Chapter 9 #3
Claire decided to sleep on the pullout couch with her sketchbook beside her so she could draw the view of the restaurant patio from memory.
Harper was on one of the beds, wearing the plush hotel bathrobe, texting someone she refused to identify, but it was obviously Jordan, based on how she kept angling her phone away from everyone.
Nina was on the other bed, propped up against the headboard.
For the first time in a year and a half, she wasn’t thinking about going home.
This was the thing she’d been the most afraid of.
Not the trip, not even the distance, not even leaving Lucia with Elena.
She’d been afraid that she would get here and want to stay, that she would find out there was a version of her that existed beyond her little cottage on Edisto and David’s boots by the door, that there might be a version of her that still wanted things, that wanted to eat dinner on a patio watching mountains go purple, that wanted to walk through a city she didn’t know, that wanted to lie on a hotel bed at midnight listening to her best friends talk instead of sitting in her home and suffocating from the fog of grief.
She wanted tomorrow, and that was new.
For almost two years, tomorrow had been something she just had to get through. It had been a series of hours between waking up on the wrong side of the bed and falling back asleep.
Now she was lying in a hotel in Asheville with her two best friends, and she actually wanted to know what came next. She wanted to wake up and eat breakfast at a place they hadn’t found yet and walk down a street she’d never seen. She wanted to be alive, not just surviving, but alive.
The feeling was so unfamiliar to her that it took a moment to name it. It sat on her chest like a bird that had been in a cage so long, it didn’t trust what to do with an open door.
Anticipation. That’s what it was. She was looking forward to something.
“Nina?” Claire said from the pullout sofa. She was lying on her stomach with her sketchbook open, a pencil in her hand, and looked like she was back in middle school. “You’re smiling.”
“Am I?”
“Yeah, you’re lying there smiling at the ceiling like it told you a joke.”
“I guess I’m just… well, I’m happy,” she said it carefully, testing the word to see if it felt right. “I think I’m happy right now.”
Claire stopped drawing. Harper looked up from her phone.
“Yeah?” Claire said.
“Yeah.” Nina kept her eyes on the ceiling. “It actually feels a little different than I remembered. It’s not a big loud thing. It’s just this, lying here, being with you two, knowing there’s a tomorrow that I’m actually looking forward to.”
Claire put her pencil down. Harper put her phone down. Nobody said anything for a moment.
“David would be so glad,” Claire said. “He would be so, so glad.”
“He would be jealous,” Nina said. “You know he always wanted to go to Asheville. He had a whole list of restaurants, and he kept adding to it. I think that list is still on the fridge at home under that palm tree magnet.”
“Well, we should go to one of his restaurants tomorrow,” Harper said.
Nina looked at her. “Really?”
“Pick the one he wanted to go to most. We’ll have lunch there.”
Nina picked up her phone and scrolled until she found the photo she had taken months ago of his list, still pinned to her fridge, his handwriting slanting upward.
There were seven restaurants.
He’d circled one of them twice and drawn a star next to it, some barbecue place on the south side.
“This one,” she said, holding up the phone.
“Well, then that’s where we’re going,” Claire said.
Nina put her phone on the nightstand. She pulled the covers up. She listened to Claire’s pencil scratching and Harper’s phone buzzing with a man’s texts that she was trying to learn to let back in.
Outside the hotel window, Asheville hummed, and the mountains stood in the dark, waiting, patient. And nobody knew that a woman in Room 214 was looking forward to tomorrow for the first time in a long time.
Nina closed her eyes. She didn’t dream about David or that awful day he left.
She dreamed about a road she hadn’t driven yet, stretching out ahead of her. She slept through the night, the whole night.
No waking up at 3 a.m. to reach for a body that wasn’t there. No staring at the ceiling fan. No lying on the wrong side of the bed.
When she woke up, the mountains were pink with sunrise, and Claire was already dressed. She was holding three coffees somehow, and Harper was pretending that she hadn’t been up since 6 a.m., texting Jordan.
And Nina thought, Yes, I want more of this.
She got dressed and drank her coffee. She told Claire about the barbecue place, and they checked out of the hotel and got into the car.
The drive home later today was five hours long, and Nina was in absolutely no rush to get there.
Yes, it was crazy that they had come just to stay one night, but they would spend the whole day meandering around Asheville before hitting the road home. And even though it was stressful and crazy, she was thankful to be doing it all with her best friends.