She picks up her suitcase, and my chest goes tight. "Because I can't be responsible for your happiness. I can't be the reason you change everything. That's too much pressure, and I can't carry it."
"I'm not asking you to carry anything. I'm asking you to let me try."
"I can't."
"Why?"
"Because I'm scared, okay? I'm terrified that you'll follow me home and three months from now you'll realize you made a mistake, and I'll be the girl who ruined Logan's perfect island life."
"And I'm terrified you'll get on that plane and disappear, and I'll spend the rest of my life wondering if I let the best thing that ever happened to me walk away without a fight."
We stare at each other across the room. Her knuckles are white where she grips the suitcase handle.
"I have to go," she says quietly.
"You don't."
"I do."
"Hannah…"
"Don't bother taking me to the airport."
She walks to the door but stops with her hand on the handle. For a second, I think she's going to turn around, say something, change her mind.
Instead, Hannah opens the door and walks out.
I stand in my bedroom and listen to her footsteps on the porch, then the gravel driveway, then nothing.
The house settles into quiet. Not the comfortable quiet I'm used to, but something hollow. I walk to the kitchen, pour coffee, and take it out to the porch. Two chairs face the ocean, but only one of them matters now. The waves roll in steadily and predictably, the same as they have every morning. The same as they will tomorrow. The same as they did that first night I took Hannah to the beach.
For the first time since I moved to this island, the ocean doesn't feel like enough.
6
HANNAH
Two weeks back in the city, and I've perfected the art of going through the motions.
Wake up. Coffee. Shower. The same black slacks, the same white blouse, the same commute on the same train with the same people who never look up from their phones. My desk, my computer, my spreadsheets that somehow multiply overnight like gremlins.
I've looked at the photos on my phone so many times I could recite the timestamps.
Logan and me at the overlook, his arm around my shoulders, both of us squinting into the camera.
Eli's photo of us at Shore Thing, Logan's hand tangled in my hair while I'm mid-laugh.
The two of us at his kitchen table, plates of pasta between us.
The last photo is Friday morning. 6:32 AM. Logan asleep in his bed, hair falling across his forehead, one arm thrown overthe pillow where I'd been lying. I took it right before I got up to pack. Right before everything went to hell.
I'd rather be an idiot who tried than someone who spent the rest of his life wondering what if.
His words loop in my head during meetings, during lunch, during the endless subway rides home. Along with my own words—the ones that have been sitting in my chest like poison.
Vacation sex.
I called it vacation sex. I looked him in the eye and reduced everything we'd shared to something cheap and temporary, because I was terrified it was the opposite. Because I knew it wasn't vacation anything—it was real and huge and perfect, and I was too much of a coward to admit it.
