‘Taylor?’
I turned. ‘Dawn?’
She squealed, embracing me. ‘How are you? God, it’s been forever since I’ve seen you.’ She looked over my shoulder. ‘Is Adam with you?’
‘Uh, no. Adam and I are no longer together.’
‘Oh.’ Her nose crinkled up. ‘I’m sorry to hear that.’
‘It’s fine, honestly. All for the best, as they say.’
‘It seems like just yesterday I was the maid of honor at your wedding. Do you remember?’
‘Of course I remember.’ Although not, I suspected, for the same reasons she did.
‘I still have the dress,’ she exclaimed. ‘In my wardrobe. Couldn’t bring myself to throw it away or donate it to the thrift store. It’s so pretty.’ She pulled a face. ‘Obviously I’ll never be able to wear it again though. I’m at least fifty pounds heavier than I was then.’
‘You look great,’ I assured her, and I meant it. She’d been too skinny back then. Rail-thin.
‘So what are you doing back here?’ she asked, then clutched my arm and squealed again. ‘Please tell me you’re moving back to Pine Harbor?’
‘Sorry, no.’
Her face fell. ‘Damn. That would have been so cool, to have you to hang out with again. We used to have so much fun, all of us together. Before… well, you know.’
‘Yes,’ I replied in a clipped tone. ‘We did. How are you, anyway? Did you become a writer, like you planned?’
‘Working on it. It’s a lot harder than you might think, actually. Writing a book. And the publishing industry is a tough nut to crack, but I’ll get there. In the meantime, I work in the library to pay the bills.’
‘You’re kidding, you’re a librarian?’
‘What’s so unbelievable about that?’
‘Nothing. It’s just, the Dawn I remember was a little… wilder than I imagine your typical librarian to be.’
‘Hey, for your information, librarians can be freaky too.’
‘Remember the night of the festival once, when we all borrowed dinghies and made it a race to row across the bay at midnight? Winner was the first one to ring the bell at the lighthouse on Sandbar Point? That was your idea, if I remember correctly.’
She looked wistful. ‘I’d forgotten about that. Remember that cop, Donald? He was so sure it was us but couldn’t prove anything.’
‘He was a miserable old guy. I don’t know what his problem was, anyway. We put the boats back where we found them.’
‘Yeah, but Cal and Adam painted faces on some of the marker buoys with glow-in-the-dark paint, remember?’
I stared at her. ‘They did?’
‘Yeah, that’s why they were the last ones back, long after the rest of us.’
‘I thought they were just drunk and rowing in circles.’
‘Nope. They switched some of the markers around too. There were some pissed-off oyster farmers the next day. My dad drilled me on whether I knew anything about it. I lied. Just like I lied when they put dish soap, food coloring and rubber duckies in the town fountain.’
I smiled. ‘God, I’d forgotten all about that.’
‘We were little shits really,’ she admitted. ‘But that’s what you get with teens in a small town. We had to find some way to amuse ourselves. The teens these days are the same. They thought it was funny to move all the books around a few months ago. Mix it all up. Took me ages to get them all back in the right places.’ She shook her head. ‘I couldn’t tell them off. We did far worse than that.’
‘You weren’t even tempted to get out?’ I asked.
