Legal Question in Real Estate Law in California

If you leave in response to the notice, the landlord must take commercially reasonable steps to re-let the property. If the landlord does so, you are on the hook for the rent until the new tenant's lease starts, and the cost of finding the new tenant.

Assuming you do "quit," there is no unlawful detainer and therefore no basis for that type of lawsuit, the main purpose of which is to restore possession to the landlord after a breach of the lease. Instead, the likely venue switches to small claims court. The landlord cannot receive damages in excess of what his losses were, or would have been, if he made reasonable efforts to find a new tenant to mitigate his damages. So, in a sense, both the landlord and you have some responsibility with respect to the three-month period. If the landlord just takes the unit off the market, for whatever reason (unless the reason relates to something that was your fault), he has no compensable loss.