Page 124 of The Best Shot

The women had started climbing out of the pool, wrapping themselves in towels and still needling one another when the first notes of “Pick Up Your Feelings” came through the speakers.

Every woman by the pool turned toward me.

Tabby pointed. “Hale, this is your ministry.”

“Amen,” Annie said.

Ava started moving her shoulders to the beat. “Come on, voice of her generation.”

Carter made a choking sound behind me. I ignored him.

Annie pulled Tabby into the open space beside the pool. Ava drifted toward Grant. Even Nico was nodding along from his lounge chair.

The song ran out. Something slower came up behind it, and the patio settled without anybody deciding to.

Yasmine smiled, one hand held out toward me. That was what got me moving. I set the bottle down and went to her.

She pulled me into the loose circle, still damp from the pool, her arm sliding around my neck. I settled one hand at her waist while everyone around us sang, swayed, and talked over the music.

“You’re not singing,” she said.

“I have an audience.”

“You’ve never cared before.”

True.

I bent closer and gave her the next line under my breath.

Her whole face changed.

Six weeks.

35

“ARE YOU COMING OR NOT.”

YASMINE

Four days.

That’s how long I’d been watching him stand half a step outside of us.

He still texted back fast, the way he always did, like his phone lived in his hand. Tuesday mornings he put coffee in my palm before I’d finished getting my eyes open. His keys stayed on my counter like they’d grown roots there, and his shirt hung over the back of my chair for three days without either of us moving it.

And food. Cinnamon rolls from the bakery near his business. Banana pudding from a barbecue place forty minutes outside town. A peach pie currently taking up the bottom shelf of my fridge.

He’d always paid attention to what I reached for when things got hard. I’d told him that once and he’d never forgotten it.

It made me uneasy. It felt like getting flowers before bad news.

At Ava’s on Wednesday his knee stayed warm against mine under the table, and his hand found the small of my back on the way out, and he kissed my neck when he dropped me off.

All of it exactly the same.

Except he never once said the word Antarctica.

And I didn’t push. He’d asked for a few days, and I could give him that.