The problem was that they had gotten there a bit too early. Port Angeles was a lively, attractive town in a glorious location, but a cultural center-a city-it wasn't; not yet. And Gideon, she had belatedly realized after five years of marriage, was a city person through and through, born and bred in Los Angeles. He had taken the Port Angeles position, an associate professorship at the time, largely for her sake, so that she could continue working with ease at Olympic National Park.

He'd never once complained; indeed, in many ways it was obvious that he loved the place-the clean air, the nearby Olympic Mountains, the startlingly beautiful Alpine lakes tucked into pristine green valleys, the laid-back atmosphere of the university campus. But no opera, no real theater or museums, no fine restaurants, no Mariner games. To get to any of those meant a four-hour round trip by highway, bridge, and ferry boat, and when the weather was bad, a pretty common occurrence in these parts, it meant a night spent in a Seattle hotel and a pre-dawn start home the next day if it happened to be a workday. And so, little by little, they'd pretty much stopped going, except for the occasional university event at the main campus. That had suited her fine; she was a country girl at heart, never at her best in cities. But, she had only recently come to realize, it hadn't suited him.

And so when the opportunity had been offered him to join the faculty at the main campus in Seattle-he'd turned down a similar chance once before-she had encouraged him to accept, and this time he had, and they had moved to Bainbridge Island, still on the Olympic Peninsula side of the Sound but only six miles from downtown Seattle, a comfortable 35-minute ferry ride. She had pushed for the move in an open-hearted spirit of self-sacrifice-it would mean a ninety-minute drive to work for her each way instead of her former ten-minute walk, but she'd found that it was a good thing for her too.