It was a dark and stormy night when Maggie and her mother left their McMansion in Monte Vista and moved to a small rental house in Carlmont. Six months later the weather had improved but not much else. Maggie’s parents divorce was underway and the house she grew up in was for sale.

“Listen to this,” her mother said, rattling the pages of the Silicon Valley newspaper’s real estate section. “’Classic Spanish villa in prime Monte Vista, eat-in kitchen with granite countertops.’” She looked up, eyes blazing. “My granite countertops. My eat-in kitchen.”

Maggie grabbed her backpack and looked over her mother’s shoulder. “’Private tree-studded setting,’” she read. A pang of nostalgia hit her between the ribs. Tree-studded was right. Tree-studded with a tree house. Or had her father taken down the tree house after she’d left along with the volleyball net and the tetherball pole? She picked up her duffel bag full of her fencing gear. That was her sport now. Fencing was fast, athletic and challenging. Just what she needed to take her mind off her other problems. “Gotta go. I’ll be late for school.”

Her mother said nothing. Not even good-bye.

Maggie could have reminded her that the sooner the house was sold, the sooner there’d be a settlement, but her mother had sunk too far into depression to be cheered by anything Maggie could say.

It was a relief to get to school away from her mother’s despair which hung over the house like a blanket of San Francisco fog….While everything else in her life had changed, Maggie was still at Manderley Prep, the most expensive, most exclusive prep school in the Bay Area, maybe in the whole state of California. Let her father take up with a new girlfriend, let him complain about the way she and her mother spent his money. As long as he kept paying the $30,000 tuition she wouldn’t say a word against him.

If she were being completely honest, she’d admit that one of the big reasons she loved the school was not the spacious campus, the small classes, the ten-to-one ratio of students to teachers or even the snob appeal of rubbing elbows with the spawn of Silicon Valley’s movers and shakers. It was the opportunity to see Ethan every day.