No text in the body. Just an attachment.
My thumb hovers over the file. One tap and I’ll see it.
I put the phone down.
It’s not that I don’t want to read it. I want to so badly my fingers ache. But reading it means deciding something. Moving forward or stepping back. And right now I’m frozen in the space between, where it’s safe to pretend this isn’t happening.
Avoidance is easier because it’s what I’m good at.
The heat hitsme like a wall when I step outside. It’s not even nine o’clock and the boardwalk is already crawling with tourists—sunburned dads consulting maps like they’re navigating uncharted territory, moms slathering sunscreen on squirming toddlers, teenagers dripping ice cream onto the wooden planks.The air smells like coconut oil and salt and the funnel cakes from the stand near the pier.
Peak season. The lifeblood of Twin Waves and the bane of my existence.
Within fifteen minutes of opening, I’ve helped two families find “beach reads that aren’t too long,” recommended three romance novels to a bachelorette party looking for “something spicy” (I resisted the urge to recommend a cookbook), and talked a harried grandmother out of buying her twelve-year-old grandson anything with a shirtless man on the cover.
“Summer reading list?” I ask the next woman, who’s clutching a crumpled paper and looking desperate.
“My daughter needs three books by August fifteenth, and she’s read nothing. Nothing! We leave tomorrow, and I need to solve this today.”
I solve it in under five minutes. She looks at me like I’ve performed a miracle, which is essentially what retail bookselling feels like in August—endless chaos, sunscreen fingerprints on my counter, and the constant refrain of “Do you have that book everyone’s reading? I don’t remember the title but the cover is blue.”
If I had a dollar for every blue cover in existence, I could retire to a private island.
Caroline arrives mid-morning with iced coffees, her hair already frizzing in the humidity like it’s trying to escape her head entirely. She hands me my drink with an expectant expression that means an interrogation is coming.
“It’s a zoo out there,” she announces. “Mads looked like she was going to cry. Some woman was demanding a refund on a cover-up because it ‘didn’t look as good on the beach as it did in the store.’”
“Shocking that fluorescent lighting and high noon produce different results.”
She studies me with far too much perception for someone her age. “So? How was the forced date? Michelle’s being annoyingly mature about not sharing details, which means it was either really good or really bad.”
I could tell her the truth—that it was the most intimate, terrifying evening of my life, that I saw parts of Scott I didn’t know existed, that I’m falling for him and it scares me half to death. Instead I say, “It was illuminating.”
“That’s a word people use when they don’t want to say ‘life-changing.’ Or when they’ve been kidnapped by aliens. Either way, I’m concerned.”
“It was a lot.”
“Did you kiss?”
“Caroline.”
“That’s not a no. That’s actually a very loud not-no.”
I hide behind my coffee cup. “We didn’t kiss.”
“But you wanted to.”
I don’t respond, which is an answer.
“For what it’s worth,” she says, “the way he looked at you during that committee meeting was like you’d invented books personally and he wanted to thank you. Just don’t overthink it, okay? Sometimes the scared feeling and the right feeling are the same thing.”
Before I can respond, the bell chimes and a family tumbles in, all pink-shouldered and looking for “something to read at the beach house.” The youngest is maybe four, fingers sticky probably with popsicle residue.
I escape into helping customers. Easier than admitting Caroline might be right.
The morning blurs into a parade of increasingly creative requests—a man who wants “that thriller with the girl” which narrows it down to approximately ten thousand books, a teenager looking for “sad books that will make me cry” whichI can actually help with because I have a whole section, and a couple arguing about whether romance novels “count as real reading” while I resist the urge to ban them from the store and possibly from the state of North Carolina.
The Hensley Housewalkthrough is at two.
