‘Eighteenth century?’ I could feel my heart starting to pound hard, as if I’d been running. ‘That’s like three hundred years old!’

‘I don’t get it.’ We were driving through the town of Carmel-by-the-Sea now, all picturesque cottages – some with thatched roofs, even – and beautiful little restaurants and art galleries. Andy had to drive carefully because the traffic was thick with people in cars with out-of-state licences, and there weren’t any stoplights, something that, for some reason, the natives took pride in. ‘What’s so bad,’ he wanted to know, ‘about the eighteenth century?’

My mother said, without any inflection in her voice whatsoever – what I call her bad-news voice, the one she uses on TV to report plane crashes and child murders, ‘Suze has never been very wild about old buildings.’

‘Oh,’ Andy said. ‘Then I guess she isn’t going to like the house.’

I gripped the back of his headrest. ‘Why?’ I demanded, in a tight voice. ‘Why am I not going to like the house?’

I saw why, of course, as soon as we pulled in. The house was huge, and impossibly pretty, with Victorian-style turrets and a widow’s walk – the whole works. My mom had had it painted blue and white and cream, and it was surrounded by big, shady pine trees, and sprawling, flowering shrubs. Three stories high, constructed entirely from wood, and not the horrible glass-and-steel or terracotta stuff the houses around it were made of, it was the loveliest, most tasteful house in the neighbourhood.

And I didn’t want to set foot in it.

I knew when I’d agreed to move with my mom to California that I’d be in for lots of changes. The roadside artichokes, the lemon groves, the ocean . . . they were nothing, really. The fact was, the biggest change was going to be sharing my mom with other people. In the decade since my father had died, it had been just the two of us. And I have to admit, I sort of liked it like that. In fact, if it hadn’t been for the fact that Andy made my mom so obviously happy, I would have put my foot down and said no way to the whole moving thing.

But you couldn’t even look at them together – Andy and my mom – and not be able to tell right away that they were completely gaga over each other. And what kind of daughter would I have been if I said no way to that? So I accepted Andy, and I accepted his three sons, and I accepted the fact that I was going to have to leave behind everything I had ever known and loved – my best friend, my grandmother, bagels, SoHo – in order to give my mom the happiness she deserved.

But I hadn’t really considered the fact that, for the first time in my life, I was going to have to live in a house.

And not just any house, either, but, as Andy proudly told me as he was taking my bags from the car, and thrusting them into his sons’ arms, a nineteenth-century converted boarding house. Built in 1849, it had apparently had quite a little reputation in its day. Gunfights over card games and women had taken place in the front parlour. You could still see the bullet holes. In fact, Andy had framed one rather than filling it in. It was a bit morbid, he admitted, but interesting, too. He bet we were living in the only house in the Garmel hills that had a nineteenth-century bullet hole in it.