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rainstorm only served to add to the stark and bleak drama as Lila surveyed the cliffs dropping 40 feet down into the ocean below. Waves boiled, churned and crashed against jagged black rocks. Walled as it was, the surf looked as it was trying to escape as it tirelessly pounded its way into crevices and caverns. Two rock spires had what looked like an arch between them, carved over the years by waves. When the water hit just right it sprayed out like a fountain. Even she, accustomed to oceanic beauty as one who’d grown up surrounded by it, found this coastline breathtaking.
    Gazing out over the waves, she decided there was more here to the scene of the romantic heroine, wronged yet not downtrodden. Easing the sliding glass door open another foot, she took a sip of the hot chocolate she’d made from the in-room coffee machine and settled in for a good brood.
    She didn’t have anywhere to be until five o’clock that night. She was heading over to her college roommate Annie’s house in downtown Redwood Cove for dinner. A wash of guilt overtook her, blending in nicely with the despair, as she realized that Annie’s daughter Charlotte had to be over a year old by now and Lila had only visited her once. It had been a quick visit, too, filled with obsessive pecks at her iPhone.
    It hadn’t been that way in college, of course. Matched together as Freshman roommates at Colgate, they’d instantly hit it off, sharing the same dry sense of humor and love of late night pizza deliveries. That first year Annie had been on the varsity swim team and Lila had been in the library, either working for her campus job or working on her studies. Sophomore year, however, a shoulder injury curbed Annie’s competitive swim career and the two had become inseparable. Wry, observant and willing to say the things others might just think, Lila loved the confidence she felt with fearless Annie.
    Annie had been at the center of her move to San Francisco after graduation. Never having left the East Coast, it was a big deal to move out; less so since Annie would still be her roommate and her parents lived just forty five minutes away in the suburb of Danville. Six months into the adventure, Annie had announced that she was leaving for Redwood Cove so she could move in with her boyfriend, Pete. The distance between them had widened as Annie got engaged, married and settled into a cute little cottage in a cute little town. Lila stayed in the city to climb the corporate ladder, party with her chic and sophisticated roommates and date a highly successful executive in the firm. At least, that’s how Lila had portrayed it, feeling defensive and lonely. The few times she’d tried greater honesty Annie had asked pesky questions like, “Why are you into this Phillip again?” or a “Remind me why you’re suddenly so interested in advertising?”
    Once Annie embarked on pregnancy and motherhood, they might as well have moved to different planets. Where Lila was consumed with deciphering Phillip’s latest text and planning the new fasting cleanse diet promised to make you lose those last five pounds of bloat, Annie was obsessed with her infant’s sleep schedule, or lack thereof. It seemed every time Lila called Annie’s daughter was crying in the background. “Now’s not a good time” had ended most conversations before they began.
    What was Annie going to have to say tonight when Lila washed up on her doorstep battered, bruised and thrown overboard by her supposedly sublime life? Shifting her legs so they were slung over the arm of the chair, Lila gazed out at a seagull perched defiantly on a jagged rock. He had no answers. But something about the independent and spirited gleam in his eye made her think of her Gram. What was she up to just then? Probably cooking some soup. She always liked to have soup on hand and in the freezer in Tupperware containers. “You never know when you’re going to need some,” she’d tell Lila, stirring a pot.
    A hot