IT WAS AS IF the car were responding to some surreal internal guidance, as if it were carrying her along Route 195 independent of her own volition. They were going to New York, she and the BMW. They were going home. No, not home. They were going to 720 Park Avenue, where her mother and Preston Daniels and two servants lived—and where she, too, had a room.
But home was San Francisco. Home was the house on Sacramento Street, and her room that overlooked the rear garden.
Except that the house on Sacramento had been sold soon after she and her mother moved to New York. He’d had to sell the house, her father had tried to explain, because her mother’s father had loaned them the money for the down payment. And he wanted his money back.
Always, it came down to her mother. Her mother had wanted a divorce so she could marry Daniels. Because of her mother, strangers now lived in the house on Sacramento Street.
And because of her mother, she and the BMW were traveling west on Route 195, bound for New York.
A few words from an emperor, she’d once read, could change the fate of the world.
A few words from her, and the emperor would topple from his throne, all fall down.
The emperor and his wife. All fall down.