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"That's just for this evening because your dad has plans too." Luca shrugs and goes back to his game.

"What friend are you meeting?" Isla asks. "Eleanor. My old school pal."

"Oh. I didn't know you were still friends with her. Is she the one you had that big fight with?"

"Nope, that was Anya. She's joining us too." 'Unfortunately.' "Eleanor and I are good." Are they, though? Julia wonders. They've seen each other a handful of times in the last ten years and they seem to have less and less in common. The sooner she can get tonight over with, the better. She takes a

five-euro note from the drawer and picks up the receiver to buzz the pizza guy through the main gate to the complex.

"OK, Mom, as soon as you get the pizza, you 'have' to look at this video." Isla holds up her phone again. "It's so weird. I can't figure out how they did it, but it looks like it was filmed inside our house."

"What is it—the letting agent's website?"

"No, I told you already!" Impatient. Snappy. "It's TikTok." Julia bites her lip. 'Hello, eggshells.'

"OK, let me grab the pizza, then I'm all yours."

* * *

Julia sighs again, louder now, as she walks through the long hallway toward the front door, her heels echoing on the white-and-gold marble floor. Low evening sun filters through the glass panels on either side of the door but she reaches for the Louis Poulsen standing lamp anyway, switching it on with a touch. Light fills the hall and she glances at her reflection in the mirror above the narrow table—the sunburst mirror she'd had shipped all the way from San Diego in a bid to make this mausoleum of a house feel like home. She smooths down her hair. Still in the suit she'd worn to work that day, she looks distinctly overdressed for take-out pizza. She doesn't even like take-out pizza, but going for drinks with Eleanor and Anya on an empty stomach is a bad idea. Especially Anya. Still queen bee, all these years later.

Eleanor means well, but why she invited Anya is beyond Julia. Of course, maybe she's mellowed since they last spoke. Or maybe she's the same narcissist she always was. Julia knows where she'd lay her money.

* * *

Now, she stands in the doorway, looking at the orange-and-purple sky. The longer, brighter evenings are just one of the many things about which her kids complain—'why can't it be dark already like it is at home?' They'll get used to it, and eventually they'll love that August evenings are longer and brighter. But for now, everything is other and different and strange, and they still can't understand why she uprooted them, and she still can't tell them the truth. So she's bribing them with pizza. Pizza that is, of course, at least according to her kids, inferior to pizza back home. There are a lot of things Julia misses about San Diego, but the pizza that tastes the same here as it does there is not one of them. She misses her yoga sessions with Milena, the instructor who became her friend. She misses the moms from the school: never true confidantes—and she couldn't tell them the truth about Isla—but good company all the same. She misses the smell of the ocean. Brentwood, she realizes as she sniffs the air now, smells of nothing, not even cut grass. She misses the San Diego weather. 'God', she misses the weather. She shakes herself. No time for wallowing.

The delivery guy is making his way past the town houses and on to the wider, greener part of Brentwood, the luxury gated community in which she and Isla and Luca live in a spacious, double-fronted house with a sweeping gravel driveway and somewhat pretentious white columns holding up the porch. Having grown up in a mid-century, slightly faded home with tricky electrics and creaky floors, adult Julia has always favored new-build houses. But there's something about Brentwood, for all its high-end newness. Something soulless. And at this time of the evening, it's almost eerie.

The delivery driver pulls in outside their gate and hops out with the pizzas. Feeling guilty about how long the driveway is, Julia walks down to meet him.

"Number twenty-six Brentwood? Two margheritas?"

"That's me. Now if only they were drinks instead of pizzas," Julia says, reaching to take the boxes and passing the man the tip.

"Cheers." He pockets the money without responding to her quip. Her kids are right, she's not funny. "Never been in here before," he says. "Those huge gates and all that security is something else. It's bigger than I thought—you wouldn't think we were in the middle of Foxrock."

"Yes. It used to be a convent, but they razed the whole thing to the ground about ten years ago."

"So, from one gated community to another, eh," he says, as he turns to walk away.

And nodding quiet agreement, Julia goes back up the driveway with her two margheritas-not-margaritas.