Seven years ago
I thought I knew how our story would go, two parallel lines stretching into forever. But in retrospect, our lives were never destined to take that shape.
If I had to pinpoint the moment they started to veer toward each other, it would be a Saturday afternoon in college. Ren and I were at our favorite arcade bar, defending our Ms. Pac-Man high score, and I had asked him to be my plus-one for an old friend’s wedding the following week.
“You don’t already have a date?” he said, chasing down an orange at one corner of the screen.
I watched as he barely avoided a ghost in a tunnel. “I just remembered it was even happening.” I had RSVP’d months ago but forgot all about it until this morning, when I discovered the invitation buried under take-out menus, doodles, and Polaroids on my refrigerator.
“Ah,” Ren said dryly. He let the game sound out his death and turned to me. “So I’m a last resort.”
It was true that I hadn’t had time to find a date, but Ren Webster was my best friend, a part of all my favorite moments, and there was no one I’d rather go with anyway. I widened my eyes innocently, trying to emulate one of his many noteworthy expressions. I used to say I hated his big brown eyes, that they had a way of doing me in, but in the end, it was just another thing I had misread.
After a minute, he relented. “If you can beat our high score,” he said, smirking as he nodded me toward the game, “I’ll go with you.”
His reaction didn’t seem important or all that surprising at the time. Just a joke between friends, another way to add RAJ—Ren and Joni—to the game’s top standings.
And the wedding was yet another item to add to the list of all the dumb things we’d done together. I didn’t think it would balloon, turn into anything beyond that one weekend. I didn’t pause to think about the fact that he didn’t hesitate long, and his yes was as good as certain. That I so easily forgot the wedding, that I didn’t even try to find a real date.
I didn’t pause to think about it at all until everything was already ruined.
But like any good story, life has its twists and turns, and sometimes, just when you think things are going to end up one way, those two lines head straight for each other.
SUNDAY
chapter one
I pull up to the salt-weathered house late Sunday afternoon, seagulls announcing themselves above and the ocean crashing in far below. As I step out of the car, I suck in the Pacific Northwest air, like it’s the first breath I’ve taken in two and a half years. It’s briny out here on the coast, where the sky stretches endless and blue over water that sparkles in tiny fractals, and where one week from now, my little sister will be married under the red-roofed lighthouse that juts out from the green headland a short walk away.
The trunk of the rental car heaves open with a groan, a stark contrast to the perfect Oregon day. It’s fitting that my return to the West Coast would not only be on the heels of losing my job, but involve a dented Mazda that sounded like a freight train running off the tracks the entire way from PDX. Coming back here was never going to be easy, but the journey could have been a little kinder.
Inside, the house is largely the same. The kitchen sits at the front, the long oak table that we can all fit around under the windows. Through a small mudroom opposite are French doors leading to the screen porch that runs along one side of the house. When everyone else arrives the day after tomorrow, there will be laughter rolling in from the yard, conversation in the kitchen, music playing.
For now, there’s only silence.
I drop my car keys on the granite island and walk my bags into the living room, where the sun streams in through the floor-to-ceiling windows. I should go upstairs and unpack, start the week on a responsible note, settle myself in before the others arrive. But a wave of all the memories this place holds suddenly washes over me, and I find myself unable to move another step. This house has seen me through so many versions of myself, and this newest one feels like a stranger here, an intruder.
I brace myself. If I’m going to survive this week, I need to pretend that I haven’t intentionally been staying away these past few years. I take another deep breath, pour a glass of wine, and fold my legs under me on the couch. It was this view of the ocean that sold my parents and the Websters on the place when they purchased it together twenty years ago. And now, with the familiar feel of the sun warming my shoulders, the sight of the waves shimmering before me, that same view quiets my mind for the first time in days.
MONDAY
chapter two
I wake up the next morning sprawled face down on top of the comforter, a dull throb behind my right eye. What started as one glass of wine turned into three on the back deck as I watched the sun go down over the ocean, curled under a well-loved Pendleton throw in one of the Adirondack chairs out there.
I close my eyes again for a minute, listening to the waves rolling in, enjoying the cool breeze drifting through the window as it brushes across my neck.
And that’s when I hear the front door.
My eyes fly open. I sit up and scramble for my phone, checking to see if Stevie has texted that she and her fiancé, Leo, decided to head up early, but I don’t have any new messages. Still, it wouldn’t be that unlike my sister to show up unannounced. I stand with far too much confidence for a hungover woman alone in a coastal house, and shuffle downstairs.
Just in case, in the living room, I pick up a heavy geode from a sideboard and raise it above my head as I approach the kitchen, ready to—what? Pummel someone at short range?
At the sound of keys being tossed onto the counter, I lower the rock, my heart slowing. “Hello?” I call. “Stevie?” I poke my head through the door, catch sight of the person turning at my voice.
It is not my sister.
At first, I think I might be making him up, as if despite the energy I’ve spent repressing him since the second I stepped foot inside this house, some memory managed to spring free and wander around like a reminder of everything I’ve been missing. But this person is flesh and blood, fully corporeal.
I take him in like there’s a curtain slowly rising up to reveal him. Here are the long legs that used to bike around town with me when we were kids, here are the forearms that used to lean against the bar across from me, here are strong shoulders and here is a head of messy, dark hair.
“Joni,” Ren says, my name familiar on his lips. “Hi.”
I stare back at him. Dust particles catch in the bands of light filtering in through the kitchen windows behind him like he’s a particularly well-lit figure in an indie film. His gray T-shirt sits against the tan of his arms, Wayfarers tucked into the front pocket.
I had one more day to get ready for this, one more day to live in delusion that this moment might never come, that I would never have to face him. The person who knows—knew—me better than anyone in the world. The reason I’ve avoided Oregon for so long. I was going to be cool, casual, act like nothing had changed between us while our families were around and ignore him the rest of the time. I wasn’t going to be alone with him.
If the vague nausea I was feeling before was because of the wine I drank last night, now it is firmly due to the fact that not only do I have to face him alone, but I have to do it pants-less, in only a Portland Mavericks T-shirt that hangs partway down my thighs. As luck or fate or the laughably unfair universe would have it, he’s here a day early, wrecking my plans.
“Hi, Ren,” I croak. I clear my throat. “I didn’t know you’d be here.” Obviously.
My eyes snag on the barely there lines that frame the corners of his mouth, twin parentheses serving as proof of how much joy I know can fill up his body. They deepen even when there’s just a hint of a smile on his face. I used to chase them like I did his laugh. But Ren isn’t smiling now.
“I’m sorry,” he says, in what might be the most quintessentially Ren answer possible. He’s apologizing, like he really did break into my personal vacation home. “I didn’t mean to startle you. I would have called if—”
“No, it’s okay.” I hadn’t told anyone I’d be here early, hadn’t wanted to alert them to the reason—the sudden and dramatic end
of a job I loved—behind my last-minute schedule change. There’s no way Ren could have known I would be here. “What are you doing here?” I ask him.
It takes Ren a beat to answer. He reaches up to either tug at his hair or rub at his neck, but he releases his arm at the last second, settles his gaze on me. “I thought I’d head up before everyone arrives tomorrow to get some things out of the way,” he says. “You know, mow the lawn, clear the path down to the lighthouse, that sort of thing.”
Right. Ren would be here out of selfless reasons. As Stevie’s maid of honor, I have a list of all the things I’ll need to prepare for starting tomorrow, but Ren, helper that he is, is diving in well before anyone even asks him to.
“Of course,” I say. “Same.”
“Your hair—” Ren says, and I glance up in time to see him nodding toward me.
“Shorter,” I say, smoothing the back of my hair, which just clears my shoulders, the only vestige of its former self my bangs. I cut it a year ago, after Stevie told me hair holds memory or emotion or something along those lines. I was willing to try anything to fill the hole that had taken up residence in my life.
“You’re still—” I gesture at him, coming up short, nerves climbing up my neck. His hair looks like it’s been trimmed recently, but it’s still his usual style. His shoulders seem like they might be broader under his T-shirt, but he’s always been in good shape, so maybe it’s just a trick of the light. The ways he’s different are too minute to mention: a face and body two and a half years older in ways only someone intimately familiar with them would notice.
“—tall,” I finally finish, wincing a little.
“Yeah,” Ren says. “Been trying my hardest to knock off a few inches, but…” He shrugs, and I realize too late he’s trying to make a joke, so my laugh comes out stilted.
“Well,” I say. “I’m in my old room, but I’ll stay out of your way.”
Ren raises a fist to his forehead. For a moment, the mask falls, his eyes honing in on me again. Ren’s always had a way of seeing through me, and suddenly I’m sixteen again, crying against his shoulder because I just failed a math test, or eighteen, anxiously poring over a dog-eared welcome packet as we drive north to Portland as college freshmen, or twenty-seven, standing on a cold
sidewalk on New Year’s Eve, the last time I saw him.
“Right,” Ren says, eyes still on mine, then, “Actually, I should probably mention—” He stops short when he sees the small flinch on my face, like I’m bracing for what he’s going to say next. His fist drops to his side. “We’re on the screen porch again this year.”
I clamp my lips together. “Hmm?” I say.
“You and I,” Ren says, nodding between us like that is the part of his sentence he needs to clarify. “They put us on the screened-in porch again this year.”
“Who is they?” I ask, though there’s only one possible answer. Our families. The other people you’ve been avoiding.
“Well,” Ren says. “The last couple years—” He pauses.
I paste as placid a look on my face as possible, like it’s normal that I haven’t been here for the last two summers, like it’s normal that he and I are no longer a we, bound together by something that I used to think was profound, and now just feels like time, proximity, all those things that can tie people together.
“Stevie and Leo have been in the room you two used to share, and Thad’s in the one I usually take.”
“No worries,” I say, smile tight, already angling my way out of the kitchen. What did I expect? That they’d walk by my room in hushed reverence all this time, maintaining it like a shrine when there’s hardly enough space for all of us as is? That Stevie and Leo wouldn’t use it as their own? “Let me know if you need any help. Otherwise, I’ll meet you on the screened-in porch tomorrow.”
His brows bend toward each other and his eyes go dark. “Right. I won’t get in your way, then.”
I, a nearly thirty-year-old woman, salute him on my way out.
chapter three
There was a time I would have been thrilled if Ren and I had a whole day here to ourselves, but the idea of being alone with him now has me hurrying away as fast as I can. I speed-walk back down the hall, fly up the stairs two at a time, close my door quietly behind me before leaning against it and letting out the breath I’ve been holding.
It takes me a minute to clear my head, to sort through the conversation I half blacked out downstairs, catalog each item so I can proceed accordingly.
Ren. Ren is here. Not just here, but off doing something, existing like I’ve been doing a mediocre job pretending he doesn’t these past years.
And after tonight, we’ll be sharing a room for the rest of the week.
The thought makes me claustrophobic, like this house isn’t big enough for us and all of our history.
I need to get out of here.
I stuff a tote bag with enough supplies to last me months and lug a camp chair down to the beach. It’s one of the rare days when the temperature will climb into the eighties, the sun already beating down intensely, the sand scorching my feet. I slather my shoulders in sunscreen and settle in with a book, ready to escape into the tale of a woman who falls in love with a guy five hundred years her senior, but it’s okay because he’s magic and heir to some throne.
But after a while, I realize I’ve read the same paragraph four times. The words are blurring in front of me, and the corners of the book keep digging into my legs.
I toss the book aside and trade it for my phone.
“Leo wants to play capture the flag,” Stevie says by way of an answer.
“He— Now?” I drag my sunglasses back down my face now that I’ve abandoned the romantasy.
“No, on Wednesday.” She’s rummaging around on the other end of the line, a series of clinks and thumps.
“Stevie, you’re going to have to provide a little more clarity than that,” I say, pressing my toes into the sand.
She sighs. The rummaging stops. “It’s some big tradition,” she says. “He and his brother organized a whole crosstown event when they were kids. It’s his singular request.”
“Fair enough.” I pull my phone away from my ear when there’s a sound like an entire shelf of books has caved in. “What are you doing?”
“I’m in our office.” Stevie huffs. “It was someone’s bright idea to store all the band’s extra shit in our suitcases to save space, but now I actually need to use them.”
“Ah,” I say. “The tour.” Immediately following their honeymoon, Stevie will be joining Leo on his band’s North American tour for the first three months of their marriage.
“Hey,” Stevie says. “Where are you?”
“Just at home.” The lie comes surprisingly quickly. I’d decided to wait to tell anyone about being fired until after Stevie’s wedding. Coming here early to regroup had seemed like the perfect way to prepare myself for a week of
lying to my family. That is, until the person I most dreaded seeing showed up early too.
“Last I checked, you couldn’t hear the ocean in your apartment.”
I grip the arms of the chair, curl my toes in the sand. Down the beach, a family is rapidly approaching, sand pails in the hands of a pair of shrieking kids, the father’s booming voice telling them to slow down.
“Oh, it’s a playlist,” I say.
“What?”
“I listen to it when I’m trying to sleep. You know, rain sounds, ocean sounds.”
“Huh,” Stevie mutters. “Were you trying to sleep?”
“No. Just…” I scramble, trying to lie better. “Couldn’t wait a second longer to hear those seagulls!” It comes out like a carnival worker trying to sell a wailing kid on a ride.
“What’s going on?” she asks.
I squeeze my eyes shut, readying myself for this week to implode before it’s even started.
“Is it because of Ren?” she asks. “Seeing him tomorrow.”
Stevie is the only person in my family who knows Ren and I haven’t spoken in the last two and a half years. She’s confirmed no one else is the wiser on the Webster side of things either, so at the very least, Ren and I implicitly agree that our families should be spared our drama. But Stevie doesn’t know what happened between us, the line we crossed. Something else Ren and I implicitly agree on, I guess.
“I’m a little stressed,” I admit. A breeze moves through the beach grass behind me, teasing my neck. “But we’ll be fine, Stevie. We’re two people who used to be friends, and now we’re not, and that’s it.”
Stevie snorts. “Yeah. That’s it.”
“Let’s talk about the schedule for the week,” I say, the sun catching my eye as it bounces off a dory fishing boat bobbing by. I squint out at it, then at where the waves come to tiny points of light. “You don’t need to worry about Ren and me.”
Stevie sighs again, but relents. “You’ll probably get there before us tomorrow. Sorry we can’t pick you up at the airport.”
“It’s fine.” I don’t mention that it’s also the perfect cover for why I will have arrived before they do. Stevie and Leo are stopping at our parents’ house on the way to the coast tomorrow morning so they can pack up all the wedding things they’ve been storing there: bins filled with favors, decorations, enough napkins for every wedding guest to douse theirs and their neighbors’ in gasoline and still have extra.
“I think Ren will be there early tomorrow too,” Stevie says.
“Will he,” I say.
“Will you be okay?”
“Stevie,” I warn.
“Fine, fine. Never mind.”
n Wednesday, the combined bachelor and bachelorette Thursday night, wedding setup before the rehearsal dinner on Friday.
“Can’t believe I’m getting married,” Stevie says.
I pick at a piece of vinyl peeling off the arm of my chair. “Couldn’t be anyone but Leo,” I say.
“I know. I hate it so much.” The speed at which Stevie, former queen of no-commitment, fell for sunny, golden-retriever Leo surprised everyone. But she still has to be Stevie about it.
“Sure you do.” I bring my knees up to my chest and gaze back out at the white-capped, endless Pacific that’s been the backdrop to so much of our lives.
“Are you really going to be okay this week?” she asks.
I glance over my shoulder toward the house, where I can hear the sound of the mower running in the distance. “This week isn’t about me, Stevie,” I say, determined not to give her anything to run with. Ren is the A&R manager for Leo’s band, Bearcat, and Stevie and Leo spend a fair amount of time with him in Portland, a fact that caused a lot of sleepless nights when I first realized it. Ren isn’t just some person I can write out. His life will always be irrevocably intertwined with mine.
“It is if I want it to be. I’m the bride, and I don’t like that much attention.”
“Says the person who invited almost two hundred people to her wedding.”
“Only half of them are coming. And I didn’t invite them. My fiancé has never met a person he didn’t like.”
By the time we hang up, the sun is shifting toward afternoon in the sky, burning off the last of the mist hanging over the dense, coastal Oregon forest on either side of the house. The family from earlier is fading back the direction they came.
I stretch my arms over my head, twist back toward the house. I can just glimpse Ren at the far side of the yard, pushing the ancient mower in clean lines back and forth, avoiding the rocky patch where it slopes at the bottom and making sharp, careful turns at each end. He pauses, the sound of the mower dying as he peels his sweat-damp shirt over his head, his skin glistening in the August sun and—
I wrench my eyes away, but not before they’ve caught on him pulling the starter once, twice, the muscles in his back working.
I turn back around and wade into the freezing water.
* * *
That night, after trying and failing to distract myself, scrolling and not responding to a string of texts from my former coworkers “just checking in,” repacking my suitcase for when I move into what’s beginning to feel like the jail cell Ren and I will be sharing tomorrow, I turn off the lamp above my bed—Stevie and Leo’s bed, more accurately—and roll over to get some sleep for what will probably be the last time this week. I close my eyes and count my breaths, do that thing where you clench every muscle in your body then relax five times in a row, tell myself a particularly boring story.
But after what feels like hours, I’m still awake. I check the time on my phone—twenty-eight minutes have passed—and flop back onto my pillows. My brilliant plan to come up here early has already failed, and tomorrow feels more daunting than ever. It’s an unnerving combination, being in this place that’s supposed to bring me so much solace while feeling so on edge.
Ren and I managed to stay out of each other’s way today. When I walked into the kitchen to make myself dinner, I noticed his car was gone and wondered again, for a minute, if I made him up. If I’d been so worried about seeing him that I crafted some narrative that he showed up early.
But now I can feel him in the house, like I used to be able to feel him across town, across campus, across Portland, across the country, some point at the other end of a line that tethered us.
I kick the blankets off, stare at the ceiling. This nudge at my center that shifts with him, like every time he turns over in bed, he tugs a little—it used to be a comfort. Now it just feels like something else I can’t control.
Six years ago
Claudia and Clark
Portland, Oregon
chapter four
Ren knocks on my door at exactly the time he promised. I weave through the maze of boxes stacked in my living room and whip it open. ...
We hope you are enjoying the book so far. To continue reading...
Copyright © 2025 All Rights Reserved
Please log in to recommend or discuss...
