empty room, she almost didn't see the envelope someone had slipped under the door.
It was cream-colored, imsy and square, and when she ipped it over, she saw her name typed on the front in small, blocky letters. She tore into it, wanting an apology from him. Knowing she owed him one too.
The letter inside was typewritten on cream-colored paper and folded into thirds.
Dear Luce,
There's something I've been waiting too long to tell you. Meet me in town, near Noyo Point, around six o'clock tonight? The #5 bus along Hwy 1 stops a quarter of a mile
south of Shoreline. Use this bus pass. I'll be waiting by the North Cli . Can't wait to see you.
Love, Daniel
Shaking the envelope, Luce felt a small slip of paper inside. She pulled out a thin blue-and-white bus ticket with the number ve printed on its front and a crude little map of Fort Bragg drawn on its back. That was it. There was nothing else.
Luce couldn't gure it out. No mention of their argument on the beach. No indication that Daniel even understood how erratic it was to practically vanish into thin air one night, then expect her to travel at his whim the next.
No apology at all.
Strange. Daniel could turn up anywhere, anytime. He was usually oblivious to the logistical realities that normal human beings had to deal with.
The letter felt cold and sti in her hands. Her more reckless side was tempted to pretend she'd never received it. She was tired of arguing, tired of Daniel's not trusting her with details. But that pesky in-love side of Luce wondered whether she was being too harsh on him. Because their relationship was worth the e ort. She tried to remember the way his eyes had looked and his voice had sounded when he told her the story about the lifetime she'd spent in the California gold rush. The way he'd seen her through the window and fallen in love with her for something like the thousandth time.
That was the image she took with her when she left her dorm room minutes later to creep along the path toward Shoreline's front gates, toward the bus stop where Daniel had instructed her to wait. An image of his pleading violet eyes tugged at her heart while she stood under a damp gray sky. She watched colorless cars materialize in the fog, peel around the hairpin turns on guardrail-less Highway 1, and vanish again.
When she looked back at Shoreline's formidable campus in the distance, she remembered Jasmine's words at the party: As long as we stay under their umbrella of surveillance, we can pretty much do as we please. Luce was stepping out from under the umbrella, but where was the harm? She wasn't really a student there; and anyway, seeing Daniel again was worth the risk of getting caught.
A few minutes past the half hour, the number ve bus pulled up to the stop.
The bus was old and gray and rickety, as was the driver who heaved the levered door open to let Luce board. She took an empty seat near the front. The bus smelled like cobwebs, or a rarely used attic. She had to clutch the cheap leatherette seat cushion as the bus barreled around the curves at fty miles an hour, as if just inches beyond the road, the cli didn't drop a mile straight down into the jagged gray ocean.
It was raining by the time they got to town, a steady sideways drizzle just shy of a real downpour. Most of the businesses on the main street were already closed up for the night, and the town looked wet and a little desolate. Not exactly the scene she'd had in mind for a happy makeup conversation.
Climbing down from the bus, Luce pulled the ski cap out of her backpack and tugged it over her head. She could feel the chill of the rain on her nose and her ngertips. She spotted a bent green metal sign and followed its arrow toward Noyo Point.
The point was a wide peninsula of land, not lush green like the terrain on Shoreline's campus, but a mix of patchy grass and scabs of wet gray sand. The trees thinned out here, their leaves stripped away by the tful ocean wind. There was one lone bench on a patch of mud all the way at the edge, about a hundred yards from the road. That must have been where Daniel meant for them to meet. But Luce