Kezia Cooper Hobson flew from San Francisco to New York in first class, with four big suitcases that held the last of her things she was bringing to New York. Everything had been sent ahead weeks before, her clothes, all her mementos, her papers and personal treasures. Her furniture and art were due to arrive at the end of August. She’d been living at the Ritz-Carlton in San Francisco for the last month, while she concluded the sale of both her Pacific Heights home and her share of the venture capital firm she had inherited from her husband, Andrew Hobson, when he had died of Covid-19 five years before, after a business trip to China. Twenty years older than Kezia, he was seventy-five at the time, vital, healthy, active, handsome, successful, and youthful for his age. The virus had hit him hard and he was dead in five days. He was a wonderful person from a wholesome Midwestern background. He had gone west to Stanford for college and business school, established his groundbreaking business in San Francisco, and remained there.
Andrew Hobson had been one of the legends of early venture capital and one of its innovators in high-tech and biotech investments.
The firm he had founded originally with two partners had been bought by a newer, larger venture capital firm, since Andrew’s partners had been older than he and were now well into their eighties. The life had gone out of Weintraub, Mills, and Hobson once Andrew was gone, with his incredible energy and constant daring new ideas. One of his partners was ill now, the other eager to retire, and the offer they received for the firm had come at the right time. Kezia had been active on the board since Andrew’s death.
Originally from a small town in Vermont, the only child of a widowed and dedicated country doctor, Kezia had shared a thrilling life with Andrew. She had met him at a high-tech medical conference she went to in San Francisco, and married him not long after that, when she was thirty-five. The twenty years they had been married had been extraordinary, and profoundly happy. He had shown and taught and shared things with her that she would never have experienced otherwise. San Francisco had been the perfect small city to bring up their two daughters, with an agreeable cultural life and active business life for him of major international proportions with important investments in Asia, and good schools for their two girls. But once widowed at fifty-five, she found the city small and lifeless and limited. It was a lonely life for her. Everyone in her social circle was married, many of the men to younger women, much younger than Kezia by then. Her girls, Kate and Felicity, had gone east to college and never moved back to San Francisco. They loved living in New York, so Kezia traveled there frequently, to see them. She was bored with the opera and ballet boards she had served on for years. It all felt different as a widow. She felt like the odd man out with her married friends, and the city was just too small and provincial to provide an interesting life for her as a single woman. She could see herself growing old, with nothing changing in her life for the next forty years or more.
In exchange for the golden life Andrew had given her, she felt an obligation to remain involved with his company and sit on the board, but the offer to buy the company that came along unexpectedly was a blessing for Andrew’s partners, and for Kezia. It forced her to re-evaluate her life and decide how she wanted to spend the rest of it, and where. It was time to let go of the past and move on. She would be turning sixty in the fall, even if she didn’t look it, and it felt like the right time to make a bold move and re-enter the world, at fifty-nine.
Once she’d made the decision, her house sold quickly, and with two daughters in New York, it was the obvious place for her to go, and it would give her the life she needed and wanted after twenty-five years in San Francisco, the last five of them without Andrew. San Francisco had stopped making sense for her once he was gone. He had added life to it for her.
One of her daughters had a booming career and life in the city, the other lived in the West Village and some of the time in a house close to the Vermont town where she and her mother had been born. Kate was trying to write a book. She spent enough time in New York that Kezia knew she’d see more of her if she lived there herself than she would visiting her from San Francisco.
Kezia was excited about the move. Her whole focus was turned to what lay ahead for her.
She was still beautiful at fifty-nine, and easily looked ten years younger than she was. She was tall and slim, with a lithe, youthful, trim figure and strikingly pretty face, with blonde hair and deep blue eyes. She felt profoundly revitalized and renewed by the move to New York. San Francisco was just too small and too sleepy and now that she was no longer married to Andrew, even though she was a powerful force on the board of the company, people forgot about her. She wasn’t by any means ready to give up her life yet, and quietly close her doors and sit at home. New York had all the life, vitality, and energy she craved, and with her daughters there, it made total sense. She was sorry she hadn’t made the leap sooner. She was in great spirits on the flight on the way there.
It was the last week in June, and the weather was warm. The airport was teeming when she arrived on a Friday afternoon. She already knew that both her daughters were out of town for the weekend. Her younger daughter, Felicity, was working in Paris for two weeks, at Paris Fashion Week. At twenty-three, she had become a stunningly successful model and had been on magazine covers all over the world for the past three years. She had been eighteen when her father died, and she went to college at USC in L.A., as he would have wanted her to. But she had never been a strong student, and she dropped out after two years, when she was discovered by the head of a major New York modeling agency. Within the first six months she was on the covers of Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, Elle, and L’Officiel, and was known all over the world as the most exciting new face to come along in years. Felicity was responsible about her career. She took it seriously, and worked hard, and Kezia was proud of her success. Felicity had bought her own apartment in Tribeca from her earnings a year before, at twenty-two, and led a glamorous life that would have turned most women’s heads. She had learned to spot the men who pursued most models and were just looking for entertainment or arm candy, or simply wanted to be able to say they’d gone out with her. She had a tendency to go out with older men. Her boyfriend for the last year, Blake White, led a fashionable jet-set life at thirty-nine, and had a big job as a wealth management consultant at Goldman Sachs for some very illustrious clients. He was from a prosperous family himself, knew many important people as clients and friends, and loved going out with beautiful young women. But he also saw something deeper and different in Felicity, something that he hadn’t come across before. In spite of her success and the money her father left her, she had sound values, strong family ties, and a good mind, and was more sensible than most women her age. Her own success hadn’t turned her head. She was upbeat and fun to be with. Blake had been married before, to a socialite he had grown up with. He was divorced and had a six-year-old son, Alex, who spent alternate weekends with them, and would be with Blake for the month of August.
Felicity enjoyed spending time with Alex, and he loved her. She treated him more as a big sister would, rather than taking on a motherly role, which Blake also liked about her. She had no hidden agenda, considered herself too young to marry anyone, and had no desire to have children of her own anytime soon. After years of dating women since his divorce who were hell-bent on getting Blake to marry them, being with Felicity was refreshing, happy, fun, and a huge relief. She didn’t try to court Alex in order to woo his father; she just had a good time with him. She was in love with Blake, but she loved her career too. She considered herself fortunate that her career had taken off and provided her a big income and great opportunities over the past three years. Blake loved being with her. He considered it ironic that the one woman he had taken seriously since his divorce didn’t want to get married, and viewed herself as too young to consider it for at least another ten years.
Kezia knew that Felicity had been in Paris for fittings all week, at the various houses she would be “walking” for in the fashion shows. Both Chanel and Dior had hired her as one of their star models, and she was spending the weekend in Saint-Tropez at the house of friends of Blake’s. He had flown over to be with her and see her in the haute couture shows the following week. Kezia couldn’t wait for her to see the new apartment when she got back. She had gone all out with a real showplace in New York.
The apartment Kezia had bought was half of the penthouse floor in a relatively new sixty-story building on Fifty-fifth Street between Fifth and Madison Avenues. It was two floors taller than any other building near it, and she had a hundred-and-eighty-degree view of the city. She had been ordering furniture and draperies with a New York decorator for the past few months, and it was going to be sublimely comfortable and elegant. She had put some of the old furniture in a storage unit to keep for the girls. She had sold a lot of it, and sent only her favorite pieces to New York. It was a new world, a new life, a new home. She had kept most of the art because she loved it.
Kezia had rented the bare-bones basics from a staging company her decorator had recommended, so that she’d have a bed, several dressers, and a chair in her bedroom, two couches in her enormous living room, some comfortable chairs in case she had guests, a big coffee table, and a large dining table and chairs in the kitchen. She didn’t need more than that until her furniture arrived at the end of August.
She had made no summer plans. She was looking forward to two months in New York, exploring new shops and restaurants and obscure museums. Her daughters were horrified that she was staying in the city, and Kezia insisted she didn’t mind the heat or the tourists. She was going to make the city her own before the summer was over. Felicity had rented a house in Southampton for June, July, and August, and she and Blake would commute for work when necessary and were planning to entertain there. Alex would be with them in August. Felicity wanted her mother to come visit. She was always warm and welcoming, and mother and daughter had fun together, usually spontaneous adventures or evenings on the spur of the moment when Felicity was free.
Kate, Kezia’s older daughter, was more complicated, and always had been. She was just as beautiful and striking as her younger sister, but everything about her was more serious and more intense. She had dark brown hair and big brown eyes, and delicate features. She was smaller than Felicity, who was tall and looked a great deal like Kezia, with blonde hair and blue eyes. Kate’s beginnings were very different from Felicity’s, and yet she had been just as fortunate, possibly even more so.
Kezia’s mother had died of breast cancer when Kezia was three, and she had no memory of her, although her father spoke of her constantly in glowing terms. She had been a nurse and worked with him. Kezia had grown up in a tiny town in Vermont as the daughter of the local general practitioner, and he had shared with her his dedication to medicine, which was his passion. Her childhood had been a happy one, and Thornton Cooper was a loving, attentive father. Kezia had stayed close to home and attended the University of Vermont, as a science major, and entered nursing school in Boston after she graduated, to become a nurse practitioner and work with her father, which was her lifelong dream, and his. Shortly after she began the nurse practitioner program, she had discovered that she was pregnant, by a boy she’d had a romance with that summer, Reed Phillips. But neither of them had intended for it to be long-term. It was a hot summer romance they both knew couldn’t last. She was going to nursing school, and he was a medical student at Dartmouth and was starting his internship in L.A. He had a summer job at a small country inn in Vermont, where he met Kezia.
Discovering that she was pregnant when she got to Boston after the summer was not good news for either of them. She liked Reed, but there was no hope of a future for them. They were headed in different directions, on opposite coasts. When she called to tell him she was pregnant, he came to see her. He was three years older than Kezia, steeped in his medical studies, and planning to move to L.A. for his internship. He liked Kezia a lot but he wasn’t in love with her, nor she with him. There was no room in his life for a wife and a baby, and he made that clear. His life’s dream was to go to Africa and work with Doctors Without Borders. His and Kezia’s career goals were similar in medicine, but their paths were not destined to intersect in the future. She planned to work in a small Vermont rural town with her father, and Reed wanted a life a world away in underdeveloped countries.
Reed was very direct that he could not participate in the life of a baby. He would help her support it if necessary, but he was not going to engage in fatherhood with her. It was the last thing he wanted, and he didn’t want to mislead her. Kezia spoke to her father after she’d spoken to Reed, told him what had happened, and offered to drop out of the nursing program. She had a partial scholarship, and her father was paying the rest. Her father was, as he always had been, loving and compassionate and generous with her. The baby was due at the end of the spring semester. He insisted that she stick with her studies, have the baby over the summer, and leave the baby with him in the fall and go back to school. He and a local girl would care for the baby during the week, and Kezia would come home on weekends from Boston to take care of her child. It would be arduous for both of them, but he was more than willing to do it. He would have done anything for her. Miraculously, it all went according to plan. Reed, the baby’s father, stayed true to form too.
When the baby was born, Kezia named her after her mother, Kate Morgan Cooper. Reed was starting his internship in L.A. by then, and never came to Vermont to see the baby. He had sent Kezia relinquishment forms as soon as the baby was born. He wanted no responsibility for her. He offered to pay support, in spite of surrendering all parental rights, and Kezia refused. She didn’t want money from him if he wanted no involvement with the child. They signed the papers when Kate was less than a month old, and he left her life without ever entering it. Until she was twelve, the only parents Kate knew were her mother and grandfather in the small town where Kezia had grown up.
It was a happy, carefree life. From time to time, when she was younger, Kate wanted to know why other children had a father and she didn’t, and Kezia simply said that it had worked out that way. She explained that Kate’s father was a doctor, he worked in Africa, and they couldn’t be together. It was enough information for her as a young child. She spared Kate the additional information later that he had married a South African physician who also worked for Doctors Without Borders. Kezia had heard it by chance when she met someone who had gone to medical school with him. Kezia never heard from Reed again after he signed the relinquishment papers. Just as he had told her, he wanted a clean break. Kezia had wanted her baby anyway, doubly so to make it up to her for not having a father. And Kezia’s father had been wonderful to both of them.
Kate had an easy, healthy childhood, adored by her mother and grandfather, and Kezia loved working as the nurse practitioner in her father’s practice. No one in their little rural town had sparked Kezia’s romantic interest, few wanted to date or marry a woman with a child, and some were bothered that she hadn’t been married to Kate’s father. It was a small, gossipy town.
It was Kezia’s father who had suggested that she go to the medical conference in San Francisco, to learn about some of the new technologies. She’d been hesitant at first, and had resisted, but he insisted it would be good for her to get away. He took Kate camping that weekend. She was twelve, and loved camping and fishing with her grandfather. It was the only life she’d ever known. She had a serious, introverted nature, kept a journal, and loved to write. She wanted to be a writer and was always creating stories or scribbling in her journal. She said that one day, she’d write a book.
“If that’s what you want to do, you will,” her grandfather told her. “That’s how I felt about being a doctor.” Medicine held no fascination for Kate.
At the medical conference in San Francisco, by sheer chance, Kezia met Andrew Hobson, who had invested heavily in several of the technologies that were being introduced. He had come to see the presentations, since he lived in San Francisco. He took her to dinner, and to lunch before she left. She was somewhat dazed by having met him. He was incredibly impressive and the kindest man she’d ever met. He was a widower without children, twenty years older than Kezia. And for the next six months, he flew to Vermont as often as he could to spend time with her and Kate. He and Thornton, Kezia’s father, became good friends, and were not so far apart in age. They were both good men who respected each other.
Six months after they met, almost to the day, Andrew and Kezia were married in the small church in her hometown. She hated to leave her father; it was a wrenching decision for her. She knew it would be hard for him without her, but he wanted her happiness more than his own, which was the kind of person he was, and why everyone loved him. He wanted a better life for her than their small rural town could offer. Andrew Hobson was presenting her with a rare opportunity. And they loved each other.
Kate and Kezia moved to San Francisco with Andrew. He bought a big enough house for them to have more children, and he solemnly asked to adopt Kate within a few months of their marriage. He treated Kate as his own child right from the beginning. When Kezia and Andrew’s baby girl was born two years later, they named her Felicity. He never differentiated between the two girls and treated them equally. The estate he left reflected that, and he divided his bequests equally between Kezia, his wife, and his two daughters, Kate and Felicity, with equal trusts for both girls.
Kate was fourteen when Felicity was born. She had treated her almost like her own baby, holding her, changing her, feeding her, like a live doll she had waited for all her life. But as Kate entered her twenties and Felicity got older, Kezia could see that Kate was starting to view Felicity differently, as the intruder who had come to steal the limelight from her and rob her of her parents’ time and attention.
Felicity was an enchanting, happy child, easy to love and spend time with. She had a sunny, open, uncomplicated nature, and Kate had a dark, brooding side to her which got more intense as she got older. Kezia wondered at times if Kate’s biological father had a similar personality, but she hadn’t known him well enough to be able to tell. Their relationship had been short-lived over a summer. When Kate turned twenty-one, Kezia shared the details of her history with her, thinking it only fair to do so. She told her about the summer romance that had been the origin of her birth, and the father who had chosen to relinquish her. She made it clear that it hadn’t been Kezia’s decision. It had been his.
The truth had come as a blow to Kate, even though he had given her up without ever seeing her. It wasn’t that she didn’t measure up, Kezia tried to explain, it was that he didn’t. He didn’t feel ready to be a father, no matter how lovable Kate was, and Kezia assured her she had been the joy of her life and of her grandfather’s.
Sadly, the year after Kezia and Andrew married, Kezia’s father had been diagnosed with leukemia and died in three short months. Kezia had been able to spend his last month with him, and Kate had come to say goodbye before he died. It had been an immeasurable loss to them both. But Andrew was close at hand to comfort them. And Felicity had been conceived shortly after Kezia’s father’s death, which had given her some consolation.
Kate had been depressed for months after she learned about the circumstances of her birth. She had thought about writing her biological father a letter, asking him to explain to her, in his own words, why he had given her up, but she never had. She wrote more than ever then, and her stories were always dark and sad. As she got older, she had a perspective on life that was always about loss and rejection, without taking into account how Andrew had embraced her fully, to balance it, from the moment he adopted her, and even before. Reed Phillips, her birth father, remained a mystery in her life and a dark specter, which in Kate’s mind overshadowed Andrew’s unconditional love, as well as her grandfather’s.
Kate had a series of unhappy love affairs in her twenties, always with men who rejected her for one reason or another, as though she was trying to reenact the circumstances of her birth and have it come out differently. But it never did.
She was thirty-two when Andrew died, and she inherited a large amount of money immediately, because of her age. Felicity was eighteen when her father died, and had to wait until she was twenty-five, thirty, and thirty-five in order for the trust to disburse her inheritance. Kate received two-thirds of it immediately, since at thirty-two she was deemed to be a responsible age, according to the terms of Andrew’s will. In spite of her inheritance, Kate lived relatively frugally, and bought a small house in Vermont, barely more than a cabin, a few miles from where her grandfather had been revered, and where she had spent her first twelve years. Kate was always in mourning for something, a broken romance, her father, or her grandfather. She was always looking back over her shoulder at the past. Felicity, in contrast, looked toward the future with excitement, and saw bright horizons all around her. There were no ghosts in her life, unlike Kate’s.
“Obviously,” Kate said sarcastically to her mother about it one day, “her father didn’t refuse to see her and give her away.”
“Andrew chose to be your father,” Kezia pointed out to her. “He met you, and loved you, and made you his daughter, entirely equal to Felicity from the time she was born. He never saw you as second best, so why should you?”
“Because that’s what I was,” Kate insisted. “A reject.”
“Reed Phillips was the loser, for what he missed. Not you.” Andrew was a thousand times the man Reed had been. Kezia never pointed out that her adoptive father’s love had come with a huge financial gift that would give her freedom for the rest of her life, and the ability to do whatever she wanted, which was hardly negligible, but it didn’t seem to matter to Kate. Her birth father’s rejection meant more to her than Andrew’s love and her inheritance. It was how she looked at life. She always saw what was missing, rather than the blessings she had. It was the exact opposite of Felicity’s view of life. She was free and unfettered, whereas Kate was always haunted by the ghosts of the past, including those she’d never met.
Kate had continued to write throughout her life, always journaling, and her latest romantic partner of the last four years, Jack Turner, was a struggling writer who seemed to enjoy the struggle more than the writing. In that way, he was well suited to Kate, although Kezia found him tiresome, always expounding about something, and pompous. Kate had met him at a writing workshop. He had been an English teacher at a prestigious boarding school and had given it up to become a tutor and try to write a novel. He hadn’t so far, but Kate was convinced he had real talent. He had grown up in Boston and gone to Boston University. He had published short stories, and taught creative writing at one of the many writers’ workshops he attended that flourished in Vermont. He was from a family of teachers. His father taught English literature at Harvard, but Kezia thought Jack lacked ambition and was less sure than Kate about his talent. He was good-looking but not exceptional on any front, with graying brown hair and brown eyes.
Now thirty-seven, Kate had been with Jack for four years and time was slipping past her. She had started a novel when Andrew died, five years before, but hadn’t finished it, and still spent her summers in Vermont, going to writing workshops with Jack. He was forty-two years old, and never mentioned marriage. His own parents had divorced when he was young. He and Kate talked more about their unwritten novels than any plans for the future. Their life was eternally on hold, waiting for the great American novels to spring forth on their own. And conveniently for him, Jack had moved in with her three years before, after they had dated for a year. He had given up his fifth-floor walkup studio apartment in a shabby building on the Bowery, and Kate discreetly supported him, by tacit agreement. The subject seemed indelicate to bring up, and Kate could afford it, which seemed to Kezia a poor reason to be supporting him. Jack didn’t make enough to live on. Kate insisted he was brilliant, but her mother wasn’t so sure. His talent seemed to be latching on to the right people and making a living of it. Kate didn’t seem to be madly in love with him, but their outlook on life was similar. He was good-looking, bright enough, and well brought up. The relationship was comfortable, but he was more of a habit than a passion. Kezia was no longer sure that Kate would ever marry and have children, but if she did, Kezia hoped it would not be with Jack. Kate was still nursing the deep inner wound of having been rejected by her birth father.
She was cautious with the money Andrew had left her and didn’t live extravagantly. Her cabin in Vermont was barely big enough for the two of them, and her apartment in the West Village was a comfortable loft, but everything in it was secondhand and looked like she’d found it on the street.
By contrast, Felicity’s big sunny apartment in Tribeca overlooking the Hudson was spectacular, and very chic. She and Blake went back and forth between her apartment and his equally nice one, a few blocks away.
Kezia often wondered why Kate continued the relationship with Jack. It seemed so unproductive and unrewarding, but it appeared to meet a need for her, for companionship, and for being with someone who was always struggling, as she was, to find herself. Kezia didn’t have much faith in Jack at forty-two, but she still had hope for Kate at thirty-seven. She liked to tell herself that her older daughter was a late bloomer, but that was seeming less and less likely as the years went by. She had never met the right man. It was easier to be with someone like Jack, who hadn’t made a success of his life, than with someone who had and made her feel inadequate. It was always easier to blame someone else. And with what Andrew had left her, Kate could spend the rest of her life trying to write the great American novel, and it didn’t really matter if she never did.
In Felicity’s case, she hadn’t even come into her inheritance yet, and lived lavishly on what she made as a model. Kate was always critical of that, and said the money she earned was obscene, since it was a job that didn’t require a brain. But it required flair and style, energy, persistence, and a positive outlook on life, and Felicity had them all, along with her beauty. The simple truth was that Felicity was happy and Kate wasn’t, which made Kezia’s heart ache for her. But the only one who could change that was Kate.
Kezia had hired a car and driver to take her into the city from Kennedy Airport. He had come with a van, and managed to get her four big bags in, and she smiled as she watched the outskirts of Manhattan slide by.
“This is home now,” she reminded herself with a smile, content in the back seat. She was wearing jeans and a T-shirt, with a well-cut black blazer and loafers, and carried an Hermès Kelly bag. She had a natural chic. Her hair was pulled back in a long blonde ponytail, and some loose strands flew in the breeze that came in the open window. She was excited to see her new apartment again. She had been working from photographs and floor plans while she bought new furniture and ordered rugs. She was eager to see how it would all come together, but she had two months to wait for that. In the meantime, she didn’t mind living in the sparsely furnished apartment with rented furniture. She didn’t care if she lived with orange crates for two months.
She couldn’t wait to show the apartment to the girls. Neither of them had seen it. She had bought it on a quick weekend trip to New York when it had become available, and the New York realtor she had been working with called her and told her to grab it before someone else did. It was a prestigious address, a great location, and one of the two best apartments in the building. When she bought it, Kate had been in Vermont for another writing workshop, and Felicity had been in Milan for Gucci. Kezia felt like she was jumping off the high dive when she saw it on her own and said she’d take it. It meant starting a whole new life. It was the perfect antidote to turning sixty. She still couldn’t believe she was that old. She didn’t look it or feel it. Some people retired at sixty, but she hadn’t worked since she was thirty-five, when she’d married Andrew and given up nursing. She still missed it sometimes, but that was part of another life. Out of sentiment and nostalgia for her father, she still kept her nursing license up to date, but she hadn’t practiced in twenty-five years. It seemed like an eternity, and it was.
It was early evening when the car pulled up to her new address. Fifth Avenue was crowded and so were the side streets. It was fun to be surrounded by all the noise and activity. She wouldn’t hear it on the sixtieth floor. Her view stretched to both rivers and included the Empire State Building. The realtor had mentioned a number of famous people who lived in the building. Two senators and a congresswoman, a famous writer, and several actors. Notably Sam Stewart, the Oscar-winning actor, had the other half of the penthouse floor. They each had their own express elevator so they never had to see each other or other residents, or wait for the elevator. They had total privacy. A hedge separated his terrace from hers. The realtor had assured her that he was a notoriously quiet neighbor, and he was away on location most of the time.
Kezia remembered that his wife had died in a helicopter accident while filming a movie two years before. She was an equally famous actress, and they had been a legendarily happy Hollywood couple with a solid marriage, which ended in tragedy. Since Kezia and Sam Stewart had separate elevators, she would never see him, although she had seen most of his movies. He was a man of immense talent, strikingly handsome, and the realtor referred to him as a recluse, so at least he wouldn’t be giving parties on his half of the terrace, which she would be able to hear even though she couldn’t see him. The realtor said he was known to have a fabulous art collection, although the realtor had never seen it, since she hadn’t sold him the apartment. He wasn’t one of her clients.
The building manager had an envelope with the keys in it for Kezia, with a note. Her rented furniture had been delivered the day before. She had hired a cleaning service, until she found a housekeeper, since she had nothing of value in the apartment. She was intending to cook for herself or buy takeout food, or order in. She was perfectly content to be alone in the apartment for the summer, without anyone to fuss over her. She liked being independent after having been alone for five years.
She had been sad to let her employees go in San Francisco when she sold the house. Some of them had been with her for her entire marriage, and the five years since, but all of them had lives and families in San Francisco, and they didn’t want to leave, which was fine with her. It would be a completely fresh start.
The elevator shot upstairs, with a porter pushing her bags on a trolley. There were concierges, security men, and doormen in the building, a gym, a pool, a roof garden, and a dry cleaner. The door to the apartment opened easily, and the alarm wasn’t on. She tipped the porter, he left, and she went out on her terrace and looked south, toward downtown to where her daughters lived, and where the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center had been before 9/11. The sun was setting to her right, in a blaze of flame. The windows of other buildings below her sparkled like diamonds. It was a perfect welcome to her new life in New York. It looked exciting and beautiful, and she stood there smiling, and sat down on one of the rented deck chairs, feeling joy well up inside her. It was one of those rare moments when everything comes together and feels just right. It couldn’t have been better. It was perfect. Welcome to New York, she whispered to herself. She loved it.