“Jordan’s up there,” Claire said as they pulled away.
“How do you know?”
“The music. Harper doesn’t play music when she’s alone or not at home.”
They drove to Edisto. The bridge was dark, the marsh invisible, headlights carving the road out of nothing. Nina’s house appeared at the end of the drive with the porch light on, which meant Elena had left it on because Elena always left the porch light on when Nina was gone, the same way she’d left it on for David.
Nina got out of the car. She stood in the driveway, breathing in the marsh air. This was the smell of her life, the life she had shared with David, and now the new life she was learning to live without him.
She went inside. The house was quiet, but it felt less empty, as if a room had been cleared out to make space for something new. She walked past David’s boots by the back door. She didn’t move them. She wasn’t ready. But she looked at them and thought, I told you I’d leave the door open. I meant it.
And then she picked up her phone and texted Sam.
I’d like to have dinner sometime, not just coffee. Dinner, if you’re interested.
His response came within three minutes.
I’m very interested. You pick the place.
Nina put her phone on the counter. She looked at the marsh out the kitchen window, the place that David had fallen in love with years ago. She couldn’t see it at night, but she could feel it.
She made a cup of coffee, even though it was ten-thirty at night, and she would never go to sleep. She sat at the kitchen table and drank it slowly, looking out the dark window, and she didn’t turn on the television.
The house was very quiet, but for the first time, quiet didn’t hurt.
CHAPTER 13
Harper had only five minutes of material prepared and was utterly terrified throughout. She wasn’t someone who became scared easily and couldn’t even recall the last time she felt the word ‘terrified’.
She was the person who gave presentations every quarter to a board of directors that controlled billions of dollars and whose idea of a warm greeting was a firm handshake.
She had pitched acquisitions in rooms where a single wrong number would mean someone’s career ended. She had negotiated contracts across time zones and languages she didn’t even speak, with the help of translators who looked more nervous than she did.
Harper Ellis didn’t get terrified. She just got prepared.
But here she was, sitting on her couch in Charleston at nine o’clock on a Thursday night, reading her notes for the fifth time, and her hands were shaking. Not because the material was bad, just because the material was actually true.
This was her pick for the ninth month: an open mic comedy night at a small club in Charleston called The Laff Stop. It was spelled exactly that way, which Harper found offensive on a grammatical level, but she had chosen it because it hosted an open mic night every Friday that, according to the reviews, was welcoming and not too intimidating.
She picked stand-up because, after the grief retreat, she had told Claire and Nina that they needed a good laugh. Claire had said, “Then let’s just go see a comedy.” And Harper said, “ That’s not scary. Let’s go do comedy.”
The words had left her mouth before her brain had time to file a formal objection.
The thing about stand-up was that it required you to be honest about your life in front of a group of strangers and then make them laugh about it, laugh at you.
Harper was very good at making people laugh. She was sharp and quick-witted. Her timing was impeccable. And she had been the funniest person in every room she’d entered since she was about fourteen years old.
But being funny in a boardroom was very different than being funny up on stage. Being funny on stage was like standing in front of a bunch of people without your clothes on. And although Harper kept in shape and was proud of her body, she did not want to stand in front of a group of people without her clothes on.
In her boardrooms, humor was armor. On a stage, humor was the wound.
Her material was about being single, childless, a woman in finance, about eating toast over the sink, about her mother calling to report cousin Margaux’s reproductive achievements, about the fiddle leaf fig that her assistant kept alive because she just couldn’t be trusted with a houseplant. It was also about what it meant that the longest relationship in her life was with a man named James, who watered her plants on Wednesdays.
It was funny. She knew it was funny because she’d read it to James, and he’d laughed so hard he’d spilled his coffee on the desk. Then he said, “Please don’t fire me for laughing at the part about your love life.”
Harper had said, “You laugh every day at my love life, James. That’s not new.”
But the funny wasn’t the hard part. The hard part was the truth beneath the funny. The loneliness she turned into a punchline.
