When Hannah lives in Manhattan, she spends her days surrounded by concrete, steel, and asphalt. Her business in New York is successful, but she sees limits in her personal life and despairs of ever meeting a nice guy in New York.

When Hannah moves to Sausalito to marry Owen, her surroundings drastically change. She moves into the houseboat on which Owen lives in the San Francisco Bay, a boat offering wide vistas of open water through its glass walls. The houseboat is also vulnerable to flooding, as are the other 400 boats in the aquatic neighborhood. In contrast, Hannah’s workshop is a house nearby, rooted in the earth and solidly underfoot.

The houseboat represents the life Hannah took on when she married Owen and became Bailey’s stepmother: a life that, while pleasant and outwardly beautiful, is also fragile and lacks roots. It also lacks privacy, which is an aspect of small-town Sausalito Hannah dislikes since she feels observed and judged by the neighbors.

It is no surprise, then, that although Hannah and Bailey return to Sausalito after Owen’s disappearance and their trip to Austin, Hannah sells the houseboat as soon as Bailey graduates, and moves to Los Angeles where she is once again surrounded by the reliably solid elements of concrete, steel, and asphalt and the anonymity of a large city.