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didn’t want to stay in his present situation; he had too many plans, and he wanted to travel with Kate, to enjoy life a little now that they were both in their forties.
    She was very happy living with him, working besidehim. There was a kind of magic in John that inspired other people, allowing them to see possibilities they hadn’t considered. As much as they had talked through long evenings, there was so much about him that she didn’t know. Although there were things in his past that he didn’t want to elaborate on, he occasionally gave her short scenarios about his years as a boy and younger man. He seemed to have worked and studied very hard to become the man she knew now.
    Kate knew that John’s father, for whom John was named, had died in 1986, but he didn’t care to speak about him much. A pall seemed to descend over John whenever she asked about his father, so she didn’t press him. His mother was elderly and ill, and lived close by in the San Diego area. She had lived with John and Sue, but of course they couldn’t expect John’s ex-wife to be responsible for taking care of his mother any longer.
    Kate liked John’s mother, and often brought her small gifts she picked up in the cities she flew to. Sometimes Kate brought to work the cozy slippers that the older woman had crocheted, which she would sell to the other flight attendants. That tickled John’s mother, and she accepted Kate as a member of her family.
    John was a devoted son and very considerate of his mother, who had a series of heart attacks. He visited her in her assisted-living apartment often, and he and Kate frequently took her out to dinner.
    When John’s mother died of her final heart attack in 1992, she left him a half million dollars in her will. John’s sister, Marilyn*, his only sibling, lived in the Point Loma area of San Diego. Kate had never met her—John and shehad been estranged for years. Kate wasn’t sure why, but John sometimes said she had betrayed him, turning him in to “some” authorities (Kate was never sure if it was the police or someone else) when he and his family had lived with Marilyn and her husband after they’d left Florida. He also said she and her girlfriends had humiliated him when he was only a boy, making him take his clothes off, tying him up, and laughing at him.
    But that was such a long time ago, and Kate suspected he might be confused about things that had happened when he was a child.
    With his inheritance from his mother, John finally had the freedom to travel and plan what he would do for the rest of his life. He’d closed down his practice at Bayview in 1993, Tamara had set up her own business, and John decided not to start another California clinic.
    He and Kate embarked on a long trip. They drove to Arizona to see her father. Then they went wherever the wind took them, heading up the Oregon coast and north along the Washington shoreline on the Pacific Ocean. In some places, now, the beaches became less welcoming and somehow darker and craggier. Nevertheless, the two lovers explored some of the tiny islands off the northwest Washington coast. Both of them loved the sea, and they were sure that wherever they settled down, it would be somewhere near the coast.
    It was a carefree journey; they didn’t have to be any special place at any given time, and they were together, finally without problems or hopes that seemed impossible to achieve.
    Listening to John expound on his concepts and his solutions to any challenge was enthralling for Kate. The temper tantrums she had sometimes seen in him were easy to bury in her memory. She knew he was a good man and he had been through a lot in the past few years. With the pressure off him, she believed the angry scenes would diminish. And they did—for a while.
    Kate was thankful that she had waited until she was almost forty to find the companion and lover who was well-nigh perfect for her, and she hoped she was the same for him. She wasn’t naïve