"Is it good?"
"I'm not sure. It feels different. Like the words are coming from somewhere I haven't accessed in a while." She watched the jogger disappear past the jetty. "There's this guy I met at the coffee shop. Clint. He's a musician, plays guitar. We've been talking about the creative stuff, the blocks, the doubt, all of it. He thinks I should keep going with the fantasy."
"A guy at a coffee shop." Meredith's eyebrows rose. "And you're just mentioning this now?"
"It's not like that. He's just—he gets it. The thing where you're supposed to be making one thing but you can't stop making something else." She set her mug on the arm of the chair. "He invited me to his show. Thursday night at the Hard Rock."
"Are you going to go?" Meredith asked.
"Maybe." Jen shrugged.
Meredith smiled, but it was knowing rather than teasing. "You know you're going."
"I really don't."
She looked out at the water instead of at Meredith. The man with the detector was heading back the other way now, sweeping in slow arcs.
"It's been a long time since I let myself want something without knowing how it would turn out," Jen said finally. "The book, the fantasy, all of it. I've spent so long writing the safe thing, saying the safe thing, staying in my lane."
"And now?" Meredith watched her.
"Now the book is done. And I'm still here. And maybe it's time to stop waiting for certainty before I do anything."
The morning unfolded in the usual chaos.
By nine, the house was awake and loud. Coffee mugs accumulated in the sink. Someone was hunting for sunscreen. Someone else was arguing about whose turn it was to make the Wawa run. The teenagers had emerged in stages, Max first with his hair standing up in three directions, then Lily still half-asleep and looking for her phone.
"Has anyone seen my phone?" Lily asked, for the third time.
"You're holding it," Max said.
Lily looked at her hand. She was, in fact, holding her phone. "I hate you."
"Love you too."
Sophie and Brittany came down together, already dressed, talking about the beach club and free smoothies. Ethan wandered through, looking more relaxed than he had in days, and actually said good morning to Lori before grabbing a banana and heading for the deck.
"Mark the calendar," Carrie murmured.
"Don't jinx it," Lori said, but she was smiling.
Jen had showered and changed by then, restless in a way that coffee hadn't fixed. She needed to move. Needed to be somewhere that wasn't the house, a place to think without the comfortable noise of eleven people living on top of each other.
"I'm going for a walk," she announced to whoever was listening. "Might be a while."
Carrie looked up from the fruit she was cutting. "You okay?"
"Better than okay. Just need some air."
She headed out before the questions started.
The promenade was already busy with the morning crowd: families hauling wagons toward the beach, couples on bikes, a group of older women power-walking in matching visors. Jen walked against the flow, heading south toward Landis, past the ice cream shops that hadn't opened yet and the surf rental places setting out their boards.
She didn't have a destination. That was the point.
The streets off the promenade were quieter, residential blocks mixed with the occasional shop. She passed a yoga studio with a class in progress, bodies visible through the window, moving in unison, then a florist arranging buckets outside. Birds of paradise, sunflowers, purple hydrangeas.
Wax & Water sat on Pleasure Avenue near 40th, tucked between a surf shop and a place that sold nothing but wind chimes. She'd walked past it at least a dozen times since they'd arrived but had never gone in. The kind of place you noticed without entering, if you noticed record stores at all.
