Chapter 18
T he next evening was warm, the kind of coastal dusk where the sky went soft and the breeze had the smell of honeysuckle and sea salt in it.
I drove the golf cart slowly down the winding side street, one hand on the wheel, the other resting on my thigh.
Sloane sat beside me in a linen blazer and pale silk tank, her legs crossed at the ankle, gold sandals glinting faintly in the fading light.
She hadn’t said much since we left the house.
“On your right,” I said, nodding toward a small corner storefront just past a florist that had been closed since five. “That’s Charlie’s bakery.”
Sloane’s head turned and took in the pale lavender awning, the freshly painted trim, the window stenciled in cursive with the name Lemondrop .
She gave a small hum, the kind you make when someone shows you a painting of their dog and you aren’ t a dog person.
“How quaint,” she said, brushing a strand of hair behind her ear. “Does she do everything by hand?”
“She does everything,” I said. “Period.”
We turned onto a smaller street, closer to the water, the low thrum of music from an open patio spilling out into the air. The sign was hand-lettered, playful, swinging gently in the breeze: Red, White, and Rosé.
It was a modest little wine bar tucked into an old converted post office, now strung with fairy lights and wrapped in ivy. It was the kind of place that didn’t take itself too seriously—which, I knew, was going to be a problem.
Sloane stepped off the cart delicately, smoothing her hem with her fingers as we walked up.
I opened the door, and we were hit with the warm scent of wood and wine and roasted garlic from the kitchen in back.
A chalkboard listed the week’s flights: Oregon Pinot, Paso Robles Cabernet, Virginia Viognier.
She stood silently in front of it for a beat too long. “American wines only?” she said, not loudly—but enough for me to catch the distaste laced under it.
I said nothing, just let it hang there.
We were seated near the window in a small booth with low light and a view of the bay. The waitress handed us menus printed on thick cardstock and adorned with small watercolor grapevines in the corners. Sloane barely glanced at hers. “California reds,” she murmured to herself. “Charming.”
I raised an eyebrow. “Something wrong with California?”
“They’re...fine,” she said with a small, practiced smile. “Just not particularly expressive. Over-oaked. Too proud of themselves.”
I fought a smile. “Sounds familiar.”
She didn’t laugh. Instead, she folded the menu and set it aside. “I’ll be fine with whatever you want.” A few months ago, I might’ve taken that as ease. Compatibility. Now it just felt like disinterest wrapped in silk.
Sloane swirled the wine in her glass slowly, lips barely touching the rim before she set it back down, with a barely discernible frown. Outside the window, the sky had gone from blush to ink, the fairy lights above the patio glowing faintly against the dark.
She hadn’t said much since our wine flight came to the table. Neither had I.
Finally, she set her glass aside, folded one leg over the other, and looked at me straight on. There was no malice in her eyes, just precision—the same cool analysis she used when redesigning a dining room or deciding whether a client’s taste was actually taste or just money dressed up in beige.
“Are you in love with her?”
I blinked. “What?”
“Charlie.” She didn’t flinch. “Are you in love with Charlie?”
The question landed like a soft slap. “That’s ridiculous—” I started. Then stopped. Ran a hand over my jaw. “It’s not even remotely an option.”
She nodded, but not like she was giving me space. Like she already knew the answer.
“I’ve known her since she was a kid. Since she had braces and refused to wear shoes and built forts out of beach towels and cried when she thought a sand dollar was broken. She’s Jack’s little sister. I’ve never?—”
“She’s not little anymore,” Sloane said, sharp but quiet. “She’s about to turn thirty. She’s not some barefoot child at the edge of the dock. She’s a woman. And you look at her like you’re drowning.”
I didn’t answer. I didn’t know how to.
Sloane leaned back, her silhouette sleek against the booth’s leather. “You’re so scared of breaking some unspoken rule between you and Jack that you can’t even see your own feelings.”
I looked away—out the window. Across the bay, a string of boats rocked softly against their moorings.
“It’s more than unspoken rules,” I said, my voice tight.
“We made a pact—many years ago. He would never look at Lily that way, and I would never look at Charlie.” My tone came out harsh, clipped, like saying it scraped something raw inside me.
Because I hated the words. And I hated the truth in them more.
Sloane didn’t respond right away. She just studied me across the table with that quiet, expensive detachment, as if she were mentally cataloguing each excuse and adding it to a shelf labeled bullshit.
I looked down at the glass in front of me, the ruby hue of the wine catching the warm low light, and remembered the exact day Jack and I made that pact.
We were sixteen. It was the spring break before junior year, and we were still mostly boys pretending to be men, high on hormones and the invincibility of freedom and late-night swims. We’d just come back from some co-ed sleepover party out near Westhampton on my family’s vacation, one where we’d both made out with girls whose names we’d barely remembered by morning.
We were swapping details over greasy bacon and Cokes in the kitchen, laughing too loud, too free.
My little sister Lily had wandered in—eleven years old, braces, skinned knees, wearing one of my old t-shirts like a dress and holding a cereal bowl half her size. And something about the way Jack looked at her—not possessive, not annoyed, but fierce —made something snap into place.
Later, when we were upstairs flopped on opposite ends of my bed, flipping through a Maxim and arguing about who had better boobs, he looked over at me and said, “You ever even think about my sister that way, I’ll kill you.”
I’d laughed. “Jesus, Jack, she’s a child.”
“She won’t be forever,” he said. “And I know how you think.”
I’d smirked at that. “Then we’re even. Because if I catch you looking at Lily wrong, I’ll castrate you with a beach shovel.”
We shook on it, like idiots. It was a solemn, juvenile pact wrapped in teenage bravado, but underneath the jokes was something real. Because it wasn’t just about the girls; it was about trust.
We told each other everything—what we did, who we did it with, how it felt, how it tasted. It was open season on stories, the more filthy and fantastic, the better. But our sisters were off-limits . Because no matter how gross or godless we got, there had to be a line that never blurred.
Sloane set her glass down. “So you were sixteen, and you made a promise that still governs your adult life.”
“It wasn’t just a promise,” I said. “It was the one thing we never questioned. Not once.”
“And now?”
Now I dreamt of her mouth. Her voice. Her thighs.
The way her hands looked when they rolled out dough, and the sound she made when she laughed with her mom.
The way her eyes narrowed when she was pissed and the way she stood like she owned her space in the kitchen even when the world was trying to shrink her down.
Now I woke up thinking about her—and went to sleep trying not to .
“I will always be loyal to Jack. He’s my brother,” I said, finally. “Even if Charlie makes it complicated.”
She was quiet. The weight of that hung in the space between us like humidity.
“And even if he could forgive me,” I added, my voice lower now, “our lives don’t line up.
I’m a partner at a firm in DC. She’s opening a bakery in a beach town six hours away.
I live in litigation and conference rooms. She lives in butter and sea salt.
It’s not a life that overlaps. It’s not something I could fit into.
And it’s not fair to ask her to fit into mine. ”
“So you’re doing the noble thing,” she said.
I shrugged.
“You’re lying to both of us,” she said softly.
I didn’t disagree.
She picked up her glass again, finally took a sip, and said nothing more. And I sat there, feeling like I’d already lost something I’d never even had the right to want.
M y bedroom back on Lemondrop Lane was dim except for the pale glow of the bedside lamp. The air between Sloane and me had settled into that dense quiet that comes not after an argument, but after the space between two people finally stretches wide enough to feel permanent.
Sloane stepped out of her sandals gingerly, placing them beside the door like she always did—tidy, deliberate, as if everything had its place, including hard conversations.
Then she sat on the edge of the bed, still half-dressed from dinner, one bare leg tucked beneath her.
I hadn’t changed yet either. My shirt was unbuttoned, sleeves rolled, and I didn’t know whether to strip down and get in bed or change in the bathroom with a plan to sleep on the sofa.
She was quiet. Then she reached for her phone. “I took a photo earlier,” she said, voice softer now. “It wasn’t really to show you, but more to see it for myself. The evidence of it was irrefutable, right there in front of me.”
I turned toward her. She tapped her screen a few times, then angled it toward me. It was the beach path: the lavender haze of the sky blooming behind the dunes, the sand cast in soft pink light, and there—at the center—were Charlie and me. We were walking side by side.
She was in that floral dress that matched the sky, her hair caught up in the breeze, head tipped toward me mid-laugh. I was turned toward her, talking. No idea we were being watched. No idea we looked like that. Like a couple. Like something whole.
I stared at it, something hot tightening behind my ribs. “She didn’t know what I was doing,” Sloane said. “She probably thought I was photographing the sunset.”
I swallowed.
“It’s a beautiful photo,” she added. “You should have it.” She airdropped it before I could answer. I watched it appear on my screen, too intimate, too real. A frozen moment I hadn’t even known I was in.
And then she said, quietly, “You look happy.”
I didn’t know what to say.
She studied me for a moment longer, and whatever hope she might’ve been holding cracked right there on her face.
“I don’t want to be with you by default,” Sloane said, her voice calm—not cold, just controlled.
“We shouldn’t be together because it’s convenient or because we don’t fight or because we make sense on paper. ”
I turned toward her, every muscle in my back wound tight. “I didn’t think that’s what this was.”
She looked at me then, really looked. And for once there was no mask, no perfectly timed smile, no curated indifference.
Just a woman sitting across from the man she’d been with for two and a half years, waiting to hear something that would make this feel less like a quiet betrayal.
“Okay,” she said. “So what is it, then?”
I didn’t speak. I didn’t have the words.
Because maybe it was convenience. Or maybe it started as something real and turned into something safe—and I’d held onto it because it was steady.
Because Sloane never asked more than I wanted to give.
Because she fit into the life I’d built without ever pushing against the walls.
Because she never really reached me, and that meant she couldn’t break me either.
She exhaled, then stood, slowly crossing the room to the dresser. Her reflection in the mirror looked regal—impossibly poised. She slid out an old Wellesley sweatshirt and pulled it over her silk tank without ceremony.
“I watched you tonight,” she said. “At dinner. On the beach. And I know that look, Fitz. The way you watched her, even when you weren’t looking at her.”
I opened my mouth. Closed it.
“You don’t have to lie to me,” she said. “You never really did. I just—kept hoping I’d be the one to get to you, that I’d crack whatever icy little fortress you’d built around yourself and you’d look at me like I was it.”
She turned to face me. “But I’ve never been it. Not really.”
I stood, heart pounding in the way it does when the thing you’ve been avoiding finally arrives and doesn’t shout—it just sits there. “Sloane,” I said. “I’m just not sure anymore.”
“Do you picture marrying me?” The question cut sharper than she intended. Maybe she wanted softness. Reassurance. But what she got was my truth.
“I can picture it,” I said, after a beat. “But I don’t know if it would make me happy.”
Her chin tipped slightly, but she didn’t flinch.
She just nodded, once, like she’d already known.
Her smile this time was sad and elegant.
And then she said it: “I don’t want to be with someone who has to imagine being happy with me.
I want someone who is. I want someone who wakes up every day and knows they’d be a fucking idiot not to marry me. ”
“Sloane—”
“We’re too old for delusions, Fitz,” she said softly. “Too old to waste time in a relationship that looks perfect on paper but feels like settling on the inside.”
The silence that followed was brutal. Not angry. Not cruel. Just true.
I looked at her. And then I thought of Charlie: Of her flour-dusted cheeks. Her stupid jokes. Her heart. Her goddamn fire.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
She nodded once. “It isn’t good enough.” The words were soft, final. “I’ll pack in the morning,” she added.
A beat passed, a lifetime inside it. “I’ll take the sofa,” I said.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” she replied, turning down the corner of the sheets. “We’ve slept in the same bed hundreds of times. One more night won’t kill us.”
But that was the moment it clicked for me. That this —the quiet, the reasonableness, the absence of grief—was exactly why it had to end. Because if you were in love with someone— truly in love—you couldn’t sleep beside them on the night it fell apart.
You wouldn’t be composed. You wouldn’t be rational. You’d be crying and messy and tearing at the sheets like maybe the bed could hold you together if your body broke first.
And she wasn’t crying. And I wasn’t broken. We got into bed like it was just any other night. And that’s how I knew, with finality, that it was never meant to be.