‘You can practise driving in the Rambler.’ He wagged a finger jokingly in my direction. ‘But only if there’s someone with a valid licence in the passenger seat.’

I just blinked up at him. ‘I can’t drive,’ I said.

Dopey let out this big horse laugh. ‘You can’t drive?’ He elbowed Sleepy, who was leaning against the side of the truck, his face turned towards the sun. ‘Hey Jake, she can’t drive!’

‘It isn’t at all uncommon, Brad,’ Doc said, ‘for a native New Yorker to lack a driver’s licence. Don’t you know that New York City boasts the largest mass-transit system in North America, serving a population of thirteen point two million people in a four thousand square mile radius fanning out from New York City through Long Island all the way to Connecticut? And that one point seven billion riders take advantage of their extensive fleet of subways, buses, and railroads every year?’

Everybody looked at Doc. Then my mother said, carefully, ‘I never kept a car in the city.’

Andy closed the doors to the back of the Land Rover. ‘Don’t worry, Suze,’ he said. ‘We’ll get you enrolled in a driver’s ed course right away. You can take it and catch up to Brad in no time.’

I looked at Dopey. Never in a million years had I ever expected that someone would suggest that I needed to catch up to Brad in any capacity whatsoever.

But I could see I was in for a lot of surprises. The palm trees had only been the beginning. As we drove to the house, which was a good hour away from the airport – and not a quick hour, either, with me wedged in between Sleepy and Dopey, with Doc in the ‘way back’, perched on top of my luggage, still expounding on the glories of the New York City Transportation Authority – I began to realize that things were going to be different – very, very different – than I had anticipated, and certainly different from what I was used to.

And not just because I was living on the opposite side of the continent. Not just because everywhere I looked, I saw things I’d never have seen back in New York: roadside stands advertising artichokes or pomegranates, twelve for a dollar; field after field of grapevines, twisting and twisting around wooden arbours; groves of lemon and avocado trees; lush green vegetation I couldn’t even identify. And arcing above it all, a sky so blue, so vast, that the hot-air balloon I saw floating through it looked impossibly small – like a button at the bottom of an Olympic-sized swimming pool.

There was the ocean, too, bursting so suddenly into view that at first I didn’t recognize it, thinking it was just another field. But then I noticed that this field was sparkling, reflecting the sun, flashing little Morse code SOSs at me. The light was so bright, it was hard to look at without sunglasses. But there it was, the Pacific Ocean . . . huge, stretching almost as wide as the sky, a living, writhing thing, pushing up against a comma-shaped strip of white beach.