Lee pressed a hand to her own before she rose. Tea wasn’t going to help. She had to move. “I have no illusions about Hunter and myself,” she said, more firmly than she’d expected to. “We have different priorities, different tastes.” She looked through the kitchen window to the high red walls far beyond the clustering trees. “Different lives. I have to get back to L.A.”

Bonnie calmly continued to drink tea. “Of course.” If Lee heard the irony, she didn’t respond to it. “There are people who have it fixed in their heads that in order to have a relationship, the two parties involved must be on the same wavelength. If one adores sixteenth-century French poetry and the other detests it, there’s no hope.” She noticed Lee’s frown but continued, lightly. “Fred’s an accountant who gets a primal thrill out of interest rates.” She wiped absently at a smudge of flour on the table. “Statistically, I suppose we should’ve divorced years ago.”

Lee turned back, unable to be angry, unable to smile. “You’re a great deal like Hunter, aren’t you?”

“I suppose. Is your mother Adreanne Radcliffe?”

Though she no longer wanted it, Lee came back to the table for her tea. “Yes.”

“I met her at a party in Palm Springs two, no, must’ve been three years ago. Yes, three,” Bonnie said decisively, “because I was still nursing Carter, my youngest, and he’s currently terrorizing everyone at nursery school. Just last week he tried to cook a goldfish in a toy oven. You’re not at all like your mother, are you?”

It took a moment for Lee to catch up. She set down her tea again, untasted. “Aren’t I?”

“Do you think you are?” Bonnie tossed her tousled, streaked hair behind her shoulder. “I don’t mean any offense, but she wouldn’t know what to say to anyone not born to the blue, so to speak. I’d’ve considered her a very sheltered woman. She’s very lovely—you certainly appear to’ve inherited her looks. But that seems to be all.”

Lee stared down at her tea. How could she explain that, because of the strong physical resemblance between her and her mother, she’d always figured there were other resemblances. Hadn’t she spent her childhood and adolescence trying to find them, and all of her adult life trying to repress them? A sheltered woman. She found it a terrifying phrase, and too close to what she herself could have become.

“My mother has standards,” she answered, at length. “She never seems to have any trouble living up to them.”

“Oh, well, everyone should do what they do best.” Bonnie propped her elbows on the table, lacing her fingers so that the three rings on her right hand gleamed and winked. “According to Hunter, the thing you do best is write. He mentioned your novel to me.”