Her shoulders burned. Her lungs burned. It felt good. Pain that meant something was happening.
She swam parallel to the coastline for what felt like forever, past the lifeguard stand, past the next beach entrance, maybe four or five blocks before she finally turned back. The swells were gentle on the return, and she let herself bob over them, arms loose, catching her breath between strokes.
When she made her way back to the sand, her legs were shaky and her muscles were singing. She dropped onto her towel and lay there, chest heaving, eyes closed, face tilted toward the sun.
"Feel good?" Meredith asked.
"Yeah." Olivia didn't open her eyes. "It really did."
She'd been a professor since her early thirties, art history at a small college outside Philadelphia, specializing in nineteenth-century American painters. She loved it, the teaching and the research, the students who occasionally caught fire over the same things she did. But somewhere along the way, the job had become obligation instead of passion. Office hours, committee meetings, recommendation letters, the endless grading. She couldn't remember the last time she'd done something purely for herself.
This. This had been that.
She reached for her phone out of habit, the habit she was trying to break, the one where she checked it every few minutes as if the world couldn't wait.
Three texts from Dan. The first casual: Hope you're having fun. The second slightly less so: Call me when you get a chance? The third with an edge she could hear even through the screen: Starting to feel like you're avoiding me.
She was. She knew she was.
One text from Michael: Good morning. Hope the ocean is treating you well.
Her stomach flipped. A flutter, a lift, a charge she hadn't felt toward Dan in years. Michael knew she was married, knew it was complicated. He probably thought she was on her way out.
Maybe she was.
She looked at Dan's messages again. Starting to feel like you're avoiding me. The audacity of it almost made her laugh. He'd spent months texting another woman, pouring himself into someone else's inbox, and now he wanted to know why she wasn't calling him back?
She typed a reply: At the beach. Kids are good. Talk later.
She didn't reply to Michael. Not yet.
She set the phone face-down on the towel beside her. Her shoulders ached in that good way, muscles remembering what they used to do. The pool at home was fine, but the ocean was something else. Open water, salt, the pull of the current. Her body still knew how.
Max came jogging up from the volleyball game, sweaty and grinning. He dropped onto the corner of Lily's towel. She kicked at him until he moved.
"We won," he said. "Three games straight."
"Nobody cares."
"You're just mad because you haven't moved in two hours."
Lily didn't dignify that with a response.
Sophie arrived at The Crabby Catch ten minutes before her training shift.
She'd agonized over the outfit—black pants, white button-down, exactly what Diane had described—and then second-guessed whether the button-down was too formal, changed into a different white shirt, changed back. Brittany had finally thrown a pillow at her and told her to pick one and leave.
The restaurant was already in motion. Through the front windows, Sophie could see servers folding napkins and someone hauling a crate of produce toward the kitchen. She pushed through the door and found Diane at the hostess stand, marking up a clipboard.
"Sophie. Good." Diane set the clipboard aside. "Let's walk through everything."
The training was more involved than Sophie had expected. The iPad system for check-ins, the waitlist protocol, how to handle incomplete parties who insisted on being seated, how to smile at difficult guests without actually conceding anything. Diane covered it all with the precision of someone who'd trained dozens of new hires.
"Questions?" Diane asked, when they'd finished the basics.
"Where are the backup menus? In case I run out during a rush."
"Smart." Diane gestured down the back hallway. "Storage room, past the kitchen. Jake can show you."
