Beth texted that she’d had a hell of a shift and could they please figure out dinner. While Jack called in an order to Pizza My Heart for a large sausage and onions with extra olives, Lana texted André again. The pizza arrived just after Beth did. Thankfully, Lana’s phone rang before she had to entertain the idea of eating it.
Lana rushed into the back bedroom and shut the door. Beth raised an eyebrow at Jack, but the girl was too busy redistributing toppings for maximum flavor variety per bite to notice.
“Thank you for calling me back so quickly, André.” Lana sat down on the bed facing the window with the slough and pulled the letter of intent onto her lap.
“Darling, of course! Where are you? Your assistant told me something about an out-of-town medical procedure, and then you never responded to my texts, and when I called her again, she was working for some kind of lifestyle influencer in Ojai.”
Lana hadn’t realized how good—and painful—it would be to hear her old friend’s voice. It was like ripping off a Band-Aid she’d forgotten she had on.
“André, I’m fine. Things up here have just gotten more complicated than I anticipated.”
“Where are you?”
“Monterey Bay, near Carmel.” Near enough.
André let out a long exhale. “Thank God. Here I was thinking you were stuck somewhere awful, like a Siberian prison, or Bakersfield.” He paused. “Wait. Are you getting one of those EscarGlow treatments? You beast! I hear the snail slime smell is awful but the wrinkles positively melt away.”
“Please. You know I don’t have wrinkles.”
“You’re not going to tell me, are you? So what’s up?”
“I was hoping you could tell me a bit about conservation easements.”
“You haven’t gone Green Party on me, have you?”
“No, nothing like that. I’m looking into a few contracts with a land trust up here, and I had some questions. I’ve never gotten my hands dirty in nonprofits before, and I knew you’d be the right one to ask,” Lana said.
He chuckled. “That’s my girl. All business. Fire away.”
“I’m looking at a signed letter of intent from five years ago for a conservation easement between a rancher and a land trust. Just to be clear, an easement like this, it’s a transfer of development rights, not a transfer of land, correct?”
“That’s right. The owner holds the land, relinquishes the rights to do anything on it, and gets a tax write-off for doing it. In a way, it’s like the easements we’ve negotiated in the past to put new roads through private land. But instead of building, it’s blocking—the easement creates a no-development zone.”
“So if no one is actually buying or selling land, what role does the land trust play? What’s in it for them?”
“Control. The land trust is a kind of nonprofit nanny to the process. They strip the property of all meaningful paths to progress and profit. They get the papers signed and new deed restrictions recorded. And then they monitor the properties under their care, to make sure no one puts up a lemonade stand or a house or God forbid a factory on the premises.”
“How does the land trust make money in that scenario?”
“They don’t. Hence the non to their profit.”
“That doesn’t make sense.”
“Not to you, it wouldn’t. Not to me either, darling. But different strokes . . . and I suppose land trusts do often get large gifts of cash for their efforts. Kind of like making a donation to the hospital where dear old mother gave it up.”
Lana tried to ignore that last analogy.
“What if a land trust had enough land under conservation easement to get some kind of federal status as a wildlife protection zone?”
“What kind of wildlife?”
Lana looked out the window. “Seals. Otters. Waterfowl.”
“Charismatic megafauna,” André said. His voice betrayed a combination of respect and disgust. “The cuter the animal, the bigger the prize. Very popular with Sierra Club billionaires. And the feds. If the land trust could prove such animals were unique or endangered, it could trigger a federal designation. It could mean lots of funding, and power to call the shots for miles around.”
So Diana hadn’t been exaggerating. Lana imagined Victor Morales, conservation king, reclaiming Elkhorn from the ranchers who’d controlled the area for generations. She could see him up on the grassy hillside of the ranch, astride a horse, in custom boots, surveying his eco-empire. He’d enjoy it. He wouldn’t look half-bad doing it either.
But there was one unresolved question between him and that dream.
“In my experience, a letter of intent isn’t binding,” Lana said. “There isn’t some special exception for conservation projects, is there?”
“Nope. An LOI is just a promise. And you know how easy it is for a real estate project to change or fall apart between the promise and the finish line.”
“No contract, no deal.” It was one of her mantras. “Thank you, André. This is exactly what I needed.”
“Not at all. You’ve given me the pleasure of being the one person who has actually talked to you in months. Everyone will be jealous.” He paused. “It’s less fun here without you. Chat is nice, but I miss watching you carve up apartment buildings.”
“You miss getting my business.”
“Well, that too. But, darling, there’s this maddening little show on right now in West Hollywood where all the men’s roles are played by pigs and everyone is talking about it. Are you coming back soon?”
Lana felt a sharp pang of longing for her old life, the intoxicating drumbeat of commerce, clinking glasses with friends and enemies alike. She missed restaurants that seated you based on how much power you wielded in the city. She missed valet parking. But she wondered how much of her old world would be open to her if she came back now, with sunken eyes and stitches. There was a reason she hadn’t told anyone but Gloria about the cancer. Powerhouses like André avoided weakness like it was contagious. Before she got sick, Lana had too.
She looked around the cocoon she’d made of her daughter’s back bedroom in Elkhorn. Chipped furniture. Papers everywhere. Not a place she’d chosen, but a place where she could be herself, a fragile, incomplete self: Lana-with-cancer. In two days, on Thursday, she’d take the tests that would tell her when she could go back to being Lana, full stop. It could be soon. It could be never. She couldn’t let go of the hope that the tumors would shrink and she could go back home, become dazzling and diamond-hard once again, and put all of this behind her.
Until then she had new ways to occupy her time.
“I’m not sure when I’ll be back, André.” Out the window, Lana could see the slough waking up for the evening, terns and harbor seals slipping into the water to hunt for dinner. “Something up here has piqued my interest.”
“A hundred acres of opportunity? A silver fox? Knowing you, it’s probably both.”
Lana smiled. “I’ll tell you all about it when I’m back, André. Omakase. My treat.”
“Darling, I can’t wait. And bring him with you.”
Chapter Thirty-Two
When Lana stumbled into the kitchen at nine thirty the next morning, the landline was ringing.
“Mrs. Rubicon?”
Lana was too tired to correct her.
“I’m calling from the office at North Monterey County High School.”
“Yes?” Lana yawned.
“Is Jacqueline out of school today for an illness? We don’t have a note on file that she would be absent.”
“What? Hold on.” Lana looked over at the sofa bed. Jack’s pillow was stacked on top of her folded comforter, like usual. Through the window she saw Beth’s car in the driveway. Lana tried to stretch the phone cord far enough to knock on Beth’s bedroom door but couldn’t reach. “We’ll have to call you back.”
“This will be marked down as unexcused.”
“I said we’ll call you back!” Lana snapped at the phone, which flipped to a dial tone before she could finish.
“Beth?” Lana gingerly opened the door to her daughter’s room.
“Uhn.” Beth’s face was squashed into her pillow, her body swallowed by a mound of blankets. “Day off. Lemme sleep.”
“Beth. The school just called.” Lana tried to keep the panic out of her voice. “Jack isn’t there. She isn’t here either.”
Beth shot up into a sitting position. “What? How long has she been gone?”
“I don’t know. The phone woke me up.”