Chapter 3
Three
I ’m drowning,” Grace announces, and falls backward onto the couch, like someone auditioning for a melodrama.
A small wooden trinket box—once perched on her girlhood dresser—jabs her in the spine.
“Maybe not literally, seeing as I’m on dry land.
” She sets it beside her phone, currently on speaker. “But definitely emotionally.”
“You opened them, didn’t you?” Jenny asks, employing her signature nurturing, yet exasperated, tone.
Jenny has been Grace’s best friend since the first day of sixth grade, when they walked into homeroom wearing the same purple shirt and scrunchie.
They’ve remained inseparable—or as much as life allows—ever since.
“I told you not to go through them alone.”
“It didn’t seem this bad in my mind,” Grace mumbles, surveying the chaos she’s unpacked.
Her old retainer. Teenage diaries. Floppy disks.
Birthday cards. College essays. Rolled-up posters.
Souvenirs from every era of her life. It’s like a strange pop-up museum exhibit.
Grace: A Retrospective. “I also forgot my mother saved every shred of paper I ever touched. She was like a hoarder, but only with my memories.”
Once Adam left, Grace did everything to avoid the boxes.
Scrubbed the sink. Checked the mail. Cleaned the fridge.
Brought her laptop downstairs, hoping—then failing—to craft a single page.
Still, the stacks loomed. She started with Birdie’s belongings—the boxes Grace packed up herself a few weeks earlier—before moving on to the others.
The ones her mother had been privately packing up for years.
26
“Stop what you’re doing,” Jenny says, her backdrop a cacophony of joyful mayhem. Kids shouting. Something crashing. The baby crying. “I’m coming over. We’ll schlep everything to the basement, which is what you should have had the movers do in the first place when—”
“You don’t need to come here,” Grace interrupts, flipping through an old journal filled with her adolescent attempts at poetry. “I live two hours away. You have three children.”
In high school, Jenny—a preppy soccer star—went through a brief rebellious phase.
Blue hair. A longing to head west. For a year, she made everyone call her “Niffer”—an unnatural abbreviation of her first name, Jennifer.
Today? She lives ten minutes from their hometown in Bucks County with her husband, Eric.
Her school-age kids carry Pottery Barn backpacks.
During the holidays, she sends photo cards of her family in matching tartan. People change.
“Fine. Plan B. You come here for a few days. Stay in the spare room. Swim. Work on your book. See the kids. They miss you, and—Charlie! Stop hitting your sister with the dinosaur!” Jenny exclaims, then pulls back.
“Plus, we can celebrate your birthday on Wednesday. I’ll make pancakes. You love my pancakes.”
“It’s true.” Grace tears open the packaging tape on a new box, this one labeled Miscellaneous. No category. No date. Just memories. “You really do make the best breakfasts.”
“What was that noise?” Jenny asks, instantly suspicious. “Did you open another one?”
“I sneezed,” she says, reaching for a joke.
“Grace.”
“Look, I appreciate the offer—all your offers. But I’m not great company right now. It’s better that I’m alone.”
“Haven’t you basically been alone all summer?”
“Not if you count when Adam still lived here. Or when I visited my therapist. Or grief group.” Grace tries for a sarcastic smile. It hurts, like lifting weights after months of skipping the gym. “Plus, I saw you when you helped me pack up Mom’s house. I’m basically a socialite.”
27
“Grace, come on. It’s me. You don’t have to pretend. I’m not a stranger.” Jenny stops herself. “You can fall apart with me.”
Grace’s phone dings. She checks the screen and finds a notification from an affirmation app. Feel what you’re feeling. You’re not the same person you were yesterday. She swipes it away. “I’ll think about it.”
“Liar.”
“Probably.”
As Jenny wrangles her children, Grace lifts something new from the box.
It’s heavy and wrapped in tissue. Whatever it is, Birdie apparently believed it was worth protecting.
Piece by piece, Grace removes the paper, half expecting to find an old snow globe or figurine.
Instead, she discovers a large mason jar full of sun-bleached shells.
A lump forms in her throat. Every summer, on the last day of vacation, they made one together before heading home.
“Dear God, Birdie,” Grace whispers through a sad gasp of a laugh. “You kept this?”
“I knew it!” Jenny proclaims, then pauses. “So? What is it?”
“It’s . . . nothing.” Grace traces the lid with a fingertip. “Just old beach memories.”
Everyone has a place. For years, Sea Drift was theirs. A stretch of barrier island off the southernmost tip of New Jersey. Twelve miles long. A half mile wide. Close enough to Delaware to touch. On a map, it was so small it looked like a mistake—a smudge of ink versus a place.
It wasn’t the Jersey Shore most people probably pictured.
Everyone had Atlantic City crime dramas and bad reality TV to thank for that.
Sea Drift wasn’t glamorous. No old New England money.
No wild horses. But it was quiet. Timeless.
Saltwater taffy shops. Rickety boardwalk rides.
Decades-old bungalows that leaned from the wind.
Every August, beginning the summer after James died, Birdie rented the same two-bedroom house the week of Grace’s birthday.
It never changed. Not the springy mattresses.
Not the dusty beach decor. Not the terrible plumbing.
Each time they arrived, Birdie—dressed in 28a floppy hat and bright, breezy dress—dropped her bag, looked around, then proclaimed, “Well, Cece, looks like the only thing that’s changed since last summer is us! ”
When she was young, Birdie’s parents brought her to Sea Drift on day trips. She fell in love with it. The fudge stores. The specific way the ocean sparkled. The fact that it was an actual island, like something from the adventure books she liked to read.
When Birdie married James, they couldn’t afford a faraway honeymoon.
Upon her suggestion, they booked three nights at a Sea Drift motel instead.
Though they grew up in the same Pennsylvania town, James had never been to the island.
During that trip, he fell in love with it, too.
When they returned home, they put a jar on the dresser in their first apartment and dropped loose change into it every night.
Little by little, they promised to save for the life they wanted.
A home. A child. A family vacation by the sea.
Birdie kept her word.
As time passed, Grace’s visits dwindled.
Something always got in the way. Jobs. Adam.
The lake house. Book deadlines. Pregnancy losses.
Just life. For a while, Birdie kept renting it, even when Grace only came for a few days.
Eventually, she got the memo. The year Grace set out on her first book tour, Birdie simply let the tradition go.
“Grace,” Jenny says now, “you can’t sit there staring at your old things. Come here for a few days. You need air. And sun. And—”
“You’re making me sound like a houseplant,” Grace says, wishing she could reclaim those last few summers with her mom. “Which isn’t great, considering my track record.”
“I’m serious,” Jenny laughs. “You’ve spent all season packing up Birdie’s house, dealing with Adam, and beating yourself up about your book. You need a fresh perspective. A reset.”
“Maybe,” Grace murmurs, setting down the jar and deciding to leave it at that.
Seconds pass before either of them speaks again.
29
“So other than your old orthodontics, find anything good in there?” Jenny asks.
“Only if you count a shoebox of notes we passed senior year.”
“I’m sure that’s full of literary masterpieces to inspire you,” Jenny deadpans.
“You have no idea.” Grace continues to pick through the box’s contents—mix tapes, a knot of friendship bracelets—not sure what she hopes to find.
Maybe an instruction manual Birdie wrote on how to live once she was gone.
Instead, she pulls out her old Magic 8 Ball.
“Deliberating about prom dresses consumed months of our time.”
“That sounds like an actual vacation to me right now.”
“Tell me about it.” Grace sets the toy aside, continues to sift.
A moment later, her fingers curl around the edges of a department-store gift box, the kind Birdie used to get from the local Macy’s.
She opens it, certain she’ll find a pair of her flared teenage jeans. Instead, her hands go cold. “Oh, God.”
“What now?”
But Grace can’t speak. All she can do is stare at the photo album, and the title, Summer Memories, written in Birdie’s familiar handwriting.
Her grip tightens on the cover. She flips and is greeted by photo after photo of summers past. Birdie and toddler Grace eating swirl cones on the boardwalk.
Birdie and middle-school Grace reading paperbacks in the sand.
Birdie and preteen Grace on the Ferris wheel, arms raised.
She turns the page again and finds her sixteen-year-old self—hair kissed golden, skin gorgeously tan, that faded-blue tank she practically lived in that season—staring back at her.
“Grace?”
“I should’ve gone back. To Sea Drift.” Her voice cracks. “I was so stupid. So selfish.”
“There were reasons,” Jenny says gently. “A lot of them. Birdie knew that.”
Grace doesn’t respond. She shuts the album. When she does, something slips loose from the pages. A sand dollar. Fragile. Perfectly intact.
30
Without warning, a memory washes in.