Chapter 4
CHAPTER FOUR
By mid-morning, the group had scattered. Some at the beach, some around town, everyone carving out their own corner of the day.
Lily was stretched out on a towel, texting, occasionally smiling at her phone.
Max had joined a pickup volleyball game down the beach, jumping for a spike, missing, laughing it off.
Ava sat a little apart, sketchbook open, working on something she kept angled away from everyone.
Meredith had a book open but wasn't reading it.
Olivia dug through her beach bag and pulled out a pair of swim goggles—not the cheap drugstore kind, but real ones, competition-grade.
She'd been on the team at Rowan, back before Dan and the twins and everything that came after.
She still swam laps at the community pool when she could find the time, which wasn't often enough.
But this was different. This was the ocean.
She stood, brushed sand off her legs, and pulled her hair back into a tight ponytail.
"Going in?" Meredith asked.
"Going to swim."
She walked toward the shoreline without waiting for a response. She didn't stop at the shallows. Didn't ease in. She waded until the water hit her thighs, then dove under and started swimming—real swimming, with form and purpose, arms slicing through the water in clean strokes.
The cold hit her like a reset. She surfaced, adjusted her goggles, and kept going, out past the breakers, into the deep blue where the swells lifted her up and set her back down.
Her shoulders burned. Her lungs burned. It felt good. Pain that meant something was happening.
She swam parallel to the coastline for what felt like forever, past the lifeguard stand, past the next beach entrance, maybe four or five blocks before she finally turned back. The swells were gentle on the return, and she let herself bob over them, arms loose, catching her breath between strokes.
When she made her way back to the sand, her legs were shaky and her muscles were singing. She dropped onto her towel and lay there, chest heaving, eyes closed, face tilted toward the sun.
"Feel good?" Meredith asked.
"Yeah." Olivia didn't open her eyes. "It really did."
She'd been a professor since her early thirties, art history at a small college outside Philadelphia, specializing in nineteenth-century American painters.
She loved it, the teaching and the research, the students who occasionally caught fire over the same things she did.
But somewhere along the way, the job had become obligation instead of passion.
Office hours, committee meetings, recommendation letters, the endless grading.
She couldn't remember the last time she'd done something purely for herself.
This. This had been that.
She reached for her phone out of habit, the habit she was trying to break, the one where she checked it every few minutes as if the world couldn't wait.
Three texts from Dan. The first casual: Hope you're having fun. The second slightly less so: Call me when you get a chance? The third with an edge she could hear even through the screen: Starting to feel like you're avoiding me.
She was. She knew she was.
One text from Michael: Good morning. Hope the ocean is treating you well.
Her stomach flipped. A flutter, a lift, a charge she hadn't felt toward Dan in years. Michael knew she was married, knew it was complicated. He probably thought she was on her way out.
Maybe she was.
She looked at Dan's messages again. Starting to feel like you're avoiding me. The audacity of it almost made her laugh. He'd spent months texting another woman, pouring himself into someone else's inbox, and now he wanted to know why she wasn't calling him back?
She typed a reply: At the beach. Kids are good. Talk later.
She didn't reply to Michael. Not yet.
She set the phone face-down on the towel beside her. Her shoulders ached in that good way, muscles remembering what they used to do. The pool at home was fine, but the ocean was something else. Open water, salt, the pull of the current. Her body still knew how.
Max came jogging up from the volleyball game, sweaty and grinning. He dropped onto the corner of Lily's towel. She kicked at him until he moved.
"We won," he said. "Three games straight."
"Nobody cares."
"You're just mad because you haven't moved in two hours."
Lily didn't dignify that with a response.
Sophie arrived at The Crabby Catch ten minutes before her training shift.
She'd agonized over the outfit—black pants, white button-down, exactly what Diane had described—and then second-guessed whether the button-down was too formal, changed into a different white shirt, changed back. Brittany had finally thrown a pillow at her and told her to pick one and leave.
The restaurant was already in motion. Through the front windows, Sophie could see servers folding napkins and someone hauling a crate of produce toward the kitchen. She pushed through the door and found Diane at the hostess stand, marking up a clipboard.
"Sophie. Good." Diane set the clipboard aside. "Let's walk through everything."
The training was more involved than Sophie had expected.
The iPad system for check-ins, the waitlist protocol, how to handle incomplete parties who insisted on being seated, how to smile at difficult guests without actually conceding anything.
Diane covered it all with the precision of someone who'd trained dozens of new hires.
"Questions?" Diane asked, when they'd finished the basics.
"Where are the backup menus? In case I run out during a rush."
"Smart." Diane gestured down the back hallway. "Storage room, past the kitchen. Jake can show you."
She flagged down a guy who'd just finished taking an order at a nearby table. He tucked his notepad into his apron and walked over. Sandy-blond hair, a small scar through one eyebrow, moving like someone who'd worked here long enough to know every shortcut.
"Jake, this is Sophie. New hostess. Can you show her where the supplies are?"
"Yeah, sure." He wiped his hands on his apron. "Follow me."
Sophie followed him through the dining room, past the kitchen door where someone was yelling about shrimp, and into a narrow hallway lined with metal shelving.
"Menus here," Jake said, pointing. "Napkins, tablecloths, candles there. Extra silverware in that bin." He gestured to a locked cabinet at the end. "That's liquor. You won't touch it."
"Thanks." Sophie grabbed a stack of menus.
"No problem." He turned to go then paused. "You here all summer?"
"Yeah. My mom rented a house with friends. Big group of us on 59th."
"Nice. I'm here every summer. Grandparents live year-round, so I've been coming down since I was a kid. Started bussing at fourteen. Now I'm saving up for recording equipment." He rubbed the back of his neck. "Music stuff. Probably sounds dumb."
"It doesn't."
He looked at her for a second, like he was deciding whether she meant it. "Anyway. Diane's demanding, but fair. You'll be fine."
He headed back to the dining room, and Sophie returned to the hostess stand, sliding the menus into the basket. Checking through the reservation system, she heard the front door open. Ethan walked in.
His arrival surprised her. He looked like he hadn't expected to be there either, shoulders drawn up, hands in his pockets, eyes looking for somewhere else to land.
"Hey," Sophie said. "What are you doing here?"
"Callback." He crossed his arms, uncrossed them. "Busboy."
"Ethan, that's great."
"It's clearing plates." He shrugged.
"It's a paycheck."
His expression loosened. Not a smile, but close.
Diane appeared from the back. "Ethan? You're the eleven o'clock?"
"Yeah."
"Come on back. We'll talk in the office."
He followed her to the bar area. Sophie turned to the iPad. Jake passed by with a tray of drinks, heading for the patio.
"Friend of yours?" he asked.
"Sort of. Family friends. Our moms are friends. We're all staying in the same house."
"Ah." He looked back at the office door. "He seems nervous."
"He's been applying since we got here. Starting to get in his head about it."
Jake nodded. "He'll get it. Diane likes people who show up early."
He walked off toward the patio.
Her phone buzzed. Trevor.
Thinking about you. How's the first day?
She typed back: Learning a lot. Call you tonight?
Can't wait.
She slid it back into her bag.
Trevor was an hour and a half away. Steady, uncomplicated, exactly what she'd wanted when she'd agreed to spend the summer apart. But he was also texts and calls and a face on a screen, held in her hand instead of standing next to her.
On the patio, Jake was taking an order, leaning in with a grin that made the table laugh. Recording equipment. Music stuff. The scar through his eyebrow.
Sophie turned back to the reservation screen. Opened the next hour's bookings. Focused.
Then Ethan emerged from the back, face giving nothing away.
"Well?"
"I start Thursday." He didn't quite smile, but his shoulders dropped an inch.
"That's amazing."
"It's clearing plates," he said, but he was almost smiling.
"It's a start." She punched his arm. "Your mom's going to be thrilled."
For a second, it looked like he might let himself feel it. Then he looked away. "Yeah. I guess."
He left through the front door, and Sophie turned to her station. Ten minutes until her first real shift. Menus to organize, a system to master, a whole summer stretching ahead.
She was ready.
The coffee shop on Landis was called Driftwood Coffee, and Jen had claimed a table by the window with her laptop and a determination to actually work.
An iced latte sweated beside her laptop, and she'd already eaten half of the blueberry scone she'd grabbed at the counter. If she was going to take up space for hours, she might as well contribute to the local economy.