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"Oh?" Ruby reaches for the grater and the cheese again and shreds a bit more onto the flat egg mixture that's bubbling in the pan.
"Yeah, she suggested it," Harlow says, eating the rest of her banana. "Maybe Athena and I can find a place together on the island."
"Girls," Ruby says, turning off the heat and lifting the pan to slide the second omelette onto a plate of its own. "You're both welcome to stay here. I didn't buy a five-bedroom house planning to live here alone forever. Now, I know you won'twantto live with your old mom forever, but for now, let's be each other's ports in the storm, okay?"
Ruby walks over to the table with the plates and sets them in front of her daughters. Harlow jumps up and grabs utensils and the salt and pepper shakers, then sits down next to her sister again.
"We can work out all the details," Ruby says, watching with a happy grin as her girls tuck into their omelettes with gusto. "But I think you've both been through some stuff, and being here is just a pitstop on the road to you feeling like you have some agency over your lives again."
Athena stops eating and looks up at Ruby. "You don't think we're losers, Mom?"
Ruby reaches out a hand toward each of her girls. "Not at all. I think you're humans—and relatively young ones at that. You've been through some tough stuff, and you need a re-set."
Just hearing her mother's words warms Athena from the inside. She's been feeling like a total loser just thinking of giving up her job and her apartment, but with her mother's approval, she knows that it's not the wrong thing to do.
As she demolishes her omelette, she feels a thousand times better about herself and her life choices, but then she feels a few hundred times worse again remembering that there's an unanswered message from Diego just sitting in her phone.
Harlow
"So you're not coming back?"
"I'm not coming back." Harlow is standing in the ocean up to her calves with her phone held out in front of her as she FaceTimes Dart, once her closest work friend and now someone she barely even thinks about.
"But what about your apartment?" Dart is standing on a subway platform, her short, black pixie haircut barely ruffled by the strong breeze of an oncoming train. They wait for the rumble of the train to pass through the station before carrying on with the conversation. "Are you going to sublet it?"
"I think so," Harlow says. "I don't want to give up a rent-controlled apartment in Manhattan entirely—that would be insane."
"So is moving to an island full of pirates in Florida, of all the God forsaken places," Dart says, making a face. "My grandparents live in Florida."
"Well, I'm happy here," Harlow says. "I'm going to keep working part-time from here for as long as it makes sense, and if it's not working out, then I'll quit and find something else."
"Huh," Dart says, looking unconvinced. Her full lips have been lined and filled in with a deep burgundy color today. She watches someone walk past her then returns her gaze to the screen and to Harlow's face. "Are you doing okay though? Like, in general. I think we're all a little messed up after what happened."
Harlow chews on her lower lip as a wave rolls in and washes over her bare feet, covering up her ankles before it slips back out and leaves her standing on wet sand.
"I'm okay sometimes," she says grudgingly. "I have nightmares. You?"
"Same," Dart admits. "I knew Ulysses for eight years. I miss him a lot. I think I'm going to talk to a therapist."
"Oh, you should. Definitely," Harlow says. "I have been, and it's helped a lot."
"I'm glad to hear it. But I'd be more glad to hear that you were coming back to the city."
"I can't," Harlow says, shaking her head. "Not now. But at some point. I'm just gonna ride it out here. You should come visit."
Dart gives a smug laugh and Harlow knows that there's a zero percent chance that her friend will make a trip south to the land of palm trees and Mickey Mouse.
"My train is coming," Dart says. Harlow can hear the screech of metal and the oncoming rumble of another train. "I'll call soon, okay? And don't forget that no one can actually make you wear sandals with velcro or force you to play pinochle, got it?"
Harlow laughs. "Got it, boss. Talk soon."
Dart ends the call first and the screen goes black. It takes Harlow a long minute of watching the surf to know what she wants to do next, but once she has it in her mind, it's a done deal.
She quickly Googles the Library of Congress and finds the number for the main switchboard there.
"Hello, can you please transfer me to Diego Santana?" she asks sweetly. She'd insisted that Athena show her the Instagram of the douchebag so that she could see for herself what had reeled her sister in, and yeah, she has to admit that he’s pretty hot. But every one of his recent posts (following a long break of no posts at all) screams "gym bro" to her, with him showing off his gains in tank tops, or posing with one arm around another handsome guy wearing a nearly identical polo shirt as they both hold bottles of Heineken in a bar. There’s also a new wedding photo posted, and this one fills her with the kind of rage that finally pushed her to make this call.
"This is Diego Santana," a deep voice says in her ear.
