She knew this was dangerous. She knew it would only prolong her feelings for Malcolm, which needed to die down already. But somehow, she couldn’t bring herself to care. It was winter, the Bay Area was apparently getting three years of rain this month, and she needed something to cheer her up, something to look forward to. She would make herself worry about this in the spring.

On a Sunday afternoon, she was just getting home from the grocery store when her phone rang.

“Oh, my mother is answering the phone finally, hmm?” Maddie said.

Vivian laughed.

“Hey, girl, how’s your weekend been?”

She could hear Maddie washing her dishes in the background.

“Good, except I haven’t heard from you for days. Where have you been?”

Vivian opened her refrigerator to unload her groceries.

“Just working. There have been a lot of meetings in the past few days, since I become acting director in a few weeks. And yesterday I was at Aunt Jo’s all day.”

“Ooh, acting director so soon! When do you become permanent director?” Maddie asked.

Maddie sounded so excited and proud of her.

“They posted the job listing on Friday, so I have a month or so to put together my application.”

At least four people had come by her office on Friday afternoon to make sure she knew the application was up on the hospital website. She hadn’t even looked at it yet—she’d made a ton of calls on Friday to help connect a patient with services, and she’d been busy all day Saturday. She had plenty of time, though; she didn’t have to look at it yet.

“Oh!” Maddie turned off the water. “Perfect timing! Have you started working on your application? Do you need any help with it? I’m sure Theo could look it over for you; he’s great at that kind of stuff.” Vivian heard a rumbling in the background. “See, he says he’d be happy to.”

Vivian closed her refrigerator door.

“Thanks. I might take him up on that.”

Maddie was silent for a moment.

“Mom, is everything okay? You sound . . . I don’t know, off somehow. Is Aunt Jo okay? Is anyone else in the family sick, or . . . ?”

Vivian sat down on the couch.

“No, no, everything is fine. Aunt Jo is great, actually; I just talked to her at lunchtime. I’m just tired, I guess. Maybe I should go to bed early.”

Vivian stared out the window after she got off the phone with Maddie. The rain was starting again. She sighed and got up to put away her canned goods.

Chapter Fifteen

Malcolm stopped at Waterstones on the way home to see if they had any new postcards. He had plenty of them now, all in a pile in the middle of his coffee table, but he was always looking for more.

He and Vivian wrote to each other a few times a week; sometimes, he even wrote before waiting for a reply from her, and he thought she did, too. He’d told her as much as he could fit on a postcard about his conversations with Miles, she’d told him about her recent excursions to some local museums, and they both told each other funny or entertaining or frustrating stories from their daily lives. He loved her postcards; he could hear her voice in his head as he read them. It was like she was sitting there on the couch next to him, that amusement and enthusiasm and laughter all together in her voice.

But he was getting worried about her. She’d sounded blue about her new job, which seemed already to be sucking up more and more of her time and energy, when she hadn’t even started yet. She’d never seemed enthusiastic about it, and Vivian was enthusiastic about everything she cared about. When she talked about her current social work job, her love for it shone through in her words, her expressions, her very body language. None of that came through when they discussed the director position. He wished he’d said something to her about that when she was in London.

He’d felt like it wasn’t his place to say that, though. They’d never really discussed finances—he knew she wasn’t wealthy, and that she’d struggled to raise Maddie alone, but he had no idea if she was in a difficult spot now and really needed the money from the new job or not, and he would never ask. Maybe that’s what was driving her to take this job? Because it certainly didn’t seem like it could be anything else.

Was he reading her wrong? Maybe. He hadn’t known her very long, after all. But he didn’t think so.

He wished he could see her again. The postcards brought him joy every day, but he wanted to talk to her, hear her laughter, see her smile, evaluate the tone of her voice when she talked about this job, maybe even try to ask a few more pointed questions about it. Just to see if she’d be okay. He’d even gotten to the point of looking to see what the airfare was from London to San Francisco—very reasonable, this time of year—but had stopped himself before he’d gone any further down that road. She’d made it clear when they’d talked about this on New Year’s Eve that she didn’t want that.

He walked into his building and went straight for his mailbox, but he didn’t look through his stack of mail until he’d walked into his flat. He didn’t want to rush through her note, if it was there, or have to hold in his disappointment if it wasn’t.

He sat down on the couch and dropped the stack on his coffee table. There it was. A wide, empty beach on the front. What a way to lord the whole California thing over him.