Chapter 2
Harper Ellis had not planned to tell the truth tonight.
Telling the truth at a birthday party was just a big downer. Birthday parties were for cake, dancing, and laughter. Nobody wanted the truth for their birthday.
She had planned to show up, drink champagne, eat Claire’s impossibly good food, and then perform that version of herself that she had been performing for thirty years.
The sharp, funny, put-together professional.
The woman who had it all figured out.
The woman who did not need anyone, not really, because needing people was a vulnerability, and vulnerability was a liability.
Harper Ellis did not carry liabilities on her balance sheet.
But Claire had said, “I don’t know who I am without a to-do list.”
And Nina had said, “I can’t feel anything.”
And then, seemingly without her permission, she had heard her own voice say that thing about eating dinner alone five nights in a row. Truth be told, she almost always ate dinner alone. Five days wasn’t her longest stretch.
Now all three of them were sitting on the dark porch with their defenses down like houses that had lost their walls during a hurricane. And Harper had no idea how to put hers back up.
She also did not feel like she wanted to, and that was an even more alarming realization.
Apparently, the wine was doing its job.
The second bottle was almost gone, and Harper was considering a third, which she didn’t normally do on a weeknight.
But turning fifty while confessing your extreme loneliness to your two best friends on a screened porch in Beaufort felt like maybe it was an exception.
“Now I want to say something,” Harper said. “And I need you both to not make this into some big deal.”
“Okay, well, that’s a promising start,” Claire said, rolling her eyes.
“I’m serious.”
“So am I. Every time somebody says, ‘Oh, don’t make this a big deal,’ it always feels like a very big deal. But please, proceed.”
Harper sucked in a breath. The salty marsh air sat on her tongue. She had never loved the Lowcountry the way that Claire and Nina did. Charleston was a city to her, a place with great restaurants and good business, and a condo with a view she rarely even looked at.
But on nights like this, on Claire’s porch with frogs making noise and the water somewhere beyond the dark, she could almost see why people wrote poems about this place. Although at night, she found it spooky.
“So Jordan called me.”
The porch went even more silent. She was pretty sure the frog paused and had his little hand cupped over his ear.
“When?” Claire asked.
“Three weeks ago.”
“Three weeks?” Nina turned in her chair. “You sat on this information for three whole weeks?”
“I didn’t sit on it. I just handled it.”
“And what does ‘handled it’ mean?” Claire asked.
“I told him I was busy and I hung up.”
“Harper!”
“What? I was busy. I had a quarterly review.”
“You always have a quarterly review,” Claire said, taking a sip of her wine.
“Quarterly means four times a year, Claire. I mean, it’s just math.”
Nina made a sound that almost sounded like a laugh, but Harper couldn’t tell in the dark.
Nina leaned back in her chair. “What did he want?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t stay on the phone long enough to find out.”
“So you panicked.” Claire didn’t say it as a question. She made a statement. An assumption.
“I don’t panic. I prioritize. I make difficult decisions. Fast.”
“You prioritized running away from the only man who ever made you happy,” Claire said, a slight edge to her voice. “He loves you, Harper. And you love him, whether you want to admit it or not.”
Harper opened her mouth to argue, but found that she really did not have anything to say because Claire was right, and the three of them knew it.
Jordan Beck was the only man who had ever gotten past Harper’s defenses. She had punished him for that by leaving.
That was a few years ago. How had so much time gone by? Time seemed to be moving faster with each passing year.
She had not had a serious relationship since then, unless you counted the relationship with her very fancy espresso machine. Although she still didn’t know how some of the buttons worked.
“He probably just wanted to talk,” Claire said gently.
“People don’t call their ex-girlfriends after years to talk.”
“Then what do they call for?”
“I don’t know. Closure, curiosity, and someone who might split the streaming password with them. Again, I don’t know.”
“Or maybe,” Nina said, “he misses you.”
Harper took an extraordinarily long sip of wine. She did not want to think about Jordan missing her.
She did not want to picture him in his workshop in Mount Pleasant, with sawdust on his jeans, that half smile he wore whenever she said something sarcastic and he chose to find it charming rather than hurtful.
Jordan built things with his hands. Bookshelves, tables, and a rocking chair he made for his mother’s birthday from reclaimed wood. He was the kind of man who measured twice and cut once, in woodworking and in life.
Harper was the kind of woman who cut first, never measured, and then pretended the uneven edges were intentional.
They had been terrible for each other.
They had been perfect for each other.
Both things were true, and that was irritating.
“Can we talk about something else?” Harper begged.
“We can,” Claire said, “but I do want it on the record that you brought him up, not us.”
“Noted,” Harper said, holding up her glass of wine and faking a toast to the air.
“And let’s also note that you’ve been thinking about him for three weeks,” Claire reiterated.
“Also noted. Moving on.”
But they did not move on, really, because that was the thing about this porch and these nights with these two particular women.
Moving on was what Harper did in boardrooms and conference calls.
But here with Claire and Nina, conversations did not move on.
They circled and settled and came back when you thought they were done with them.
“Do you remember that night that we decided to move in together?” Claire asked.
The question came out of nowhere.
“Sophomore year,” Nina said. “Your dorm room. We had been studying for that awful econ final. Professor Anglin. What an awful little man he was.”
“You weren’t studying,” Harper said. “You were eating a bag of Doritos and reading a magazine that you’d hidden inside your textbook.”
“That’s called multitasking.”
“That’s called getting a C minus.”
“Hey, it was a solid C minus,” Nina said, chuckling.
Claire tucked her feet underneath her in the way that she had been sitting since she was nineteen years old, maybe even before.
“We were in my room, and the power went out. Do y’all remember this? Like the whole building was completely black. We just sat there in the dark, and we talked for hours.”
Harper remembered.
She remembered the three of them snuggled in on Claire’s narrow dorm room bed with a flashlight propped up on a pillow.
They had talked about what they wanted their lives to look like.
Claire wanted a house with a big wraparound porch and a husband who danced with her in the kitchen.
Nina wanted to travel, cook, and have a family that ate dinner together every night.
And Harper wanted to run something. She didn’t even know what it was. She just wanted to be in charge of something big and important. She wanted to be so good at it that nobody could ignore her.
In a way, they had all gotten what they wanted, all three of them.
But it had not looked at all the way they thought it would.
“You know, sometimes I think about that night and how young and sure we were of everything that was going to happen, as if we could just will it to be so.” She paused. “I was going to be an artist, remember?”
“You were good,” Nina said. “I mean, really, really good.”
“I was fine. As I got older, I guess I got more practical. Most people can’t make a living as a painter. I realized I needed to get realistic.”
“You got married, Claire. That was the end of your dreams. Happens to most married people. You pick a person, and you put your dreams away,” Harper said matter-of-factly.
Claire looked at her sideways, a small smile pulling at the corner of her mouth. She understood Harper’s sarcastic sense of humor.
For just a moment, Harper could see the twenty-year-old Claire beneath the fifty-year-old Claire, the girl who used to stay up until two in the morning, painting in the art building and coming home smelling of turpentine.
“You know, I haven’t held a paintbrush in twenty-seven years,” Claire admitted. “Think about that. Twenty-seven years that I’ve deprived myself of doing something that I used to love.”
The number hung between them like a heavy fog.
“David always said I should write a cookbook,” Nina said quietly.
“His grandmother’s recipes, Elena’s recipes, all the food that I learned to make once I was in his family.
He said I should write it all down. That way Lucia would have it one day, but I never did. I just kept saying I would get to it.”
“Well, you still could,” Harper said. “We’re not about to enter the nursing home, Nina.”
“I know. I keep telling myself that, but you know, there’s a difference between could and will. I’ve been stuck in could for my entire adult life.”
The porch went quiet again.
The frogs had resumed their concert and seemed to have invited more frogs to their band. A breeze came off the marsh, smelling of salt and jasmine.
Harper reached into her purse.
There was no warning that she was going to do it. She did not even know herself.
Her hand found the first pen she could, her Montblanc, the one she used to sign contracts at every meeting and to move millions from one column to another in a spreadsheet.
She picked up one of Claire’s dusty rose napkins from the table, the ones nobody had really noticed, the ones Claire had changed four times.
“What are you doing?” Claire asked.
“Something impulsive, which I would like to ask each of you not to hold against me later,” she said, waving her finger at them. “I’ve had quite a bit of wine. Just remember that.”