“What did he say?”
“He looked at it for a long time, and then he said, ‘That’s cool.’ And he smiled, and it was the same smile I remembered. I had to leave because I was about to do something completely out of character.”
“Like what?” Claire asked.
“Like stay.”
Nina felt the weight of the words settle.
Stay.
Such a small word for such a terrifying act.
Harper, who left. Harper, who kept her options open. Harper, who had a beautiful apartment with no kitchen table, because a kitchen table implied someone else would sit with her there.
For Harper, staying was the bravest thing she could do.
“Well, then stay next time,” Nina said. Harper looked at her. “I mean it. The next time you’re sitting across from him, and you wanna leave because things are getting real, just don’t. Stay. See what happens.”
“What if what happens is that I fall for him all over again, and then it doesn’t work out, and I end up feeling worse than before?”
“Well, what if it does work?”
Harper didn’t answer.
Getting to the hotel room at midnight was the best part of the whole trip.
Claire decided to sleep on the pullout couch with her sketchbook beside her so she could draw the view of the restaurant patio from memory. Harper was on one of the beds, wearing the plush hotel bathrobe, texting someone she refused to identify, but it was obviously Jordan, based on how she kept angling her phone away from everyone. Nina was on the other bed, propped up against the headboard.
For the first time in a year and a half, she wasn’t thinking about going home.
This was the thing she’d been the most afraid of. Not the trip, not even the distance, not even leaving Lucia with Elena. She’d been afraid that she would get here and want to stay, that she would find out there was a version of her that existed beyond her little cottage on Edisto and David’s boots by the door, that there might be a version of her that still wanted things, that wanted to eat dinner on a patio watching mountains go purple, that wanted to walk through a city she didn’t know, that wanted to lie on a hotel bed at midnight listening to her best friends talk instead of sitting in her home and suffocating from the fog of grief.
She wanted tomorrow, and that was new.
For almost two years, tomorrow had been something she just had to get through. It had been a series of hours between waking up on the wrong side of the bed and falling back asleep.
Now she was lying in a hotel in Asheville with her two best friends, and she actually wanted to know what came next. She wanted to wake up and eat breakfast at a place they hadn’t found yet and walk down a street she’d never seen. She wanted to be alive, not just surviving, but alive.
The feeling was so unfamiliar to her that it took a moment to name it. It sat on her chest like a bird that had been in a cage so long, it didn’t trust what to do with an open door.
Anticipation. That’s what it was. She was looking forward to something.
“Nina?” Claire said from the pullout sofa. She was lying on her stomach with her sketchbook open, a pencil in her hand, and looked like she was back in middle school. “You’re smiling.”
“Am I?”
“Yeah, you’re lying there smiling at the ceiling like it told you a joke.”
“I guess I’m just… well, I’m happy,” she said it carefully, testing the word to see if it felt right. “I think I’m happy right now.”
Claire stopped drawing. Harper looked up from her phone.
“Yeah?” Claire said.
“Yeah.” Nina kept her eyes on the ceiling. “It actually feels a little different than I remembered. It’s not a big loud thing. It’s just this, lying here, being with you two, knowing there’s a tomorrow that I’m actually looking forward to.”
Claire put her pencil down. Harper put her phone down. Nobody said anything for a moment.
