New Title 1

Contents

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Epilogue

Prologue

When a woman turns 40 she is no longer young, but not yet old.

At least, that’s what I was told by friends who had reached that milestone some years ahead of me. I wasn’t concerned, although perhaps I should have been: my work as a freelance journalist was always uncertain, my mortgage large, my pension minute, with the future unwritten. So, yes, turning 40 should have bothered me, or at least sparked my interest a little, but you can’t force yourself to feel, can you?

I never dreamed that my past would catch up with me
, and that I’d be drawn back into the erotic madness of a decade ago.

But then again, p
erhaps life is what happens when you least expect it.

Chapter 1

I gazed around the table at the faces of my friends, bathing in the warmth of their love.

Nicole smiled back at me and raised her glass.

“Well, today’s the day,” she said, winking at me. “The big 4-0! Not that you look it: beotch! Happy Birthday!”

Jenna and Alice lifted their cocktail glasses and clinked across the table.

I smiled wryly.

“Well, some days I certainly feel
forty. But not today – it’s so great that all you guys made it.”

“Are you kidding?” said
Nicole. “Of course we made it – and I
never
go to Brooklyn, so you should feel really honored, Venzi!”

“Here we go,” muttered Alice, “the
‘I never leave Manhattan even to see how the peasants live’ speech.”

“Up yours, Alice,” snorted
Nicole.

I laughed, happy to hear the
ir bickering, which was as familiar and innocent as air.

These were my friends, but I thought of them as family.
And they had all come to my favorite Italian restaurant in Brooklyn to celebrate with me.

“So, you
’re leaving us again,” sighed Alice. “Up, up and away on your travels.”

“It
’s not exactly a vacation,” retorted Nicole.

She would have raised her eyebrows except she
’d been for her monthly Botox treatment, and the upper part of her face was currently immobile.

It was true: it wasn
’t a vacation – I was going away for work. And I was living my dream.

I
’d come a long way since arriving in New York ten years ago, penniless and unhappy, fleeing a failed marriage and a doomed affair.

It hadn
’t been easy, although I doubt that moving to the Big Apple is easy for anyone. But for me, it meant living by myself, by my own efforts, for the first time in my life. I was scared and adrift in a city I didn’t understand, where I knew no one.

At first,
I’d lived in a horrible, low-rent hostel, before finding a tiny apartment in Brooklyn’s Little Italy – a place that became my home for the next eight years. I cleaned people’s apartments to earn money for food and rent, while saving what I could to go back to school to study journalism and photography.

I
’d been in New York for less than two months when 9/11 happened. The world changed on that day: everyone’s lives were different, as if we’d lost our innocence. The smoke and ash had hung in the air for days after; the feeling of shock and despair lasted much longer. And then came the anger: it was so strong, it was like a nightmarish creature that haunted your waking dreams. You couldn’t see it, but you could feel it, glimpsed in the faces of people around you – those expressions you caught out of the corner of your eye, that showed the rage was still there.

But there was also a sense of togetherness
, maybe of shared experience. It was as if the whole city came together to care for each other. We mourned together, we tried to pick up the pieces together. It was as if we were one big family, living through a crisis together. It was just a different atmosphere. Everyone wanted to help out, everyone had some sort of connection to those buildings.

Somehow, selfishly, it fit in with my own sense of loss: not just the life I
’d left behind in California, but also because I’d lost who I was.

A year passed before I
opened my eyes, shook myself from my torpor and found a way to live again.

An old acquaintance from San Diego had helped get me some ad hoc work on local newspapers and
, from there, I’d managed to begin my freelance writing career. At first it was just small features: a food festival in Brooklyn; a music festival in Queens; but gradually the scope of my writing became more wide-reaching, adventurous even.

It was shortly after that, when a
piece I wrote called ‘The New Immigrants’ about asylum seekers, had caught the eye of a national newspaper editor and, suddenly and unexpectedly, I was on my way. For the past six years I’d been lucky enough to earn my livelihood as a foreign correspondent, working freelance for several major newspapers.

Two years ago,
I’d even saved enough to put down a deposit on a tiny, 1920s bungalow in Long Beach. My mortgage was scarily large, but I wanted somewhere of my own: somewhere I could come home to as driver of my own destiny, and queen of my own castle.

I
’d loved living in Brooklyn and was sorry to say goodbye to my favorite coffee shops and restaurants. There was a real sense of community in the neighborhood, and the area thrummed with the vibrancy of the constantly changing wave of people that passed through.

By
this time, I was working mostly from home – ‘home’ being wherever my laptop was – so the commute into the city didn’t bother me, and I was ready for another change. For much of my life I’d lived near the ocean, certainly during the most significant parts, and I loved that sense of space and peace that living by water gave me. Above all things, I loved to walk down to the shoreline when a big swell came in, and watch the surfers: like so many seals, clad in black neoprene, bobbing behind the line-up, then charging down the barreling green waves. Sometimes, in the summer, I’d take my surfboard out and join them. It brought back happy memories and I felt carefree for an hour or so.

My new home in
Long Beach was a fascinating and diverse community. I loved the mix of people, and spent many happy hours just watching the world go by, often finding inspiration for new stories. My neighbors included an elderly Jewish lady, Mrs. Levenson, who used to walk side by side with her close friend, Doris, a Hispanic mother of three small children. Then there were the teenage beach bums, quietly smoking pot all day, hanging out on the boardwalk or by the mall, quiet and inoffensive. They all had their presence in the town, all part of the diverse culture, color and life.