Claire and Nina looked at each other, and that said everything. Harper saw it and rolled her eyes before taking a sip of wine. Her heart was still pounding.
She picked up the phone under the table and typed.
Jordan, I know it’s late. I just did something brave and stupid. Can I come over?
His response took twelve seconds.
The door has been open for four years, Harper. Come home.
She didn’t show anyone the text. She just put the phone in her pocket and sat there with her two best friends, ordering another round and laughing about the man in the Hawaiian shirt, Claire’s index cards, and the fire chief who stayed for pie.
When they left at midnight, Harper drove straight to Mount Pleasant instead of back to her condo. She parked in Jordan’s driveway. The workshop light was on. She could hear music through the open door, something low and acoustic, and see his shadow moving inside.
She sat in her car for about thirty seconds, the time it took to run into the Atlantic, and then got out and walked toward the light.
CHAPTER 14
Nina had a date on Saturday. Not this Saturday. This Saturday was the pact for month ten: horseback riding on a trail outside Beaufort. It was Claire’s pick. But her date was next Saturday, and it was a real date at a restaurant on Shem Creek that Sam had chosen because it had a patio overlooking the water.
Nina had told him during one of their long phone calls over the past few weeks that she liked eating near water. He had remembered.
That was the thing about Sam. He remembered things.
They’d had coffee three times, dinner once at a quiet place on James Island where Sam lived. He had a small house with a garden he had designed himself. Nina had seen photographs on his phone.
Sam was organized and intentional. Nina’s garden on Edisto was a patch of dirt that David used to tend, but had gone feral in the two years since he had died. She was no gardener.
Sam was patient in a way Nina found deeply disarming. He didn’t push. He didn’t fill silences with chatter. He just sat across from her, listening with the attention of a man who designed landscapes for a living and understood that the best things needed time and space to grow.
He’d lost his wife, Beth, to cancer a couple of years ago, and his grief was different from Nina’s. It was quieter, more settled, like a river that flowed steadily rather than flooding.
He never tried to compare their losses. He didn’t try to bond over their shared pain. He just sat there, warm and present, and let her be wherever she was at that moment.
The guilt was fading a bit. It wasn’t gone. Nina thought that the guilt would probably never be completely gone, the way a scar doesn’t always fully disappear, but it had softened into something that she could carry without it crushing her soul.
She had talked about it with Susie at the retreat and then with Elena, who had surprised her by saying, “David loved you enough to want you to be happy, even without him. Don’t you dare insult him by refusing to be.”
Elena had said it fiercely, but that was the way she said everything. And then she had changed the subject to the quality of the tomatoes at the Piggly Wiggly. They were apparently mushy that week, and this was unacceptable.
Lucia did have opinions about Sam. Of course, Lucia also had opinions about everything. But her opinions about Sam seemed cautiously positive. She’d only met him once, and very briefly, when he came to pick up Nina for coffee.
They stood on the porch on Edisto, making small talk, while Lucia looked at him from the doorway.
Afterward, Lucia had said, “He seems okay.”
“Just okay?” Nina asked.
“He’s not Dad.”
“No one is Dad,” Nina said.
“I know, but he seems like a person who might be nice to you, and that’s really what matters.”
Lucia had paused.
“Also, his shoes were clean. Dad always said you can tell a lot about a person just from looking at their shoes.”
“Your dad wore flip-flops nine months of the year.”
