albeit not entirely heroically) his test when I went away to film Dreamquest. It should not have come as a surprise to me, then, when one morning, in the midst of our newfound bliss, Jay spoke four little words that shattered my world.

“I have to go,” he said.

“Where?” I asked. “And for how long? A day? A month?”

“I don’t know yet.”

“But everything’s been so wonderful. We’ve been having so much fun.”

“Jenna, I’ve lived a crazy life,” he said. “And in that crazy life, I’ve made some mistakes and some enemies. I’ve fallen in love with you, and I want this to last. And the only way to do that is to take care of these ghosts from my past, because otherwise they are going to haunt both of us.”

“So what does that mean?”

“I told you,” he said. “I have to leave, and I can’t tell you where I’m going. All I can do is promise that I’ll be back.”

“Is it about another woman?”

“It’s about business.”

“Why do you have to go?” I blubbered. “Everything’s fine.”

“Because if I don’t take care of this now, it could come back later and really hurt us. I will never be happy with you or able to have a family if I have to worry every day about my past catching up with me. I don’t want to put you through any more pain.”

“Then don’t go. Get out of it.”

“I can’t,” he said. “I have to deal with it. And then everything will be okay. It’s just a pothole, it’s not the road.”

I was flattened. The whole scenario reminded me too much of my father and his secrets, and everything I had gone through when he was on the run. I couldn’t take it —not from the man I loved, not after all we’d been through, not again. But I had no choice.

Just like at Vanessa’s funeral, I refused to cry. I wanted to be strong for Jay. So I stuffed all the emotion down and let him go. I booked as many photo shoots as I could to keep myself busy so that I didn’t have to think about him. But, of course, I thought about him every day. I was living alone in our newly furnished house in an unfamiliar city. His ghost haunted everything. When I went to bed, his unflattened pillow lay next to mine. When I watched television, even the sports channels on the remote-control presets reminded me of him. I survived only because my mind never wavered from one simple conviction: he loved me. And I loved him.

After a week, Jay’s brother stopped by the house with a note for me. He had removed it from its envelope, so I had no idea where it had been sent from. I opened it that night and cried simply from reading the first two words: “Dear Jenna.”

Jay poured his heart out in the letter, in a way he never had before. “I think of you every moment,” he wrote. “I think about how beautiful you are when you’re sleeping, like a little angel. And I think of the blond peach fuzz along the curve of your back. I can’t wait to come home and kiss every inch of your little face.”

There was page after page of tenderness and affection, tinged with the hurt of being apart. It gave me chills. I’d never heard those kinds of words come out of Jay’s mouth —and, to this day, I still haven’t. I couldn’t get out of bed for days afterward. I was lovesick. Soon after, another letter came, followed by another two days later. After three weeks, I had a stack of six unopened letters. I couldn’t bring myself to read them. I knew they would make me sick again and send me into a downward spiral. I suddenly realized the difference between genuine heartache and obsession, which was all I had really experienced with Jack. And the key difference was trust: I had never trusted Jack. I trusted Jay. For all our problems, he had always been there for me. And when he left, it had been with the intention of strengthening the relationship, not weakening it.

After a month had passed, he came home as suddenly as he had left. When I saw him, my body literally shook with emotion. It wasn’t just because of the truism that absence makes the heart grow fonder, but because I knew I had done the right thing by waiting. It was so out of my character not to question the feelings and intentions of someone close to me, but, against my nurture, I had, for once, stood by my man. And Jay, in his absence, had changed too. He was still a charmingly irritating bastard, but he was much more sensitive and demonstrably in love. It was time, finally, to begin our life together.

And so Jay and I became not just lovers again, but business partners. After leaving Wicked, I had no intention of selling myself to another master —I was well known enough to try to live out my new dream of running my own company. I knew Jay had above-average business sense, because he and his brother were both retired by the time they were in their thirties. In one of their get-rich-quick schemes, they bought every phone number that was close to 1-800-CALL-ATT. This way, if anyone misdialed the number, Jay’s company put the collect call through and kept the profit. The company was called Fat Fingers.

It took us a year to start Club Jenna, rent an office, hire a staff, and chase down all the assholes who had registered my domain name. Much to my surprise, one of the assholes who had registered one of my most popular domain names was someone I knew: the uncle who had done me wrong on the strip-club deal in Anaheim.

I expected that since I hadn’t made many movies recently, I’d have to start from scratch. But somehow I was still the most downloaded person online. And even though Jay and I didn’t know the first thing about the Internet, Club Jenna was hugely profitable in its first month. So what began as a business created just to prove a point soon became a female-run success story as I added the websites of other girls (twenty-five and counting at present) under the Club Jenna umbrella.

When I stepped back and looked at my life, between my increasingly co-dependent relationship with Jay and the new company we were starting together, I was taken aback. It all seemed so far out of my character, because in order for everything I had put in motion to succeed, I needed to remain stable and in one place. And that scared me. It wasn’t long ago that I was getting wasted on the road every day with Nikki, avoiding anything that smelled of responsibility. These newfound duties seemed so sudden, and to protect me from my worst enemy —myself— I needed extra support. I still didn’t have any friends in Phoenix, so the first person I thought of was my father. I wanted him to be involved, in some way, in this new life I was building for myself.

My father and I had hardly spoken in the eight or so months since the bounty hunters, and it didn’t seem right to just shut him out of my life. In childhood, you think that your parents are perfect; in adolescence, you realize that they’re not; and adulthood, I realized, means finally accepting them for what they are, flawed human beings just like ourselves. So I sucked up my pride and called him at his gilded cage in New Jersey.

“We shouldn’t go this long without talking,” I told him.

“I dreamed about you last night,” he replied. “And when I woke up, I knew you were going to call. I dream about you all the time.”

There was not just love in his voice, but a hint of sadness. It was a strange emotion to hear coming from him. But the real surprise came moments later. “And I want to thank you for the help in Miami,” he continued. “I don’t know if I ever actually thanked you properly. I think it’s because I was embarrassed that I had to ask you for help. One of the most humiliating things for a father to do is to beg his own daughter for money.”

“I miss you,” I said as I choked up. “And I realize that it’s partly my fault this time, because I haven’t been calling you back, so I apologize.”

As we talked, the sadness didn’t leave his voice. He sounded defeated. I assumed he was just paying the soul tax of sponging off a wealthy woman who he didn’t love, but it went deeper than that.

“I need to have surgery next week,” he said when I asked him about his mental state.

He said that after he moved to New Jersey, he was constantly tired and thirsty, no matter how much he slept and drank. Soon after, his hands and feet would go numb. And then, one day, he woke up and everything was blurry. No matter how much he tried to focus, his vision wouldn’t clear.

He finally relented and went to see a doctor. And that was when he discovered that he was diabetic. He ran a risk of going blind, they said, and he needed to have surgery in a few days.

Languishing up there, a kept man with no health insurance of his own, he also, it turned out, had realized the need for family. We never seem to admit these things to ourselves until it’s almost too late, until all of our mistakes have already been made.

So I started calling my dad more often, like a worried mother. We talked weekly at first, and then finally every day.

Oddly, it didn’t feel strange or unnatural to suddenly be talking to my father on a daily basis. It just felt right.