“David would be so glad,” Claire said. “He would be so, so glad.”
“He would be jealous,” Nina said. “You know he always wanted to go to Asheville. He had a whole list of restaurants, and he kept adding to it. I think that list is still on the fridge at home under that palm tree magnet.”
“Well, we should go to one of his restaurants tomorrow,” Harper said.
Nina looked at her. “Really?”
“Pick the one he wanted to go to most. We’ll have lunch there.”
Nina picked up her phone and scrolled until she found the photo she had taken months ago of his list, still pinned to her fridge, his handwriting slanting upward.
There were seven restaurants.
He’d circled one of them twice and drawn a star next to it, some barbecue place on the south side.
“This one,” she said, holding up the phone.
“Well, then that’s where we’re going,” Claire said.
Nina put her phone on the nightstand. She pulled the covers up. She listened to Claire’s pencil scratching and Harper’s phone buzzing with a man’s texts that she was trying to learn to let back in.
Outside the hotel window, Asheville hummed, and the mountains stood in the dark, waiting, patient. And nobody knew that a woman in Room 214 was looking forward to tomorrow for the first time in a long time.
Nina closed her eyes. She didn’t dream about David or that awful day he left.
She dreamed about a road she hadn’t driven yet, stretching out ahead of her. She slept through the night, the whole night.
No waking up at 3 a.m. to reach for a body that wasn’t there. No staring at the ceiling fan. No lying on the wrong side of the bed.
When she woke up, the mountains were pink with sunrise, and Claire was already dressed. She was holding three coffees somehow, and Harper was pretending that she hadn’t been up since 6 a.m., texting Jordan.
And Nina thought, Yes, I want more of this.
She got dressed and drank her coffee. She told Claire about the barbecue place, and they checked out of the hotel and got into the car.
The drive home later today was five hours long, and Nina was in absolutely no rush to get there.
Yes, it was crazy that they had come just to stay one night, but they would spend the whole day meandering around Asheville before hitting the road home. And even though it was stressful and crazy, she was thankful to be doing it all with her best friends.
CHAPTER 10
Claire was wearing lipstick for the first time in years. She wasn’t really sure how she felt about it.
She’d bought the lipstick at a drugstore in Beaufort on Tuesday, standing in the cosmetic aisle for eleven whole minutes trying to choose a color. It was called Rosewood, which she thought sounded elegant and literary, but it made her lips look like she’d had injections.
This lipstick was for speed dating.
This was Nina’s pick for month seven.
Nina, who six months ago couldn’t even walk into a grocery store without sitting in the parking lot for twenty minutes, had signed the three of them up for speed dating at a wine bar in downtown Charleston.
When she texted the group chat with the plan, Harper responded with a single word:
Why?
It wasn’t even a question. It was a statement of disgust.
Claire had responded with,
