New York is the site of Hannah Hall’s former life as an independent woodturner and the place where her work first intersected with Owen Michaels’s world. Her Manhattan studio—an expensive lofted storefront on Greene Street in SoHo—was at once workshop and showroom. The city therefore holds two roles in the narrative: it is the professional home Hannah built for herself, and the setting of her first meeting with the man whose life would draw her toward Sausalito.

The City and Hannah’s Former Life

A little over two years before the present of her account, Hannah was living in New York, three thousand miles from Sausalito. The contrast is more than geographic. Sausalito, where Owen Michaels and Bailey Michaels had lived for over a decade, is described as quiet, charming, and sleepy; Hannah’s earlier life was squarely in Manhattan, in a small Greene Street storefront whose rent seemed almost beyond belief. She used the space for both making and displaying her work, joining the private labor of a workshop to the public-facing business of a showroom.

Hannah’s occupation was woodturning, which she understood as a form of sculpture: shaping wood rather than clay. The craft was inherited through her grandfather, an accomplished woodturner who had largely raised her and whose work had been central to her life for as long as she could remember. New York was not where that inheritance began, but it was where she made it into a profession and tested whether it could support her independently.

Work, Clients, and the Greene Street Studio

Hannah did not expect to succeed at woodturning, or at her later move into furniture-making. Her grandfather had supplemented his income with construction work, giving her reason to doubt that craft alone could provide a living. A turning point came when Architectural Digest featured one of her more impressive dining-room tables. The attention brought her a niche among downtown New York residents who wanted expensive interiors to appear as though no money had been spent. Hannah’s rustic wooden pieces suited that taste, and her local clientele eventually expanded to coastal cities and resort towns including Los Angeles, Aspen, East Hampton, Park City, and San Francisco.

The Greene Street workshop also put Hannah in contact with wealthy clients whose homes and purchases formed the immediate context of her meeting with Owen Michaels. Avett Thompson, chief executive of the technology firm where Owen worked, was among Hannah’s loyal customers. His wife, Belle Thompson, had Hannah’s pieces throughout their San Francisco townhouse and their newly built country house in St. Helena, where Belle often retreated alone. On a New York visit for an investor meeting, Avett and Owen came to the studio because Belle wanted them to check a rolled-edge side table Hannah had made for their bedroom. Avett’s concern was whether it would suit the bed frame beneath their ten-thousand-dollar organic mattress, though he appeared largely uninterested in the table itself.

The Meeting with Owen Michaels

Hannah had met Avett only a handful of times before he brought Owen to the workshop. Their arrival made Greene Street the point where her independent craft business and Owen’s corporate life briefly occupied the same room. Avett entered in a sharp blue suit, his graying hair stiff with gel and his phone still at his ear. He glanced at the side table, covered the mouthpiece, and said, “Looks fine to me,” before asking whether they were done. The casual inspection underscores how the meeting arose through a client’s errand rather than through a planned introduction between Hannah and Owen.

That encounter gives New York a quiet but decisive place in Hannah’s personal history. The city is not merely the backdrop to a romance that later takes root elsewhere: her established work, her showroom, and Avett’s commission create the circumstances in which she and Owen first meet. Her craft connects the two men before Hannah knows what that connection will mean for her life.

New York in Retrospect

Later, after Owen’s disappearance, Hannah walks back toward the docks carrying his computer and passes the elementary school as children are leaving for the day. The scene is in Sausalito, but the town’s scrutiny of her brings her earlier life in New York into focus. Residents had questioned why Owen, once considered the town’s most eligible bachelor, chose an out-of-town woodturner. They called her a carpenter, remarked on her lack of makeup and trendy shoes, and wondered whether a woman nearing forty who worked with wood would ever have a family of her own. Their assumptions expose the strain between Hannah’s established identity and the role they expected her to occupy in Owen’s community.

Hannah’s memory of New York also surfaces through a call to Jake Bradley Anderson, her former fiancé and the other lawyer she knows. When he answers, his voice takes her back to Greene Street and to Sundays at The Mercer Kitchen, with onion soup and Bloody Marys. The recollection briefly restores a different life: not an abstract alternative, but a world of familiar routines connected to the city she left. New York thus remains present as a measure of what Hannah had already built before she moved, and as the source of a past that can return in a voice, a meal, or the remembered shape of her workshop.