He nods. “It was abackflip, actually, and I spent the entire summer perfecting it.”
“Is that why we went to the waterfall every day?” I interject.
Petey looks momentarily startled that we haven’t all disappeared into the mist. “One thousand percent,” he answers. “I’m sure Ethan would’ve tried to serenade you in a treehouse all summer, but I needed to perfect my move.”
Ethan squirms next to me.
Laurel beams at Petey. “But then he did it, and it was spectacular.”
“And she kissed me,” he says, eyes alight.
“But then he left for boarding school.”
“And she moved all over the place. But then she followed me to college, obviously.”
“No,” she protests, but there’s absolutely no fight behind it. “I followed mysisterto college. My sister was following that one.” She points at Ethan, and I want to disappear into the forest.
“No one believes that for a second, Lo,” Ethan chimes in.
But his eyes trail all over my face, his brows trapped in the V of someone performing complex mental math. Now it’s my turn to squirm.
“Semantics,” Petey cuts in. “You were there—”
“But I was a twenty-year-old idiot who wasn’t even sure what love or commitment looked like. I didn’t…” Her tone downshifts into something serious—sad—and she grabs Petey’s hand. “I was so afraid of…everything.”
She breathes in deep, looking into the eyes of the manbeside her like he’s the one who makes air, then turns back to her audience. “He never gave up on me. He made me work for it—he needed to see I’d grown before he’d risk his heart again—but he never gave up on me.” I can’t tell if she’s so high on her lovesick feelings for Petey that these intimate details are spilling out of her like a club kid on Molly, or if this is one of those romantic performances our parents used to put on for dinner party guests. I’m not sure which I would find more terrifying.
The way Petey’s eyes shimmer with emotion, I’m leaning toward the former, which the pit in my stomach tells me is much worse. “You don’t give up on a woman like Laurel,” he tells us.
“And I’ve never stopped loving Peter. Even when we were apart. It was always him. It always will be.” The look on her face, like she’s slipping into another world apart from the rest of us, makes my muscles tense up.
“It was always us,” he agrees. “You can’t fall out of a love like that. Even when we couldn’t be what the other needed, it was there. Like a current under the ice.”
She snorts. “Of course you have an ice metaphor for love. You’re such a hockey coach.”
“And you’remarryinghim,” I interrupt, because listening to this story feels like ants crawling over my chest and I can no longer stay quiet. “It’s just so funny because up until a few days ago, you didn’t even believe in marriage.” I laugh, as though it actuallyisfunny, but beneath my lightness is a serrated edge. It’s undetectable to everyone else—a Beekman family frequency. Her shoulders tense, but she doesn’t look at me right away, the absence of her shine a gust of cold air.
Have I fallen into an alternate timeline where the two ofthemdidn’tbreak up getting on a chairlift at Lutsen? The four of us had to ride up the rest of the mountain together, suspended in air with our snowboards strapped to our feet and Petey fogging up his goggles with hot tears. Am I the only person who remembers this?
Now IknowI need to talk to her before she slips away from me and falls headfirst into disaster.
No one else seems to notice my shift in energy—apart from Ethan, judging by the way he’s staring at me with renewed intensity—but internally, I’m crawling out of my skin. I can’t keep sitting around wasting time.
I stand. “Laurel, can we take a walk?”
This isn’t what she’s ever wanted, and if I can only get her away from the camp bubble, her Petey fog, I might be able to get through to her.
But at the exact moment I stand, Ethan’s facing me to say, “We should talk.”
“Why?” Laurel asks me, just as I say to Ethan, “Can it wait?”
Ethan doesn’t respond. He stares meaningfully like it should be obvious that it simplycannot wait. Apparently when you light a fifteen-year friendship on fire, people prefer a more immediate forensic evaluation of the crime scene.
My eyes dart between the two of them. I don’t want to say something incriminating to either of them, but since Laurel is my immediate concern, I direct my attention to her. “Because I want to talk to you. About wedding stuff. Like flowers or whatever.” Sure, it’s a lie, but it’s a necessary one—a fib—like when you hide your dog’s arthritis medication in crunchy Jif.
Laurel narrows her eyes. “Harlow already made flower crowns. Which I know is a little Coachella-y, but my dress doesn’t have a back, so we’re leaning into that whole vibe.”
Ethan tugs my hand, shooting a pitiful echo of seismic activity up my arm. “It’ll just take a minute, Charley.”
