Issaquah Dock

Issaquah Dock is the setting of Bailey Michaels’s floating home and the domestic life Hannah Hall hopes to preserve after joining the household. Its docks, bay-facing windows, and shared routines make it more than an address: it is the familiar place Bailey has known for as long as she can remember, and a refuge whose meaning is complicated when someone new enters it.

Setting and Floating-Home Community

Issaquah Dock belongs to Sausalito’s community of floating homes, which numbers about four hundred. The homes are characterized by glass and views, while the dock serves as the neighborhood’s sidewalk. Inside an individual home, the living room functions as a hallway, so the ordinary divisions of a land-based house take on a distinctly dockside form.

The home on Issaquah Dock has wooden beams and bay windows, with views described as storybook-like. Its setting makes the surrounding water and the dock part of everyday domestic space: the route outside is a dock, and the bay remains visible from within the home.

Bailey’s Home and the Question of Continuity

When Hannah and Owen Michaels decided that Hannah would move to Sausalito, Hannah strongly opposed moving Bailey from the only home she had ever known. She regarded the floating home on Issaquah Dock as Bailey’s continuity and safe haven, and hoped that keeping her in it would make the transition easier.

Hannah later questions whether remaining in the same house actually protected Bailey from the disruption. The home was Bailey’s most cherished space, and Hannah wonders whether her own arrival made the change more conspicuous: someone had moved into that space, while Bailey had little power over the decision. The location therefore carries a tension between physical continuity and the altered experience of sharing a home.

The Porch and Domestic Routine

Hannah tries to avoid disturbing the household’s balance. Beyond making changes to the bedroom she shares with Owen, she redecorates the porch rather than another room inside the house. She adds potted plants and rustic tea tables, then builds a bench beside the front door. Shingled in white oak and fitted with striped pillows, the bench becomes a visible addition to the home’s threshold.

The bench also becomes the setting for Hannah and Owen’s weekend ritual: they sit together with morning coffee, catching up as the sun rises over San Francisco Bay. Owen is more animated in these relaxed conversations than during the workweek, and Hannah takes comfort in passing the bench even when she is not sitting there. That private sense of ease is interrupted when, on a trip outside to take out the trash, she finds an unfamiliar man sitting against the bench’s arm with a cup of coffee. The ordinary household setting thus shifts abruptly from a place of routine and comfort to a place where an unexpected stranger is present.