She smiled, this time a real one. It was like a tiny little pilot light that had been out for a long time and was just flickering back to life.
“He would have told me to say yes.”
“So then say yes,” Harper pleaded.
Nina looked at her, then looked at Claire, looked out at the marsh for a moment, and then held out her hand.
“Give me that pen.”
Harper handed it over, and Nina signed her name on the napkin beneath the rules in that looping cursive script that she’d had since college.
She passed the pen to Claire, who signed in her small, precise handwriting, the same handwriting that had shown up on decades of Christmas cards and grocery lists.
Harper signed last.
Her signature was sharp and slanted, the same one she put on contracts worth a lot of money, but it had never felt more important than it did on this dusty rose napkin on a screened porch in Beaufort at 10:30 on a Tuesday night.
“Well, it’s official,” Harper said.
“It’s a napkin,” Claire said.
“But it’s a napkin with intentions.”
Claire rolled her eyes. “That’s not legally binding.”
“Listen, Claire, I’m the one with the lawyers, okay? You let me worry about what’s binding.”
Nina took the napkin from Harper’s hand and stared at it.
Three full signatures, three rules, and a napkin that was so thin you could see the porch light through it.
“I want to pick first,” Nina said quickly.
Claire and Harper both looked at her with something close to shock because Nina had not volunteered to do anything in eighteen months.
“I thought we were doing a rotation,” Claire said.
“Well, we are, but I’m rotating myself to the front.”
Harper tried not to smile. “What did you have in mind?”
“Not yet. I have to think about it, but I’m going to make sure it scares all three of us.”
“More or less than gas station sushi?” Claire asked.
“Oh, much more.”
Nina stood up from her chair, still holding the napkin.
She looked at it one more time and then handed it to Claire.
“Put this somewhere safe.”
Claire took it like it was something precious, which it was.
“I’ll just put it on the fridge.”
“The fridge?” Harper said. “You mean we just made a life-altering pact, and you’re going to stick it under a magnet on the fridge?”
