Chapter 3
Maggie couldn’t lie. She was grateful that she hadn’t been holding a cup of coffee. No breakfast plate in her grip. If she had even been clutching a fork, she might have stabbed the table when she saw Mac and Robyn enter through the Serendipity House front door.
The house erupted in cheers when the latecomers arrived, but Maggie’s world went silent the second she and Mac finally locked eyes. Sound dropped out, like in a Nicholas Sparks adaptation.
It was Mac.
Her Mac, exactly like a memory. His blond hair poking out from under a backward baseball cap. His signature navy sweatshirt, perfectly oversize.
The same sweatshirt Maggie had worn one entire summer.
She gave him a half wave, mouthed “Hello” from across the kitchen.
He smiled back, green eyes shining right at her soul.
“Hey, M,” Mac said aloud. Their mutual nickname. “Welcome home.”
Butterflies flew from Maggie’s toes to her heart, rising with the picture of Mac, seven summers ago in this very beach house. The mattress upstairs, the view from the window a direct shot at the stars. How it had felt when Mac’s tongue dipped past her teeth. Holding hands on the moonlit beach, sneaking out for a midnight adventure of jumping off the lifeguard chair. Falling onto each other, sand on their backs, in their hair. They didn’t care.
Was he feeling the same rush now? His mind filling with the same flashbacks?
Did any of it even matter, considering the stranger who’d walked in beside him?
Poised, petite, with a Prada raffia tote bag at the crease of her elbow. Mac led the introductions. “Maggie, it’s great to see you. This is my girlfriend, Robyn.”
His girlfriend.
Maggie felt like she might be sick as she extended her hand to meet Robyn’s. She looked like all the girls Maggie had worked with in LA. Designer labels even though they all made ten dollars per hour. Perfect shoes and suspiciously straight noses. Maggie hated how insecure this newcomer instantly made her feel.
“Nice to meet you,” she said, relieved when her voice didn’t shake.
“Pleasure’s all mine,” Robyn replied, voice as honeyed as her hair was blond. She lifted her sunglasses from the bridge of her nose to her perfectly styled head. “This place is adorable! So sorry we’re late, but I brought a case of Dom in apology. What do you say? Shall we start with a round of mimosas?”
“Perfect idea, babe,” Mac said, putting his arm around Robyn, and Maggie tasted vomit in her throat.
She needed to get out of there, fast. She glanced at her phone’s clock, remembering Brenna’s chore chart for the day. “Bren, didn’t you say something about the grocery order arriving at the dock?”
“I’ve trained you well!” Brenna said. “Let’s get a move on, roomies.”
Relief came in the form of a wagon and the ten-minute walk from the rental to the Ocean Beach dock. In the end, Maggie had been in the same air as Mac and his gorgeous new girlfriend for a mere two minutes, but it was more than enough.
What had she been thinking?
It wasn’t so much that Maggie had been expecting Mac to be single just because she had deigned to move back home. He’d had other girlfriends earlier in high school, camp crushes or hookups from sports programs in the neighboring towns. From what she had deduced from his social media pages during college, after their breakup, Mac’s romantic life at UVA continued in much the same fashion. Why would adulthood be any different? At some point he’d deactivated any social media account through which Maggie might have tracked his love life, but it didn’t matter.
Logically, her history with Mac was exactly that: history. They were a classic senior year coupling, best friends exploring boundaries like so many do by the end of their high school days. Emotions running rampant, hormones exploding, graduation around the corner. It’s only natural that you start to make out with your friends.
After the Valentine’s Day dance floor pushed their bodies together, Mac and Maggie’s romance seemed inevitable. It felt easy: best friends turned into a second semester fling, followed by a summer of filling the space by each other’s sides. Falling in what felt like an entry-level course on love. Mac and Maggie had always had similar personalities—both loved to laugh, to tell stories and compete for the punch line, to make plans. Double-header reservations were their date night trademark.
It was fun for a while, but of course it didn’t last. After a strained two semesters of long distance between NYU and UVA, a fizzling due to geographical distance, Maggie called it off before she moved to California for good. It was cleaner this way. She’d start at a new school, with a new slate. Like a simple “Undo” function on Microsoft Word, she could revert Mac back to the friend category before any major disasters.
And yet.
What was it about being home that made thoughts of Mac so sweet? That made her crave to see how their relationship might have bloomed, if she hadn’t plucked the bud by moving so soon?
Would they be sharing that queen bedroom upstairs?
Would a diamond ring be wrapped around her finger?
Could they have been so much more?
This Ocean Beach weekend was going to be a lot more complicated than she’d thought.
Now, walking down Surf Road with Brenna and Quinn by her side, Maggie inhaled deeply and tried again to pivot. She took in the sandy streets, the cloudless sky, the way the sun felt like a spotlight shining on her messy ponytail. The timing was ironic: she had pulled up these same Ocean Beach streets on Google Maps just months ago for a writing project, but she was reluctant, embarrassed a bit, to bring it up now. To tell her friends what her screenplay had been about, what had happened after.
Instead, Maggie traded smiles with strangers who were similarly assigned to the morning chores. Passersby with coffee travel trays and bags of bagels, or stacks of chairs headed to stake a claim on the shore. Prime beach real estate a coveted prize, worth the early wake-up. They spied a schoolyard, and then a small chapel as they made their way down Midway Walk. Ocean Beach was a tiny village with no cars, just bicyclists and beach lovers in lockstep with the beating heart of a town.
With each step of her own, Maggie took stock of her social standing. Liz was avoiding her like the plague, poorly concealed anger practically painted on her cheekbones. Brenna and Quinn had kept Robyn a secret, but Maggie didn’t want to ask them why. Friday night had been a kickoff game of catch-up, and Maggie had done her best to remember the rules, but it was obvious that she didn’t know the new jokes, the new stories and references. She laughed along when she could, trying not to curse her impulsive self, the past Maggie who had paved the way for her to be here in the first place. She wanted to get off on the right foot, but her shoes all seemed too small. Mac had always been a safe spot, her most recent home base, but now he had his arm around Robyn.
Where did Maggie belong?
Gossiping voices snapped her out of her spiral. Quinn and Brenna were moving at rapid fire, their words outpacing their footsteps as their trio inched toward the Ocean Beach town square. They were talking about Robyn.
“Can you believe she wore a white dress?”
“I don’t think Mac told her it was an engagement. Just that it was a family dinner or something.”
“That would be a weird detail to leave out.”
“Because Mac is such a great communicator these days?”
“I just think it would have come up. Oh my god, do you think she’ll have to be a bridesmaid?”
“Bridesmaids are antiquated.”
“Do you think we’ll get to be bridesmaids?”
“Bridesmaids are antiquated,” Quinn simply repeated.
“I hope I’m a bridesmaid,” Brenna said. “Maybe we should bring Liz back a little treat. A congratulatory signal. Some chocolate chip muffins or bagels or something. But what if she’s on a wedding diet? And we’re just throwing carbs in her face. Shoot, maybe an iced coffee, then? Nonfat milk? Black?”
“Brenna?”
“Yes?”
“Please?”
“Yes?”
“Stop.”
Brenna and Quinn went back and forth and Maggie half listened, trying and failing not to focus on the fact that once upon a time, Liz had asked Maggie to someday be her maid of honor. Her “Mags of honor,” they’d said. It had been a premature fantasy, a nice hypothetical. A cafeteria conversation between seventeen-year-old girls over harvest cheddar Sun Chips. But Maggie remembered it still.
She was home, but so much had changed in her wake.
She swallowed and opened her Notes app:
To be a Maid of Honor, one must be made of honor. Are you a bridesmaid or just a broken promise?
“Whatcha typing over there?” Brenna asked when she saw Maggie with her phone.
“Thought you said you were done with writing,” Quinn piped in.
“It’s nothing,” Maggie said quickly, putting her phone away.
“Perhaps the smell of dried beer and salt water just screams ‘inspiration,’?” Quinn said with a laugh.
“Just feels good to write, I guess.” Maggie shrugged, surprised by her own honesty.
Brenna softened. “Then that’s probably a sign to keep writing.”
“Maybe,” Maggie said, though she wasn’t so sure. She had spent the length of the road trip rationalizing her decision to quit. Not just her job, but the industry entirely. Movies, screenwriting, all of it. She was done, she had said. It was over.
Maggie had given it her best, but her best wasn’t good enough.
It only took one morning with Kurt for her to realize that she had done her math all wrong. Two years as his assistant wasn’t learning experience. Three years studying screenwriting at UCLA wasn’t preparation. A lifetime of loving cinema wasn’t career manifestation.
It was simply denial on a cosmic scale.
A sudden horn blare was a welcome distraction.
“Ferry’s here!” Maggie called out, pointing toward the dock.
“About time, I’m famished.” Quinn led the charge to where a small crowd had gathered to greet the arriving freight ferry, loaded with boxes of groceries and cases of alcohol. The Ocean Beach Trading market was notoriously overpriced, only good for emergency purchases like bags of ice or sliced American cheese or salsa. To bulk up affordably and properly to feed a group of oft-inebriated twenty-five-year-olds? A grocery order by ferry was all but mandatory.
Maggie always got a kick out of tradition, out of groups of people doing the same thing all together. Singing an alma mater at a football game, cheering at a big city marathon. It was no surprise that a simple morning task like collecting bags of burger buns and patty meats and liters of soda now sparked a smile on her face. There was beauty in routine, in an island’s traditions.
So when Maggie caught that once-too-familiar whiff of cinnamon mixed with sunscreen, when she heard a familiar voice call her name, it was a good thing that a large smile was still plastered on her face.
Because if she hadn’t been so caught up in the local charm, she might have screamed.
Ty was here.
Two bags of groceries in his arms. A dark blue wagon to transport them.
Maggie gulped. Ty Bandera was here?
Maybe it was a trick of the sunshine, the way the light danced along Ocean Beach’s town square, the way the music from the Sandbar had started playing right as Maggie met Ty’s eyes, but there was something about the moment that felt like a movie. The very thing she swore that she would quit.
Which is exactly why Maggie turned and ran.
“Who was that?” Brenna whisper-shouted, struggling to keep up with Maggie’s new pace.
“Nobody,” Maggie insisted, but even Quinn and Brenna weren’t blind to the blush spreading from her ears.
“Well for a nobody, he looks pretty good.”
“Yeah, can we get an introduction to this nobody? Maybe a phone number?”
“He just looked a lot like someone I knew back at my first job in LA.”
“It sure seemed like he knew you,” Brenna said. “Think he said your name.”
“Why are we running?” Quinn huffed.
“It’s a long story.” Maggie grimaced. She had moved home to avoid LA, to erase the memories.
The last thing she needed was her former and annoyingly competitive colleague Ty showing up and reminding her of the past.
Or worse, threatening to expose the truth from which she was running.
When they’d made it safely out of town, Maggie let herself take a breath. Brenna and Quinn stared at her with wide eyes and open mouths. “Sorry, guys,” Maggie said. “I’m not sure what just happened. Too much sun, I guess. Do we have all the bags?”
Brenna pulled the wagon to the side of the road, shifting her focus to their errand. The girls cross-referenced the boxes of snacks and supplies with the receipt and order inventory Brenna had preprinted and pulled from her purse.
Then a brown bag caught Maggie’s attention.
“Who added MM’s to the list?” Maggie asked, hoping her voice sounded even, calm.
“A last-minute addition from our dear Mac, I believe,” Brenna said. “Oh god, they’re probably melting in the sun, though. Let’s get a move on, ladies. I need a mimosa and a spot on the beach.”
“Sounds good to me,” Maggie said with a forced swallow. In reality, her feet felt like concrete.
Even a thousand miles away from this beach, MM’s had still tasted like senior year at East Meadow to Maggie. Ditching last period and driving in Mac’s car, buying chocolate at the local 7-Eleven and listening to classic rock in the parking lot. Here? She was helpless against the onslaught of memories.
Fingers coated in candy, laughter on their tongues.
MM’s. A code word for Mac to cut class, to bring the car around.
MM’s.
Maggie and Mac.
Their nickname, their past.
Was Mac feeling as reminiscent as she was?