CHAPTER 1
Pauline
The first thingI did when I got back to California was stub my toe on the doorframe of my new apartment.
I hopped backward, grabbing my foot, biting down on a word my grandmother would have smacked me for. Pain shot up my leg. My eyes watered. And I thought, yes. Of course. This feels right. California has always been a place that hurts me the moment I step into it.
I dragged my suitcase inside and stood in the middle of the living room, breathing hard. Cataloging the space with the gaze of someone who’s learned to expect disappointment.
Water stain on the ceiling—shaped vaguely like a middle finger. Radiator in the corner that clanked every thirty seconds like it was trying to send a distress signal. A window overlooking a brick wall and someone’s sad little fire-escape garden—one dead fern and a pigeon with an attitude problem.
The pigeon stared at me through the glass. I stared back.
The pigeon won.
I turned away and surveyed the rest. Small but not terrible. Clean, mostly. The kitchen had actual counter space, which was more than I could say for my last place. The bathroom tileswere that shade of pale green that only existed in buildings constructed before 1980, but the water pressure was decent and the mirror wasn’t cracked.
I’d lived in worse. Much worse.
Four years in New Jersey had taught me that an apartment was just a place to sleep and write and drink coffee at odd hours. My place in Newark had been fine. Good location, reasonable rent, a landlord who fixed things within the same calendar month you reported them. I had liked my job at the Tribune. Liked my editor and the rhythm of chasing stories in a city that never stopped moving.
I’d built something there. Nothing fancy. Nothing impressive. But mine.
Then Aunt Calista called.
Her voice did that thing—too steady, too careful—and I knew before she even finished the sentence.
I’d submitted my transfer request a few days earlier, then booked a flight here. California Times had an opening, and by some miracle or cosmic joke, I got in.
So here I was. Back in California. Back in the state I’d spent seven years avoiding.
I pulled my grandmother’s photograph from my carry-on and set it on the nightstand. This was always first. Always. Margaret Wells smiled up at me from behind the glass, wearing her church hat and that expression she got when she knew I was about to do something foolish but had decided to let me learn the hard way.
Seventy-eight years old. She’d raised me alone after my parents died.
Worked the reception desk at Mercy General for thirty years, knowing every nurse and doctor by name, remembering every patient’s birthday. Making everyone who walked through those doors feel like they mattered.
Now she was lying in a hospital bed herself.
I touched the silver chain locket at my throat—her gift, my sixteenth birthday—and held
on like it could keep me standing.
A few months ago, I’d almost lost Claudette. My best friend. The sister I chose. She had been hooked up to machines in a sterile room while I sat in a plastic chair and bargained with a God I wasn’t sure I believed in anymore.
She pulled through. Barely. And I told myself that was the universe reminding me not to take people for granted.
Now this.
Why?
The question clawed at me from somewhere deep, somewhere raw.
Why does life keep doing this to me?
I wasn’t asking for much. I just wanted to live. To love the people I loved without the constant terror of losing them. To breathe without bracing for the next phone call that would shatter everything.
Was that so much? Was that really so much to ask?
