And Meredith would be watching. She always was. That was what it meant to be the one who organized—you saw everything, even the parts people thought they were hiding.
CHAPTER THREE
The promenade was different early in the morning.
Meredith had slipped out before anyone else was awake. She'd wanted the air. The stillness. The version of Sea Isle that existed before the beach crowds descended and the day demanded something from her.
At seven-thirty, the concrete path belonged to joggers and a few older couples moving slowly with their coffees. The shops were still shuttered, metal gates down, the gift shops and boutiques and bike rental places all waiting for the sun to climb higher. A man in a faded Phillies cap was hosing down the sidewalk in front of a breakfast place, and the smell of bacon drifted out through the propped-open door.
She passed someone unlocking the door of a surf shop, a stack of boogie boards visible through the window. Two women in visors power-walked past her, deep in conversation about someone's daughter-in-law. A city worker emptied a trash can near one of the benches, nodded at her, moved on to the next.
Two days in, and she was already remembering why she'd loved this place. Sea Isle had been part of her summers since she was a kid. Family vacations first, then college weekends with the girls after they'd all met at Rowan University, then the early years of marriage when she and Tom would rent a small place for a week in August. The town had changed, of course. New restaurants, fancier houses, the promenade more polished than it used to be. But underneath all of it, Sea Isle was still Sea Isle. The salt air, the sound of the waves, the particular way the morning light hit the concrete path. Some things you didn't forget.
She cut off the promenade and walked the block to Cafe 4109 on Landis. The line was short this early, just a couple ahead of her, and she ordered an iced coffee for herself. The barista was a college-aged girl with a nose ring and a tattoo of a wave on her wrist, and she made small talk while the espresso machine hissed.
"Here for the week?"
"The summer, actually."
The girl's eyebrows went up. "The whole summer? Nice."
Nice. Meredith supposed it was. She'd been planning this for so long that she'd stopped thinking about whether it was nice and started thinking about whether it was possible. Whether the house would work, whether the kids would get along, whether five women and six teenagers could share a space for three months without someone ending up in the ocean.
So far, so good. But it was only day three.
She took her coffee and headed back toward the house. More people out now. A family loading beach gear into a wagon. Two teenagers on bikes weaving between parked cars. A woman in running shorts stretching against a stop sign, earbuds in, oblivious to everything around her.
By the time she turned onto 59th Street, the house was awake.
Sophie was in the kitchen when Meredith came through the door, phone pressed to her ear, pacing the length of the island.
"Okay," she was saying. "Okay, great. I'll be there. Thank you so much."
She hung up and turned, face lit in a way Meredith hadn't seen since they'd arrived.
"I got it."
Meredith set her coffee on the counter. "The Crabby Catch?"
"Hostess. I go in for training tomorrow, then I start for real later this week." Sophie was already moving, grabbing her phone, probably to text Trevor, then stopping herself. "They said I could pick up extra shifts if I want. And the tips are good, apparently, even for hostesses, because people tip on their way out and?—"
Meredith crossed to her and pulled her into a hug, the kind that Sophie usually squirmed out of but this time didn't.
"I'm proud of you," Meredith said.
"It's just a hostess job."
"It's your first real job. That matters."
Sophie pulled back, but she was smiling. "I have to figure out what to wear. They said black pants and a white shirt, but like, what kind of white shirt? There are a lot of kinds."
"We'll figure it out."
The others filtered in over the next twenty minutes, drawn by Sophie's excitement. Lori appeared from the hallway, still in her robe. Carrie came down from upstairs, hair wet from the shower. Jen wandered in from the deck, where she'd apparently been sitting with her laptop, though the screen was dark now.
Sophie told the story three more times, each version a little smoother than the last. By the third telling, she'd added details about the manager, a woman named Diane who'd been running the restaurant for fifteen years and had "a really good energy."
"What does that mean?" Brittany asked, appearing in the doorway with Ava behind her. "Good energy?"
