Igrew up moving, so often that I sometimes lost count: New Jersey, Ohio, London, Maryland, Missouri, New Hampshire, Connecticut, and Hong Kong by the time I was eighteen. When I left New York to join my soon-to-be husband, Billy, in Los Angeles, at the beginning of 2005, it occurred to me that I had never lived anywhere longer than seven years.

In L.A., the pattern held—from one neighborhood to another, until I started to think I had an internal atomic clock. Then, in 2019, Billy and I landed with our two children, aged seven and nine, on a breezy bluff between the Pacific Ocean and the Santa Monica Mountains.

Technically a neighborhood of Los Angeles, Pacific Palisades stood apart, an extra ten minutes’ drive from civilization, on the last stretch of Sunset Boulevard before it plunges t

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