Harper opened her mouth to argue, but found that she really did not have anything to say because Claire was right, and the three of them knew it.
Jordan Beck was the only man who had ever gotten past Harper’s defenses. She had punished him for that by leaving.
That was a few years ago. How had so much time gone by? Time seemed to be moving faster with each passing year.
She had not had a serious relationship since then, unless you counted the relationship with her very fancy espresso machine. Although she still didn’t know how some of the buttons worked.
“He probably just wanted to talk,” Claire said gently.
“People don’t call their ex-girlfriends after years to talk.”
“Then what do they call for?”
“I don’t know. Closure, curiosity, and someone who might split the streaming password with them. Again, I don’t know.”
“Or maybe,” Nina said, “he misses you.”
Harper took an extraordinarily long sip of wine. She did not want to think about Jordan missing her.
She did not want to picture him in his workshop in Mount Pleasant, with sawdust on his jeans, that half smile he wore whenever she said something sarcastic and he chose to find it charming rather than hurtful.
Jordan built things with his hands. Bookshelves, tables, and a rocking chair he made for his mother’s birthday from reclaimed wood. He was the kind of man who measured twice and cut once, in woodworking and in life.
Harper was the kind of woman who cut first, never measured, and then pretended the uneven edges were intentional.
They had been terrible for each other.
They had been perfect for each other.
Both things were true, and that was irritating.
“Can we talk about something else?” Harper begged.
“We can,” Claire said, “but I do want it on the record that you brought him up, not us.”
“Noted,” Harper said, holding up her glass of wine and faking a toast to the air.
“And let’s also note that you’ve been thinking about him for three weeks,” Claire reiterated.
“Also noted. Moving on.”
But they did not move on, really, because that was the thing about this porch and these nights with these two particular women. Moving on was what Harper did in boardrooms and conference calls. But here with Claire and Nina, conversations did not move on. They circled and settled and came back when you thought they were done with them.
“Do you remember that night that we decided to move in together?” Claire asked.
The question came out of nowhere.
“Sophomore year,” Nina said. “Your dorm room. We had been studying for that awful econ final. Professor Anglin. What an awful little man he was.”
“You weren’t studying,” Harper said. “You were eating a bag of Doritos and reading a magazine that you’d hidden inside your textbook.”
“That’s called multitasking.”
“That’s called getting a C minus.”
“Hey, it was a solid C minus,” Nina said, chuckling.
Claire tucked her feet underneath her in the way that she had been sitting since she was nineteen years old, maybe even before.
