“David, David, you’re thirty-seven, I’ve been representing you for eight years, and every ten months, you’re off to Newport Beach for a two-month retreat. Never anywhere else. It’s a damn good thing your novels aren’t as predictable as your travel schedule.”

“The place inspires me, that’s all. The sun, the sea. I always come back with an idea for a novel that I absolutely need to write.”

“So why ever leave there if it inspires you that much?”

Some things were not for sharing, even with a good friend like Charlie Placket. “I heard it said if I could make it here, I could make it anywhere.”

“I ask you the same question every time,” Charlie said, “and you always have a different bullshit answer.”

“I’m a writer. Bullshit is my business.”

| 3 |

Newport Beach luxuriated in spring warmth when David Thorne arrived late on the afternoon of March twenty-sixth. In an otherwise clear sky, a long filigree of white clouds ornamented the west, soon to be gilded by the declining sun.

A taxi brought him from John Wayne Airport to his home in that neighborhood of Newport known as Corona del Mar. His cottage-style single-story residence stood three blocks from the beach and lacked an ocean view, but the lot was of great value. He would not have sold the place for ten times what it was worth.

He had purchased the property with earnings from his first bestseller, when he’d been a twenty-five-year-old wunderkind. He still liked its cottage charm: pale-yellow stucco, windows flanked by white shutters with scalloped slats, a porch with a canary-yellow swing. The house was shaded by palm trees and skirted with hibiscus soon to be laden with huge yellow flowers.

A property-management firm maintained the place in immaculate condition and also looked after his SUV, a white Porsche Cayenne. They would have rented the house when David was in New York; but he didn’t allow it to be occupied by others. In spite of its humble style and dimensions, it was something of a shrine.

The urge to return had overcome him in January. But that would have been only seven months since his previous visit, which felt wrong. Self-restraint was required. Always, after he flew back to New York, on landing at the airport, he was seized by a desire to return at once to Newport. He had not yet visited twice in the same year, but he kept the cottage vacant in case one day he could not resist the pull this property exerted on him.

Sometimes he thought he should never have left. Maybe he would be happiest if he lived here full-time.

But intuition argued that to make this his only home would put at risk not just what qualified contentment he had found in the past ten years but also his sanity.