credit card for the same co-pay. Some days she would have what the therapist called a “breakthrough,” teasing out some pattern of behavior that Kate had never noticed before—but these breakthroughs seemed to vanish instantly from Kate’s conscious memory, only to reappear days later when she was in the middle of washing her hair. At a certain point, she began to feel ludicrous, rehashing the events of a life built around creating opportunities to rehash it, and she was relieved when the therapist said she thought they could cut back to once a week, which would let Kate move into the city and look for a job.
So, new units: Two weeks looking for an apartment. Dwindling digits in her bank account, refreshed by her summer earnings, then decimated by the new apartment’s security deposit. An excruciating eight more weeks of job-searching, which finally culminated in a position as a copywriter at a small advertising firm.
She liked the new job, even though the CEO was four years younger than her and called every meeting a “summit.” The work was fun enough and challenging enough, almost all of her coworkers were female or nonbinary, and Kate found herself, to her surprise, feeling excited about the idea of moving up, a sentiment she thought the Leonard situation had drilled out of her.
She liked the new house, too, with its thrice-Craigslisted furniture and spiky air plants. Two of her roommates, long-time SF residents, introduced her to the city. Before the job started, she rode trolleys through Pacific Heights and ate pupusas in the Mission and walked to the ruins of the Sutro Baths. She learned the inconsistencies of the BART, the best coffee shops with free Wi-Fi, and how to plan her jogs so that they ended by running downhill with a view over the bay. After work began, she reactivated her Instagram and used her commute to reconnect with the New York friends with whom she’d lost touch. There was a blizzard on the East Coast. The government was a disaster. A video of a tiger cub cuddling a mouse went viral. There was a new embezzlement scandal at a rival paper, and many people had forgotten about Leonard Webb.
If sometimes at night she had difficulty falling asleep, if the bed seemed to yawn around her and the darkness felt flat and cold, it did not mean she had made a mistake. It did not mean she was unhappy.
* * *
After her Sunday therapy sessions, she usually tried to go up to Callinas for dinner. The town seemed smaller and more harmless now that she no longer lived there. Louise often invited other people over for dinner—Roberta and Wendy, Nikhil and Sabrina, Esme—and the conversations were easy, and usually Miranda-free. The Brand house had been sold several months ago for an absurd amount, and a YouTube executive had moved in with his family and was now talking about gutting the entire building. He wanted to add a second well. He wanted to install a boat launch point on Wingwater and a sign by the lagoon announcing you had arrived in Callinas. He had caused such a stir over zoning that people seemed to have forgotten that the house had ever belonged to Jake and Miranda at all. They no longer called it “the Brand house,” but instead “The Command Center,” which was the name written on the ostentatious sign that the new owner had installed down on Dunlop, right over the property line.
Tonight’s dinner was just Kate and Frank and Louise, but Louise had outdone herself as usual, serving up a heap of paella in a ceramic bowl the size of a small coffee table. Pink shrimp and black-purple mussels glinting against the saffron rice, chunks of chorizo throughout. A good Sauvignon Blanc that tasted like lemon and butter.
When they had finished eating, Kate told them about the invitation to the auction. They both said she should definitely go.
“It’s weird, though,” Kate said. “I don’t even know how Hal found my address.”
Louise shrugged. “He must have gotten it from Theo.”
The sound of his name still made her jump. “How would Theo have my new address?”
“Well, I gave it to him when he asked for it.”
Kate dropped her fork. “What? When did he do that?”
“He emailed me a few weeks ago,” Louise said. “Olive, down! Good Lord. You are such a naughty dog.”
“And you didn’t tell me?”
“I thought I did.”
“You told me someone called to say I had been selected as a keynote speaker