Page 44 of Any Port in a Storm

Afew days after I talk to my mom, I muster the courage to FaceTime Ivy.

Unfortunately, just as she picks up the phone, Nick signs on to a lecture, and it’s then I realize I left my bedroom door wide open.

“Is there a man in your apartment?” Ivy’s voice is part awe, part horror.

Heat steals my composure as I scramble to shut the door. “There is, yes.”

“What the hell?” She’s almost shouting now.

“Would you keep it down?” I hiss. “He might hear you.”

Her forehead creases. “Aren’t you supposed to be quarantining? Who is it? Porter? Shouldn’t he be staying away?”

I shake my head, remembering that Porter exists for the first time in what feels like eons. “It’s not Porter. It’s…Nick.”

A brow goes up. “Nick? From last summer?”

My stomach drops like an amusement park free-fall elevator. Not only did I not give Ivy the full backstory on my relationship with Nick last summer, I never really mentioned him to her at all over the years.

Granted, Ivy and I communicate mostly by text, and we’ve kept things pretty surface-level ever since she went away to college. We grew up together, and she’s one of the people I love most in this world, but it’s always felt safer to keep things superficial.

Even last year, when we spent much of the summer together in Maine, I didn’t open up a whole lot about my innermost thoughts. It’s purely self-preservation—Ivy has a very emotional, rose-colored view of the world, and I’m sure she’d see my pragmatism where Nick’s concerned to be highly unromantic.

“He isn’t just Nick from last summer.” I draw in a deep breath. “Look, I haven’t been entirely honest with you. Well, I’ve been honest, but not exactly forthcoming.”

“What do you mean?”

“Nick and I have been friends for years. I met him when I started at Hawthorne, and we got close my sophomore year. There’s been a lot of romantic subtext at points, but we never really explored that possibility until last summer. And it obviously went badly, so we haven’t talked much since.”

“I thought you said it fizzled out?”

I rack my brain, trying to remember what, exactly, I’d told my cousin. Last summer felt like a black hole of chaos, all set to the soundtrack of my Black Sabbath best-of album. I spent most of July chained to my desk at Beach Haven in Ogunquit, working on my dissertation.

When I wasn’t working, I was fighting with Ivy, whose boredom while I worked led her both to Oliver and to the revelation that our grandparents had taken shockingly deep truths to their graves.

After explicitly asking Ivy not to dredge up family secrets, reality had been more than a little shocking. Especially because I’d been so lost in my work, coming up for air to find my entire worldview shaken didn’t leave me in the best place mentally.

And then everything with Nick, and Porter, and Spillinger basically threw me right over the edge.

“I might have said that,” I admit. “I’m sorry. I wasn’t intentionally deflecting. But last summer was…a lot. And things with Nick have always been incredibly intense. I haven’t wanted to open up to you about him because I knew what you’d say, and I didn’t need to hear it. Honestly, I get it enough from Grace as it is.”

Ivy laughs. “What would I say, exactly?”

I lower my voice even more. “You’d say that Nick’s the one.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah.”

“Well,” she hedges. “Is he?”

“Ivy. This is my point.”

She chuckles again. “Sorry. Kidding. But this still begs the question: why is he in your apartment?”

“Oh, it’s actually a funny story,” I say. And I tell her everything.

“Can you add some onions, too?” I ask Nick later, digging through my refrigerator. He’s putting together a grocery order for delivery. We’ve pretty much exhausted everything that I had in the apartment, and we still have three days of quarantine left, so we can’t go anywhere.