Dana was silent for a minute before speaking again. “I’m not going to be able to talk you out of this, am I?” She knew the answer as well as I. “Well … you’d better let me sleep on your couch when I come to visit, then.”

“Of course!” I laughed. “We’ll hang out on the beach, drive into LA and Beverly Hills, and go celebrity hunting.” We snickered until one of the other administrators walked by and plopped two massive stacks of invoices on our desks, at which point we decided it would be best to earn our paychecks and get back to work.

My body may have been working, but my mind was sorting out details for my move. I had five weeks before I’d be homeless, which meant I had five weeks to get myself out to and successfully settled in California. I’d never made a major move like this before, and I didn’t have the foggiest notion where to start planning, although getting the California end of things figured out seemed pretty crucial.

Over my lunch break I composed a letter to my “California contact,” Gary Rosebaum. He was supposedly my godfather, although our interactions over the years had had nothing to do with God. When my parents had divorced at the end of my high school years, he’d made me promise to come to him if I ever needed anything. I had a feeling he was just trying to make up for the fact that my father had pretty much abandoned us, but throughout college he sent birthday and Christmas cards, so I felt like I could at least ask him to help me find a roof to live under.

After posting the letter I jotted down the list swimming in my head: find a moving company, cancel next year’s lease, polish up my resume, let Mom know I was moving. I mentally winced at this last item; I hadn’t talked to her in six months, because we’d argued over my “dead-end job and dead-end boyfriend” after I’d turned down a job in her firm. She’d never forgiven me for not going into law like her, and when I’d flat-out refused to work in her office, she’d exploded. I decided to tell her I had broken up with Dylan and not the other way around; I didn’t want to endure the “I told you so” speech I was sure I’d get if I admitted he’d left me, which she said he’d do from the beginning. I hated it when she was right.

Dana returned from lunch and we chatted a bit as we worked. Having moved from Boston to Chicago, she had a bit more experience in the whole relocation thing, so she gave me some ideas of where to start. At the end of the day I went back to the bookstore, a habit I was beginning to enjoy, and browsed through the travel section looking at books on California. Gary lived in a small town in Southern California called Rancho Los Lagos; it seemed as good a place as any to start my search for employment, so I took down some notes of nearby town names, and then went home to spend the evening in front of my computer.