August 27, 2017:

She was sad when he broke it off. In his blue VW bus, in a parking place on Prospect Street in La Jolla.

It hurt her. Rejection. She was downcast and forlorn.

She recovered quickly enough. A month later she lived with a lawyer in San Francisco. "He pays my rent," she said, in her chipper I-am-a-little-girl sing-song. Hardly a surprise.

From the beginning her mother had warned him.