The retirement plan. Him home all the time. She'd touched on it at the beach. But they were waiting for more.
"We've been married for twenty-three years. And I love him. I do." Her voice was steady, but there was something she wasn't letting all the way out. "But we've always had space. Work, kids, separate rhythms. I don't know what we are without that."
"And that scares you," Jen said.
"No. I don't know. Maybe."
She looked down at her hands. Put the mask back on.
"It's not like what you're all dealing with. It's fine. I'm being dramatic."
The others didn't push. They knew her. She wasn't ready to go further.
But she'd said more than she meant to. And Meredith knew it, even as she signaled for the check.
The promenade had emptied out, the dinner crowds thinned to couples and the occasional group of teenagers with places to be.
They spilled out of La Finestra arm in arm, heels in hands by the second block. The night air had cooled, touched with the faint char of someone's grill. The ocean was right there beyond the dunes, dark and steady, the sound of the waves a constant underneath everything else.
Someone laughed at nothing. Someone else joined.
"We're disasters," Carrie said.
"Complete disasters," Lori agreed.
"We're fine," Jen said.
"We're not fine," Olivia countered.
"We're something," Meredith said.
They walked. Past the ice cream shops with their late-night lines and the quiet houses, the ocean somewhere beyond them, audible but unseen.
The house came into view at the end of 59th Street. Lit up from inside, every window bright. Voices carried through the screens. Lily's laugh, the muffled thump of music, Max yelling something that might have been "That doesn't count!"
They paused where the sidewalk met the yard. Looked at each other.
Then they went inside, peeling off one by one. Someone headed for the kitchen for water. Someone else for the bathroom. Someone straight upstairs to bed, heels still in hand, not bothering to say goodnight.
CHAPTER FOUR
By mid-morning, the group had scattered. Some at the beach, some around town, everyone carving out their own corner of the day.
Lily was stretched out on a towel, texting, occasionally smiling at her phone. Max had joined a pickup volleyball game down the beach, jumping for a spike, missing, laughing it off. Ava sat a little apart, sketchbook open, working on something she kept angled away from everyone. Meredith had a book open but wasn't reading it.
Olivia dug through her beach bag and pulled out a pair of swim goggles—not the cheap drugstore kind, but real ones, competition-grade. She'd been on the team at Rowan, back before Dan and the twins and everything that came after. She still swam laps at the community pool when she could find the time, which wasn't often enough.
But this was different. This was the ocean.
She stood, brushed sand off her legs, and pulled her hair back into a tight ponytail.
"Going in?" Meredith asked.
"Going to swim."
She walked toward the shoreline without waiting for a response. She didn't stop at the shallows. Didn't ease in. She waded until the water hit her thighs, then dove under and started swimming—real swimming, with form and purpose, arms slicing through the water in clean strokes.
The cold hit her like a reset. She surfaced, adjusted her goggles, and kept going, out past the breakers, into the deep blue where the swells lifted her up and set her back down.
