Claire shivered. “Two.”
And then nobody said three.
They just ran like they were running for their lives, like an ax murderer was chasing them.
The water hit Harper’s feet first, and it was so cold that it did not even feel cold. It felt like she had been shocked with electricity. It felt like she had been slapped awake by the entire Atlantic Ocean and all the fish in it.
It seemed like the ocean was not impressed by three women in polka dots.
She gasped. Claire screamed.
Nina made a sound that sounded somewhere between a war cry and a prayer.
They kept running and splashing through the shallows, the water climbing their legs, their thighs, their waists, and Harper’s whole body was screaming.
Her brain was also screaming that she had lost her mind. Beneath all the screaming, a feeling she had not felt in years remained.
She was awake. Completely, entirely, and shockingly awake. Not the type of caffeine and willpower awake that she normally ran on every day.
This was different. This was every nerve in her body firing at once. Every cell suddenly remembered it was alive.
The cold was brutal and magnificent as they stood waist-deep in the December Atlantic, throwing their heads back and laughing.
Claire started counting. Of course, Claire was counting.
“Fifteen! Sixteen! Seventeen!”
Nina was shaking. Her teeth were chattering so loud they could almost hear it over the waves. Out of the three of them, Nina was the petite one. Over the last year, she’d lost weight, and Harper worried the cold would snap her little bones in half soon.
Nina’s arms were wrapped around herself, but she was grinning, not smiling, grinning. The full, silly grin of a woman who had just remembered that her body could do things besides grieving.
“Twenty-five! Twenty-six!”
“I can’t feel my legs anymore!” Nina shouted.
“That’s how you know it’s working!” Harper shouted back.
“Thirty!” Claire yelled.
They turned and ran back through the shallows, stumbling and splashing, half falling onto the beach, where they collapsed in a pile of wet polka dots and laughter so big that it echoed off the dunes.
After being in the freezing cold ocean, the hot chocolate tasted like a religious experience.
They sat in the open back of Claire’s SUV with their legs dangling, towels hanging around their shoulders, passing the thermoses back and forth.
The parking lot was still pretty empty. A few more early morning joggers had appeared.
The man with the metal detector had moved farther down the beach, searching for whatever it was that made people get out of bed at dawn to sweep the sand with an electric stick.
The sun was fully up now, and Folly Beach looked like a postcard.
Harper took a long drink from the thermos. The bourbon and chocolate hit her chest like a warm hug, and she closed her eyes.
She was wet and cold and sitting in a parking lot at seven o’clock in the morning in a bathing suit, but she felt more alive than she had felt in her corner office for years.
“I have a question,” Nina said. She was holding Claire’s thermos with both hands, her dark hair dripping onto the towel. “Who picks month three?”
“Well, we should just keep the rotation,” Claire said, because there was no way that Claire was going to have an unstructured situation. “You picked month one, Harper picked month two, so I pick month three.”
