“She said he’s very tall.”
“Height has nothing to do with personality, James.”
“I told her you were in a meeting, and she said she would call you back around two.”
“Then I will be in a meeting at two.”
“But you don’t have anything at two.”
“Then schedule something.”
James gave her a look that was part sympathy and part amusement. He was very perceptive for someone his age.
He set the salad on her desk and left while Harper sat there in her corner office on the fourteenth floor and thought about her mother and cousin Margaux’s second child and all the tall divorced surgeons who were probably very nice but very boring and would want to talk about their boat.
Eloise Ellis had been a Charleston society fixture for forty years. She chaired fundraisers. She wore pearls to the grocery store.
She had married Harper’s father at twenty-two years old, had Harper at twenty-four, and then buried Harper’s father at fifty-eight years old and had spent all the years since maintaining the social calendar of a woman half her age and the disapproval of a mother who had expected grandchildren by now.
She didn’t say it to her directly. She talked around everything. Eloise never said anything directly.
She would say things like, ‘I’m not saying anything, I’m just telling you,’ which was just her Charleston way of saying everything while maintaining plausible deniability.
She talked about other people’s grandchildren the way a meteorologist might mention an approaching storm, factually, repeatedly, and with the clear implication that something should be done about it.
Harper ate her salad and did not call her mother back.
At 1:47, her phone rang.
It wasn’t her mom.
It was Jordan.
She stared at the screen. It had been three weeks since his birthday call. She had told herself he wouldn’t call her again.
She had told Claire and Nina that she had handled it. Her phone rang a second time and then a third.
Harper’s thumb hovered over the screen. She let it go to voicemail.
Then she sat in her office and didn’t listen to the voicemail for the rest of the afternoon, which required a particular kind of discipline that, thankfully, Harper was very, very good at.
Folly Beach at 6:15 a.m. in December looked like the end of the world. The sky was just starting to lighten up with a thin line of gray and blue along the horizon.
The beach was empty except for a few joggers and one man with a metal detector, who clearly looked like he was living his best life. He had a small stack of metal objects piled up near a folding chair.
The ocean was dark and huge, and the air coming off of it had the kind of cold that did not just touch your skin but moved straight through it, settling into your bones.
Claire’s car was already in the lot.
Harper found them at the edge of the dunes, Claire in a puffy coat and sneakers, holding a tote bag that probably had a thermos, extra towels, and some kind of organizational system.
Nina was beside her, wearing David’s old windbreaker, her hands in her pockets, looking at the water.
“You brought towels?” Claire asked.
Harper groaned. “I brought towels.”
“Extra towels?”
