Prologue

He knew any biographer would decide that the story of his life could be summarized by this: When Liam Samuel Noone began accruing his fortune, the first thing he did was buy a piece of land as far away from his hometown as he could possibly get.

Of course, there were places technically farther from Midwood, Brooklyn than the Central California Coast. But Liam felt reborn the first time he arrived in Carpinteria. His pulse quieted, his chest released—a small, yet seismic shift. He drove through the secluded beachside town in a haze—the world around him windy and soulful, cypress trees sweeping every which way, a messy canopy.

Liam was in the early days of taking over the company, and he'd flown out west to meet with a potential investor. They were in discussions to build a boutique hotel together eight miles up the road in Santa Barbara—a hillside retreat, private and luxurious, with forty-eight stand-alone cottages, winding mountain trails, outdoor fireplaces, and cobblestone walkways. A stone-wrapped restaurant.

He was meeting with the investment partner, a former classmate named Ben, at Ben's oceanfront vacation home on Padaro Lane. They sat outside on the back deck, eating poached eggs and studying blueprints, Liam's suit no match for the chill coming in off the ocean. He drank extra coffee, refusing Ben's offer to borrow a coat.

At some point, Liam looked east and spotted a cottage, perched cliffside at Loon Point. It was lit up by the rising sun—the incandescent yellow ricocheting off the bluff front, landing on its white rock and citrus grove. The rose gardens.

The property encompassed a large parcel of land, five exquisite acres, endless ocean views, the Santa Ynez foothills in the distance.

An old woman lived in the one structure on the property, a Craftsman bungalow, a white wooden sign by the front door with the bungalow's name, WINDbrEAK. Liam knocked on the front door and asked her what she wanted for her home. She said she wanted to live there peacefully without people knocking on her door asking her what she wanted for her home. He smiled at her and apologized. I can't afford it anyway, he said.

Which was when she let him in.

Now, more than three decades later—how can that much time just pass ?—he walks over to the northeast edge, his favorite vantage point, the ocean expansive beneath him, the ancient olive trees and the wind and the sharp breeze, wild all around him.

He takes a deep breath, swallows the tears pushing in from the back of his throat as he remembers that day.

He isn't normally so nostalgic and has never been much for fantasy. But he feels himself doing it: pretending, again, that he is still that riled-up young man, knocking on an old woman's door, wanting to start a new life. As opposed to the older man he now is, an empty house behind him, no one to answer how he'd gotten it wrong. How he'd ended up here, emotional and weary, but willing to say out loud (to finally say out loud) all the things he wished he could undo. It isn't regret, exactly. It isn't anything as clichéd or inactive as regret. No. It is penance.

That is why he keeps playing the moments back on an unforgiving loop: the moments he is trying to return to, to relive. The first moment at eighteen, then at twenty and twenty-six and thirty-seven and forty-five. Fifty-eight. Sixty-one. Sixty-eight. In the ways that matter, it is all the same moment, isn't it?

The same choice. You move toward your destiny or you move away.

He digs his feet into the white rock, a light rain starting to fall. When exactly did this place become a referendum on what he'd failed to do? It would be easy (and probably wrong) to name that shift as a recent occurrence. But however it happened, slowly and at once, Windbreak is now the place that reminds him of himself the most. The irony of that! Instead of the escape he assumed it would be, a reprieve from the childhood home that he'd run from, it has turned out to be the opposite. It is his time capsule.

He turns and looks at Windbreak, the small Craftsman, all the lights on: two bedrooms, two bathrooms, a galley kitchen. A house, a cottage, that is smaller than the guesthouses on any of the neighboring properties, let alone the eight-thousand-square-foot main houses. Everyone assumed he'd knock the small house down eventually, build anew. This bungalow, perfect and misplaced, wasn't nearly big enough to house a large family. It wasn't big enough for his families certainly.

But it wasn't as simple as building a larger home. He was always nervous to bring his daughter here when she was small, and then the boys when they were. The palisades were no security from the drastic edges. That cliffside was too precipitous, eighty feet down to the ocean and the rock and the California coast. What if they fell? What if any one of them with their small quick legs and ready elbows went over the edge before he could catch them?

That's what he told himself, at least. Is it even the truth? Or is the truth simpler? He always liked to be here alone. Alone or with her.

He peers out over the edge, the waves lapping eighty feet below, the bluffs jagged and beautiful and strong. And he knows that, no, it isn't just selfishness. He's certain of that. He's certain that he was trying, in his way, to protect his children. Even when he failed (and he doesn't kid himself, he failed far more often as a father than he succeeded), he did want to protect them.

When, mere moments later, Liam Samuel Noone is pushed over that edge, airborne and pivoting, this is in fact his last thought. For all his faults, his very last thought.

Better me, than them .