CHAPTER ONE
Meredith had told them it was nice, which was true—just not the whole truth.
What she hadn't mentioned was the upgrade. The original rental had fallen through in April. Meredith had found this one instead: oceanfront on 59th Street, a newer beach house with cream vinyl siding, three stacked decks facing the water, a rooftop terrace with an outdoor kitchen and built-in bar, a private pool tucked along the side of the house with a hot tub beside it, another hot tub on the rooftop, a ground-floor game room with a pool table and foosball. She'd paid the difference herself without a word to anyone. A place like this in Sea Isle City in June didn't come cheap.
Meredith stood at the railing of the rooftop terrace and looked straight out at the ocean. From up here you could see the whole stretch of it—the white break of the waves, the long flat line of the horizon, the beach still packed with umbrellas and chairs all the way to the water's edge. The air was warm and salt-heavy, settling on your skin within a minute of being outside.
She'd told her husband, Tom, obviously, and he'd said, "Whatever you think"—which was enough. She had not told the other women. Partly because it wasn't relevant, and partly because Meredith had always preferred to let things arrive before she explained them.
She could already tell it had worked.
"Mom." Sophie appeared in the doorway behind her, phone pressed to her collarbone, her signal that she was mid-conversation and didn't want to be interrupted. "Can I claim the bedroom with the double windows? The one facing the street side?"
"We're doing rooms when everyone gets here."
"I just want to call it."
"That's not how this works."
She disappeared back inside, and Meredith could hear her footsteps on the stairs and then Trevor's voice carrying faintly from the phone as Sophie found a corner to finish her conversation. Trevor was a good kid. Safe, predictable. Meredith wasn't worried about Trevor.
Meredith was more worried about Sophie spending the entire summer with one foot back home.
She turned away from the ocean, taking in the street side. Below, 59th Street was filling up—people hauling wagons of beach gear, a couple of bikes cruising past, kids in swim trunks cutting through the alley between houses with a boogie board tucked under each arm. Sea Isle in June had its own energy—not yet the full crush of July, but enough that you could feel the season ahead of you. A woman in a wide sun hat was power-walking with a coffee in one hand and a leash wrapped around the other, connected to a golden retriever doing its best to move in the same direction. From somewhere two houses over came the smell of someone firing up a grill.
All summer, Meredith thought. Let's see what we do with all summer.
They'd been talking about it for years—a whole summer at the shore, all of them together, the way they used to do long weekends in their twenties before mortgages and marriages and kids made everything harder to schedule. Back when they were just five girls who'd met freshman year at Rowan and didn't know yet how much they'd need each other.
She went downstairs to finish unpacking and got distracted by the living area, which made her pause at the threshold. Floor-to-ceiling windows ran the length of the ocean side, and beyond them was the beach and then nothing but water—wide and blue and close enough that you could track the individual waves. The kitchen flowed into it without a seam, the kind of open-concept layout that real estate listings called seamless and that actually was, for once. Quartz countertops, a six-burner gas range, a farmhouse sink deep enough to wash a baking sheet standing upright. She opened the cabinets one by one out of professional habit—real estate had made her incapable of entering a kitchen without doing inventory—and found them fully stocked. Not the usual mismatched rental hodgepodge but actual sets: Crate and Barrel dishes, wine glasses that weren't plastic. The hall closet, checked on a hunch, held White Company linens. She closed the last door and exhaled.
She pulled out her phone and texted Tom a photo of the kitchen.
He wrote back thirty seconds later: You're never coming home, are you?
She smiled and put her phone away.
The others arrived in waves over the next hour—cars double-parked, bags hauled up the front steps, teenagers scattering in four directions before the engines were even off. By the time the last bag was through the front door, the house was loud.
Carrie was in the kitchen, reorganizing the cabinet she'd already reorganized once, moving the glasses Meredith had put away to a lower shelf she found more logical. Her daughters were gone. Brittany was upstairs, Ava somewhere with her camera. Lori was on the middle deck with a tray of iced coffees from Shorebreak, calling out to Ethan to grab the cooler from the car. He ignored her. Jen had taken a corner of the living room to drop her things and was at the windows, staring at the ocean like she was trying to decide if it was real. Olivia's twins had located the Bluetooth speaker and were arguing over whose phone to connect; Olivia herself stood at the bottom of the staircase with a duffel bag over each shoulder, reading a text, then reading it again.
"Rooms," Meredith said from the kitchen doorway. "We need to do rooms before anyone unpacks anywhere."
"I already called the one with the double windows," Sophie said from somewhere upstairs.
Meredith leaned against the doorframe. "Calling it doesn't count."
"I know. I'm just saying."
Lori came in from the deck, coffee tray still in hand. "This house, Meredith. I need you to know that I almost cried pulling up."
"You did not almost cry," Carrie said, eyes on the cabinet.
"I teared up a little. The rooftop alone?—"
"Nobody is going to the rooftop until we do rooms," Meredith said.
Jen raised her hand. "I'd like to formally request a single."
