In her rearview mirror, she saw the Malibu fishing pier she’d just passed. Holly slowed and put on her indicator. Was this how you did it? Were U-turns still allowed? She waited for the break in traffic and hoped for the best. As she parked, she accidentally knocked the hazard lights on. She listened to them tick tick tick. The rhythm relaxed her. She searched for the button and turned the lights off and on and off again.

In the tackle shop, she rented a rod and chose some lures and a pair of flip-flops. This being Malibu, she had her choice of a green smoothie or an organic soda when what she really wanted was a bag of corn chips. She settled for a bar of dark chocolate and a latte, reminding her of the mostly milk coffees her dad used to make for her.

“Nice day for it,” the clerk said, and she smiled.

“Tight lines,” she said, her dad’s voice ringing in her ear.

Holly had asked him once why they went fishing so much when he plainly didn’t like the taste of trout. Neither did she. Most of their catch they threw back, and the rest her mother ate over Triscuits with sour cream. But fishing, he said, gave him time to think.

“Nothing beats it for working out a problem,” he said. He never told her what those problems were, and so she’d pictured cranky toilets and reluctant faucets, P-traps and S-traps pulling him in different directions, her dad patiently reaching one accord after another with other families’ ornery pipes.

As Holly walked out onto the pier now, she felt the knots in her back release. The breeze from offshore purified her. She found a bench to sit and eat, ruining the lips Kelly had patiently painted on. She took off her heels and slipped on the flip-flops. Rio would not approve.

She struggled with the lure. It was a Dexter Wedge, not one of the minnows she’d grown up on, but even if it had been, she would’ve struggled. That was half the reason she hadn’t taken Flynn fishing herself. It had been so long. She looked for Flynn on the horizon. He was out there somewhere, learning to fish from someone else’s father. The other reason Holly hadn’t taught him how to fish, as her father had taught her, was a lack of imagination. She didn’t want James or Ilya to drive them to Castaic Lake, or Erin to go ahead to rent the boat, or Katya to pack them a breakfast of fried egg sandwiches on homemade bagels and fresh berries on the side. And yet she couldn’t imagine doing all of that work on her own. The problem with letting other people handle the details for you was when you did want to do something yourself, it was next to impossible.