Plot Twist In Paradise
by IAmHerEmma

 

 

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Chapter Twelve: Breakfast, Interrogations and the Potential Muse

 

I'd been awake for twenty minutes and hadn't moved.

Not because anything was wrong. The opposite, actually, which was somehow more confusing. I was lying there in the ridiculous cloud mattress with the sheet twisted around one leg and my arm draped over the pillow like I'd been reaching for something in my sleep, and I just didn't want to get up. Not in the way I hadn't wanted to get up two days ago, when the prospect of being here at all felt like a punishment dressed up as self-care. This was different. I didn't want to get up because I was comfortable. Because the morning felt quiet and unhurried and mine, and I couldn't remember the last time a morning had felt like that.

Three days. That's all it had taken for the resort to stop feeling like a sentence and start feeling like a place I was actually staying. I had friends here, which was still a bizarre thing to think. Real ones, or at least the vacation equivalent — people who saved me a seat and yelled my name across dining rooms and debriefed bartender interactions with forensic intensity over breakfast. I had a table I sat at. I had Milo, who had somehow appointed himself my emotional support chaos agent, and Talia, who had folded me into the group before I'd had the chance to object, and Cass, who said things that landed like precision munitions and then went back to eating her eggs.

And then there was Renee.

That was the thought I kept circling back to, lying there with the fan clicking softly above me. Not Renee as the sharp-edged woman who'd called my book a blank page to my face, or the one I'd spent half the shuttle ride wanting to argue with. The Renee from last night. The one who sat across from me at dinner and talked about her patients — people relearning how to walk, how to trust a body that had stopped cooperating — with a kind of steady honesty that I hadn't expected from someone who'd spent most of our interactions being deliberately impossible. She hadn't been performing vulnerability. She'd just been talking, and the talking happened to be the most real thing anyone had said all day. And then, without any fanfare or preamble, she'd mentioned that her mother had died. A week before the trip. Said it like she was reading it off a list. And when the silence that followed could have gone in any direction — pity, awkwardness, someone saying something too gentle — she'd handled it. Redirected the table with a line so clean it barely left a mark. The woman I'd spent three days reading as blunt and closed off had simply been carrying something enormous and choosing not to make it anyone else's problem.

I rolled onto my side and stared at the desk by the window. The notebook was sitting there where I'd left it, the leather cover slightly curled at one corner, the pen still tucked between the pages. I hadn't touched it since that first night — the entry I'd written after the welcome drinks, sitting at that same desk, slightly buzzed and slightly disoriented and apparently compelled to catalogue the strangers I'd just met. I remembered closing it, opening it, rereading what I'd written about Renee, and closing it harder. Like that would help.

I sat up, swung my legs over the edge of the bed, and reached for it before I could talk myself out of it.

The old entry was right where I'd left it. One page, both sides, my handwriting getting looser toward the bottom. Quick sketches of the group — Milo, Talia, Cass — written with the confident detachment of someone who thought she was cataloguing strangers she'd never see again. And then the Renee section at the end. Short, controlled, trying too hard to sound casual, and ending with the line where I'd admitted I was writing about her like a lunatic and needed to stop.

I laughed, which I hadn't expected. The entry was barely three days old and it already read like someone else had written it — someone who liked these people but hadn't figured out yet how much they'd end up mattering.

I grabbed the pen and turned to a fresh page.

The thing about Milo is that he feels everything at full volume and doesn't see any reason to turn it down. He fell for a bartender who has spoken fewer words to him than most people use ordering lunch, and instead of taking that as information, he took it as a challenge. Not even a challenge. A sign. Milo doesn't just wear his heart on his sleeve — he wears it on his face, his hands, his posture, the way he leans forward when he's listening to you like what you're saying might actually be the most important thing he's heard all day. The terrifying part is that he means it. Every time. He is the most emotionally available person I have ever met, and he is directing all of that availability at a man who communicates primarily through cocktail garnishes. If this were fiction, I would cut him for being unrealistic. But he's real, and he's sitting at my breakfast table every morning in a shirt that could cause a migraine, and somehow I can't imagine this trip without him.

I stretched my neck, shifted the notebook to a more comfortable angle, and took a sip from the water glass on the nightstand that I didn't remember pouring.

Cass is the quietest person at the table and somehow the loudest presence in the room. Cass doesn't waste words. She doesn't waste gestures. She doesn't waste the effort it would take to look up from her book when she's about to say the thing that ends you. She just says it, and it lands, and then she goes back to whatever she was doing while you sit there reassessing your entire life. She told me, on my first day with the group, that I'd gotten off on the wrong foot with someone I'd been thinking about all day. She said it like she was noting the weather. I deflected. She didn't push. She didn't have to. Cass plants things and waits. It's the most lawyerly non-lawyer thing I've ever seen, and it's extremely unsettling when you're the one she's planted something in.

I set the pen down for a moment, flexed my writing hand, and stared out the window at the water. The morning light was doing its thing — bright, warm, completely indifferent to the fact that I was sitting here journaling like a college freshman on a study-abroad program. I picked the pen back up.

Talia decided we were friends somewhere between the dock and the boat, and I never got a vote. She pulled me into a golf cart, and by the end of the mixer I had a group and a standing breakfast seat I never agreed to. She is warm the way some people are tall — it's just there, it's just her, it's not something she puts on or adjusts depending on the audience. She tells the story of how she and Cass met differently, and Cass tracks the discrepancies like a court reporter. Talia does not care. Talia is telling a love story, and love stories are allowed to embellish.

Alina I met at the mixer — the kind of person who watches a room the way I do, with that specific professional attention that normal people don't have because normal people aren't always half-composing sentences about what they're seeing. She had a notebook in one hand and wine in the other, and she said something I haven't been able to shake — something about the describing getting in the way of the living. She was talking about herself. She might have also been talking about me. I've been turning it over since that night, the way you turn over a sentence you know is good but can't figure out where it goes yet — because she's right, and I know she's right, and I don't know what to do with that.

Lyle distributes the weekly activity schedule with the quiet intensity of a man who genuinely believes that sunrise yoga could change your life if you'd just commit. The schedule is printed in colour. Every hour is accounted for. I have never in my life met someone so personally invested in other people's leisure time, and I write characters for a living. He is either a visionary or clinically unable to sit still.

I was smiling by the time I finished the Lyle entry, which was not something I would have predicted. This was fun. Not fun like writing fiction was supposed to be fun — not the disciplined, deadline-driven, please-God-let-this-paragraph-work kind of fun. Just fun. Pen on paper, no stakes, no audience, no one waiting for a manuscript. I was just writing about people I'd met and things I'd noticed and none of it mattered and all of it was coming easily, which was such a foreign sensation that I almost didn't trust it.

I turned to a new page and kept writing.

The irony wasn't lost on me. I'd just written five entries about people who hadn't existed in my life a week ago, described with specificity, with something that if I were being generous I might even call voice. The words had come without resistance, without the usual negotiation between my brain and the page where every sentence gets interrogated before it's allowed to exist. I'd sat down and written about Milo's emotional bandwidth and Cass's precision and Talia's warmth and Lyle's unshakeable belief in structured leisure, and all of it had flowed like it was already there, just waiting for me to show up with a pen.

And yet I couldn't produce a single usable sentence of the thing I actually did for a living.

I sat with that for a moment, the pen resting against the page, and instead of closing the notebook and going to brush my teeth like a normal person, I kept going.

I don't understand why this works and that doesn't. I can write about everyone at that breakfast table — what they say, how they move, what they're hiding behind the things they choose to show — and it comes easily, like breathing. But the second I open the laptop and try to do the thing I'm supposed to be good at, the thing people pay me to do, the thing that used to feel as natural as any of this, there's nothing. Not bad writing. Not rough drafts. Nothing. The screen sits there and I sit there and we stare at each other and neither of us blinks. When did it become so hard to do the thing that used to define me? Is it still in there somewhere — the instinct, the muscle, whatever it was that made the sentences come — or did it leave and I just haven't accepted it yet? What happens to the person you were when the thing you built yourself around goes quiet?

The worst part isn't the silence. The worst part is showing up anyway. Sitting down every day in front of the same blank page and not knowing if today is the day it comes back or just another day you prove it won't. And you keep showing up, because what else are you going to do — stop? Admit it's gone? So you sit there, and the page sits there, and you do this quiet, stupid, stubborn thing where you refuse to be the one who leaves first. That's not discipline. I don't know what it is. Maybe it's just the only option that doesn't feel like giving up.

And the people around you — the ones who see you doing this — they split into two kinds. The ones who tell you it'll come back. Who say the right things, the encouraging things, the things that are supposed to help but mostly just remind you that they don't understand what it feels like to reach for something that used to be automatic and find nothing there. And then the other kind. The ones who don't say it'll be fine. The ones who just stay in the room. Who sit with you in the ugly, grinding middle of it without trying to fix it or rush you through it or tell you what the answer is. They just stay. And they're rarer than you'd think, and they're worth more than they'll ever know.

I put the pen down.

I read back what I'd written — and the uncomfortable thing sitting at the center of those last pages wasn't the block. It was what Renee had said. About her patients, about showing up, about staying through the hardest parts. She was somehow everywhere in it. The people who show up and stay. The stubborn, quiet refusal to leave someone alone in the middle of something hard. The ones who don't tell you it'll be fine. She'd talked about her patients at the mixer — what it takes to sit with someone relearning how to trust a body that stopped cooperating — and she hadn't framed it as advice or philosophy. She'd just been talking about her work. And apparently it had lodged somewhere in my brain and stayed there, rearranging things without my permission, because I'd taken her words and turned them inward without even realizing I was doing it.

I reread the pages, my hand aching from how fast I'd been writing. It was honest in a way that my fiction hadn't been in months. Maybe longer. The kind of writing where you look at what you've produced and feel slightly exposed, like you've accidentally left a door open that you normally keep locked. I hadn't sat down to write about Renee Miller. I'd sat down to write about why I couldn't write, and my brain had taken me directly to her without bothering to inform me first.

None of it was usable. It wasn't fiction, it wasn't a chapter, it wasn't something I could hand to Maribel and say "here, I'm not blocked anymore, look." But it was something. It was words that had come from somewhere real and landed on the page without me having to force them, and that hadn't happened since I got here. That hadn't happened in longer than I wanted to admit.

I closed the notebook. Gently, this time.

For a moment I just sat there with it in my lap, the weight of what I'd written still pressing against the inside of my skull, and then I set it on the desk and made a deliberate decision to stop thinking about it. About the block, about the words that had come anyway, about whose voice had apparently been living in my head rent-free since I wasn't paying attention. I could unpack all of that later, or never, or at a time when I wasn't still in my pajamas with unbrushed teeth and a day ahead of me that I was, against all odds, looking forward to.

The morning routine helped — brush teeth, wash face, pull my hair into something deliberate instead of chaotic. I picked out a pair of high-waisted olive shorts and a fitted white tank with a slightly scooped neckline, and then stood in front of the small mirror and applied a thin layer of tinted lip balm. A touch of mascara. Tiny gold studs in my ears. Nothing dramatic. Just enough that when I looked at my reflection, Adrianna was looking back instead of Adrian, and that felt right in the easy, unexamined way it had started to feel right this week — just a settling.

The restaurant was quieter this morning, the breakfast rush already thinned out by the time I got there. I was halfway through the buffet line, loading a plate with eggs and fruit and reaching for coffee, when Talia's voice cut across the room with the precision of someone who had been watching the entrance.

"Ade! Over here!"

The wave that accompanied it was unnecessary. So was the volume. But that was Talia — operating at a frequency that made subtlety physically impossible.

I grabbed my coffee and headed to the table, where the full group was already assembled. Milo in another shirt that looked like a tropical fever dream had been screen-printed onto cotton. Cass with a half-eaten plate and a book face-down beside it. And Renee, in a loose linen top with her hair pulled back, sitting at the end of the table with a cup of coffee and the kind of stillness that made everyone else look like they were trying too hard.

The open seat was next to Renee, so I took it.

"Hi," I said, setting my plate down and sliding into the chair with what I hoped was a normal amount of casualness.

Renee looked up at me and smiled — a real one, easy and unguarded in a way I hadn't seen from her before. "Hi," she said, and returned to her coffee.

I turned to face the table and found Milo and Talia staring at me with matching grins so wide they looked like they'd been surgically enhanced. Milo had his chin propped on both hands. Talia's eyebrows were approximately at her hairline. Cass, beside them, was methodically working through a piece of toast and paying attention to nothing and no one.

"What?" I asked.

"Nothing," Milo said, his grin not moving even slightly.

"Absolutely nothing," Talia confirmed, still beaming.

"You're both looking at me like I just walked in with a puppy."

"Are we?" Milo widened his eyes with theatrical innocence. "I didn't notice. Talia, were we looking at her?"

"I wasn't looking at anyone," Talia said, looking directly at me.

Cass took a bite of toast and didn't participate. Renee sipped her coffee. I decided the safest course of action was to eat my breakfast and stop making eye contact with people who clearly couldn't be trusted.

The grins faded once the table settled back into its natural rhythm, and within a few minutes breakfast was just breakfast again.

"I'm just saying, the breakfast buffet has six types of bread but no brioche," Milo was saying as I started on my eggs. "That's a choice. That's a deliberate omission. Someone in that kitchen looked at the bread lineup and said, 'this is fine,' and they were wrong."

"It's bread, Milo," Cass said, not looking up from her book.

"It's the principle, Cass. If you're going to commit to a spread, commit to the spread."

"I want you to stop talking about bread at breakfast."

Renee ate her food and stayed out of it, and Talia was scrolling through her phone, tilting the screen toward Cass every few seconds. Cass didn't bite once.

"Oh, did anyone see that couple at the pool yesterday?" Talia asked, leaning forward. "Matching swimsuits, matching cocktails — do you think that's love or a shared Instagram account?"

"Codependency," Cass said.

"You're no fun." Talia grinned. "We had matching outfits once. You cried in the fitting room at Nordstrom."

"I didn't cry. I got emotional. Not really the same thing."

"We looked incredible, Cass. Sometimes beauty moves you." Talia was smiling at the memory now, and it pulled her somewhere else. "God, remember our first anniversary? Tell them about the gifts."

"No," Cass said.

"Tell them."

"Absolutely not."

"Fine, I'll tell them." Talia turned to the rest of us, already delighted. "So for our first anniversary, we decided we were going to make each other gifts. Not buy — make."

"That was your idea," Cass said.

"It was a beautiful idea. So I made her this whole hand-lettered print — her favorite quote, custom frame, took me a week. Not to brag, but it was gorgeous. It's still on our bedroom wall."

"It is gorgeous," Cass confirmed, like she was entering evidence.

"And then Cass gives me hers." Talia paused for effect, pressing her lips together to keep from laughing. "She tried to hand-stitch a pouch for me. Like, a little fabric pouch for my earrings."

"It was supposed to be a clutch," Cass said quietly.

The table went very still. Milo's fork was frozen halfway to his mouth.

"A clutch," Talia repeated, and something in her voice cracked. "Babe, it looked like a sock that had been through something traumatic. The stitching was — I don't even know what direction it was going. One side was longer than the other. The fabric was inside out and she'd just committed to it anyway."

"I followed the instructions," Cass said, staring straight ahead with the composure of someone testifying under oath.

"There was a button on it. Just one. It didn't close anything. It was just there." Talia was wiping her eyes now, laughing so hard she could barely get the words out. "And the thing is, she spent three weeks on it. Three weeks, and she never once Googled whether she was doing it right because — and I quote — 'the instructions were clear.'"

Milo had put his fork down and was gripping the edge of the table. Even Renee was laughing — quietly, almost privately, but unmistakably.

"I still have it," Talia said, and the laughter softened into something else. "It's in my nightstand. I've kept it for seven years. It's the ugliest thing anyone has ever made me, and it's my favorite thing I own."

Cass didn't say anything for a moment. She just looked at Talia with an expression I hadn't seen from her before — unguarded, something that existed entirely between the two of them and had nothing to do with anyone else at the table. Then she leaned over and kissed Talia on the lips, brief and certain, the way you kiss someone you've been kissing for eight years and still mean it every time.

"The instructions were clear," Cass said when she pulled back, and Talia laughed.

Milo pressed his hand to his chest. "I need a moment. I am emotionally compromised."

"You seem to need a lot of moments," Cass said, but she was still half-smiling.

Milo leaned back in his chair and sighed. "Seven years and she still keeps the ugly clutch," he said, shaking his head. "I want someone who'd keep my ugly clutch. Is that too much to ask? A person. A real, actual person who talks to me. With words. Full sentences. Maybe even paragraphs, if we're being ambitious."

"So not Nico," Cass said.

"Nico talks," Milo protested, sitting up straighter. "He told me I'd muddled my daiquiri too aggressively. That's practically a sonnet from him."

"That's a workplace safety note, Milo."

"The way he said it was romantic."

"He was concerned about the mint."

Talia snorted into her juice. The Nico conversation had been funny at first, the way it always was, but there was a stretch in the middle where Milo's voice had shifted — not dramatically, not enough that anyone who wasn't paying attention would have clocked it, but the performance thinned out for a second and something more raw showed through. He genuinely wanted this. Not just Nico specifically, but the thing — the connection, the person, the reciprocity.

Renee caught it too. She didn't make a production of it. She waited until Cass and Talia had moved on to debating whether Nico's apparent stoicism was cultural or pathological, and then she turned to Milo and said, "You'll find someone who matches what you bring to the table."

Milo looked at her for a second, something shifting behind his expression before he caught it. "Well," he said, straightening up and clearing his throat, "I'm putting 'brings a lot to the table' on my dating profile. I have a witness now."

Renee didn't smile, but she didn't need to. She'd said what she meant and moved on, and Milo had heard her, and I sat there thinking about the fact that I'd spent the last three days joking and teasing and performing elaborate bits about Nico's communication style and none of it had landed the way that one sentence just did.

"What about you, Ade?" Talia asked. "Any great love waiting for you back home? Terrible love? Middling love with potential?"

"No love of any variety, actually." I speared a piece of mango with my fork and kept my voice light. "Last relationship ended about a year and a half ago. It fizzled — just slowly, like a tire losing air. One day you look over and realize you're both just sitting in a parked car."

"That's worse," Milo said, and for once he wasn't being dramatic.

"The ironic part," I continued, because I could already feel the table tilting toward sympathy and I needed to steer it somewhere else, "is that I write about passion for a living. Like, that's literally what I do. People falling into each other so hard they can't breathe. People saying the things you're supposed to be too scared to say. Wanting someone so badly it rearranges you. I write all of that, and apparently I cannot locate any of it in my actual life. Which is fine. It's fine. The shoemaker's kids go barefoot. The romance writer goes home alone. It's basically a proverb at this point."

The table softened without going mournful, which was all I needed. Talia made a sympathetic noise. Milo pointed his fork at me and said, "You're going to find someone ridiculous and perfect and completely wrong for you on paper, and it's going to be disgusting, and I'm going to take full credit."

And Renee was quiet. She just looked at me, steady and direct, with an expression I couldn't fully decode except that it had understanding in it. Like she'd heard everything I'd said and everything I hadn't, and the space between those two things was the part that mattered. Then she took a sip of her coffee and didn't look away, and I was the one who broke eye contact first, reaching for my own cup with slightly more urgency than the situation required.

"Okay, Renee," Milo said, pivoting with the subtlety of a man parallel-parking a freight train. "Your turn."

"My turn for what?" Renee set her cup down with the calm of someone who had already decided she wasn't answering.

"Relationship status. Love life. Emotional landscape." Milo leaned forward. "Are you single?"

The table went very still. Talia had stopped chewing. Cass was watching with an expression that said she already knew how this was going to go.

"Yes," Renee said, after a pause that made Talia hold her breath.

"Recently single?"

"Milo."

"That wasn't a no." Milo had the look of a man who smelled blood in the water and had no intention of swimming away from it.

"That was a tone."

"Was it a bad breakup?"

Renee picked up her coffee, took a slow sip, and set it back down. "Most of them are."

"So there was a breakup," Milo said, practically vibrating.

Renee sighed through her nose, the kind that meant she was deciding how much to give him. "I broke up with my girlfriend about a month ago," she said, with the clinical precision of someone reading lab results. "It wasn't amicable. She disagreed with the premise. I disagreed with continuing to pretend we were still working. We were not, in fact, still working. End of story."

Talia's face softened immediately. "I'm sorry, Renee. That's really—"

"It's done," Renee said, not unkindly but with a finality that closed the door on whatever Talia had been about to offer. "It's done. That's the whole update."

The silence that followed lasted about four seconds before Cass set her coffee cup down and surveyed the table with the measured disapproval of a woman who had watched her breakfast be slowly colonized by emotional confessions.

"So to be clear," Cass said, looking from Talia to Milo and back, "between the two of you, we've now covered unrequited bartender obsession, existential singledom, and a breakup that's still warm. Before nine-thirty. On vacation."

"We were sharing," Talia said, defensive and completely unapologetic.

"You were excavating."

"We were just talking! People talk at breakfast!"

"The conversation went there because you steered it there with both hands, Tal. I watched you do it."

"I'm being attacked," Talia said, turning to Milo for support.

"Viciously," Milo agreed, straightening in his chair despite having been entirely complicit. "We were having a beautiful moment of group vulnerability, and now it's being criminalized."

"I'm not criminalizing anything. I'm noting the pattern." Cass picked up her toast again. "You two are incapable of letting a breakfast pass without turning it into a support group."

"That is slander, Cassandra," Milo said, pressing a hand to the table.

"It's observation, Milo. I observe." Cass picked up her coffee. "It's what I do."

Milo pushed his chair back with theatrical affront. "I need more coffee," he announced, standing up and straightening his shirt. "Some of us process conflict through caffeine, Cass. Not everyone has your constitution."

"Enjoy your process," Cass said without looking up.

"I will." Milo turned on his heel and headed toward the counter, his posture radiating wounded nobility.

"I think I need more fruit," I said, grabbing my plate and standing up. Cass's eyes tracked both departures but she said nothing.

Milo was standing at the coffee station with his arms crossed, staring at the espresso machine like it owed him money.

"You're not actually upset," I said, pulling up beside him and reaching for the fruit display.

"I'm moderately upset," he corrected, uncrossing his arms to grab a cup. "Cass acts like emotional honesty is a public health violation."

"Cass made a fair point. You interrogated Renee like she was on the witness stand."

"I asked questions. That's how conversation works. People ask things, other people answer. It's a system."

"You asked a woman you've known for three days whether her breakup was bad."

"It's been an intense three days." He poured his coffee and turned to face me with the smile that meant he was about to pivot to something I wouldn't like.

"Speaking of which," he said.

"Whatever you're about to say, I already don't like your face," I told him, reaching for the fruit display.

"You haven't even heard it yet."

"I don't need to, Milo. That smile is doing all the talking."

"That little 'hi' at the table." He held up his fingers about an inch apart. "That tiny, adorable, completely loaded 'hi.' With the smile. Her smile, Ade. That was a real smile. I'm a medical professional. I can identify facial muscle groups."

"You're a nurse, Milo. You take blood pressure."

"I take blood pressure and I observe human behavior, and what I observed this morning was a very specific kind of 'hi' and a very specific kind of smile directed at a very specific person who is standing right in front of me pretending she didn't notice."

"I said hello to someone I know at a breakfast table. That's what people do."

"People don't blush when they do it."

"I didn't blush."

"Your ears went pink."

"My ears did not go—" I stopped, because I could feel them betraying me in real time. "She just told us she broke up with her girlfriend a month ago. That's not exactly an invitation to—"

"To what?" Milo's grin widened. "Finish that sentence. I want to hear where you were going with it."

"To nothing. I wasn't going anywhere with it."

"You were going somewhere very specific with it, and you stopped because you heard yourself."

I selected a piece of pineapple with a level of concentration it absolutely did not require and refused to look at him.

"She's single, Ade," Milo said..

"I heard."

"She smiled at you."

"She smiled at a person who sat down next to her," I said, stabbing a piece of pineapple. "It's called manners."

"She just told us she broke up with her girlfriend a month ago and she still smiled at you like that. That's not manners. That's—"

"Milo, I swear—"

"That's a choice," he finished, looking enormously pleased with himself.

Renee appeared at the counter before I could commit the homicide I was considering, reaching past us for the coffee carafe with the easy, unhurried movements of someone who hadn't been the subject of an unauthorized tactical analysis five seconds ago. She filled her cup, took a sip, and glanced between us with an expression that missed nothing.

"What are you two talking about?" she asked, her eyes settling on me.

I could feel the flush threatening to crawl up my neck and willed it into nonexistence through sheer force. "Milo's being absurd about things that aren't his business," I said, looking at him with an expression that, if he had any self-preservation instincts at all, he would interpret as a final warning.

Milo interpreted it perfectly and decided to ignore it. "I was simply observing—"

"He was simply leaving," I said.

Milo looked at me. Looked at Renee. Looked at me again with an expression of such transparent delight that I wanted to throw a piece of fruit at him. "Fine," he said, picking up his coffee with exaggerated care. "I'll be at the table. Where I will sit quietly. And observe nothing. Like a very handsome, very perceptive rock." He sauntered back toward the group without a shred of remorse.

Renee watched him go, then turned back to her coffee. "He's a lot."

"He's a natural disaster in a parrot shirt."

Renee huffed a small laugh, close to the real thing but not quite there, and we stood at the counter for a moment — me picking through the fruit display with no real purpose, Renee sipping her coffee and watching the room.

"I didn't know about the breakup," I said, after a moment. "On top of everything else."

Renee turned her cup slowly in her hands. "Yeah. The timing was pretty spectacular." There was no bitterness in it, or if there was, she'd already processed it and set it aside. "But what can you do. Life doesn't schedule these things with spacing in mind."

"I never actually said it properly," I said, and she looked at me. "About your mother. I'm sorry."

She held my gaze for a second, and I could tell it hadn't stopped hurting just because she'd stopped talking about it. "Thank you," she said, simply and sincerely. "It's okay. Really."

I nodded, and the conversation could have ended there, in that small, honest pocket of quiet between two people who were still learning each other's edges. The silence was comfortable, though, and maybe that's why I let the next thing out of my mouth instead of keeping it where it belonged.

"You know, you'd make a perfect muse," I said. "Tragic backstory, enigmatic personality, the whole thing. I could get three novels out of you, minimum."

Renee raised an eyebrow. "Is that your pitch?"

"That's my professional assessment. You're practically a character already."

"A character." Renee almost smiled. "Am I at least a main character?"

"You're too complicated for a supporting role."

"Do I get royalties?" She took a sip of her coffee, and when she lowered the cup she was smiling — a real one, warm and unguarded. "What's my arc?"

"Still figuring that out," I said, and it came out more honest than I'd intended.

"Well," Renee said, turning back toward the table, "let me know when you do."

I grabbed a piece of melon, mostly for credibility, and caught up to Renee before she reached the table.

We were a few steps away when I clocked Milo and Talia leaning together with their heads approximately three inches apart, whispering with the urgent intensity of two people planning a bank heist. Cass was next to them, rolling her eyes.

The whispering cut off the second we sat down. Milo straightened so fast he nearly knocked over his coffee. Talia produced a smile that was approximately forty percent too wide to be natural.

"What's going on?" I asked. Talia was suddenly fascinated by her juice glass. Milo had arranged his face into an expression so aggressively innocent he looked like a suspect who'd just swallowed the evidence.

"Nothing's going on," Milo said brightly. "We were just talking about — what were we talking about, Talia?"

"The weather," Talia said, at the exact same time Milo said, "Snorkeling."

They looked at each other.

"The weather for snorkeling," Talia corrected smoothly.

"Perfect conditions," Milo added, nodding vigorously.

I stared at Milo until I could feel the weight of it registering on his face. He shifted in his chair. Then he picked up his coffee cup and hid behind it.

Cass, who had been watching this entire performance with the resigned patience of a woman who had long ago accepted that her life would contain these moments, unfolded her arms. "What they're not telling you," she said, "is that they've been discussing how certain combinations of people seem to bring out the best in each other, and whether the group dynamic could benefit from some strategic activity planning. It's very altruistic."

I blinked, trying to figure out what Cass had just said and why it felt like it meant more than it sounded.

"What does that mean?" Renee asked, looking genuinely confused.

"Don't worry about it," Milo said, flashing a smile so polished and transparently fake that it practically came with a warranty. "We're just enthusiastic about group bonding."

"Group bonding," I repeated flatly, staring at Milo with the kind of look that, in a just world, would have caused physical discomfort.

Milo clocked the look. His eyes widened. He set down his coffee cup and held up both hands. "I think what Cass is trying to say—"

"I said exactly what I wanted to say," Cass interjected.

"— is that we all bring different energies to the table, and that's beautiful, and we should celebrate it."

"By doing what, exactly?" I asked.

"By enjoying each other's company! At various resort activities! That's what vacations are for, Ade." He spread his arms wide, nearly clipping Talia's juice glass. "Connection. Togetherness. Vitamin D."

"You're being very weird right now."

"I'm being passionate about friendship."

"You're being suspicious about something, and I don't know what it is, but I can see it on your face."

Milo pressed his hand to his chest. "This face has never been anything other than open and transparent."

"That face looks like it's hiding a body," I said, and Renee laughed — an actual laugh, short and surprised and warm — and Milo's eyes darted between us so fast I could practically hear the gears turning.

"So what are we doing this afternoon?" Talia asked, pivoting so smoothly it was almost professional. I made a mental note that this woman could change a subject the way other people changed lanes — no signal, no hesitation, already gone before you noticed.

"There's a volleyball net set up near the beach," Renee said, almost casually.

Milo nearly knocked his coffee over for the second time. "Volleyball. Yes. We're doing that. When?"

"I said there's a net, Milo. I didn't say—"

"After lunch. We'll go after lunch." He looked around the table like a man assembling a team for a mission. "Everyone in?"

"I didn't agree to anything," I said.

"You didn't say no," Talia pointed out.

"That's not the same as—"

"That's a yes," Milo confirmed, already moving on. "Renee's in. Cass?"

"I'll watch," Cass said.

"You'll play," Talia corrected.

Cass sighed. That was apparently also a yes.

"So are we actually playing competitively or is this more of a 'hit the ball and see what happens' situation?" Milo asked, already invested.

"It's vacation volleyball, Milo," Talia said. "Nobody's keeping score."

"I'm keeping score," Cass said, without looking up.

"Has anyone actually played volleyball recently?" Renee asked, and everyone looked at her because she'd been quiet for the last few minutes and had clearly been following every word regardless.

"I played in college," Talia said.

"I played at a barbecue once," Milo offered. "I was adequate. Mostly."

"That 'mostly' is doing a lot of work," Cass said.

"What about you, Ade?" Talia asked, turning to me. "Any volleyball experience?"

"I watched a game on TV once," I said. "Ate chips the entire time. That's the extent of my training."

"So we're all terrible," Milo said, looking genuinely delighted. "That's actually perfect. Nobody can be disappointed."

"I can," Cass said.

"Cass, respectfully, you're going to be keeping score from a lounge chair," Milo said. "Your expectations are irrelevant."

"My expectations are never irrelevant," Cass said, and Talia kissed her on the cheek and said, "She's right, they're not."

Milo turned to Renee. "Please tell me you're also terrible. I need solidarity."

Renee took a sip of her coffee. "I played in high school."

"Great," Milo groaned. "So Talia played in college, you played in high school, and I hit a ball at a barbecue. At least Ade and I can be terrible together."

"I didn't say I was good," Renee said.

"You didn't say you weren't," I pointed out, and Renee glanced at me with something close to amusement.

"I was okay," she said. "It's been a while."

"'It's been a while' from someone who actually played is still better than 'I ate chips,'" Milo said, pointing at me. "This is going to be fun."

"It's going to be something," Cass said, reaching for the last of her coffee, and the table dissolved into the kind of loose, overlapping laughter that didn't need a reason.

"So lunch first, then beach?" Milo said, stacking his plate on Talia's like she'd volunteered for cleanup duty.

"Lunch, then beach, then volleyball, then whatever happens after that," Talia said, ticking them off on her fingers.

"That's a whole itinerary," I said.

"That's a warm-up," Milo corrected.

Cass stood up, tucked her book under her arm, and looked at Talia. "I need to change if I'm being dragged into a sport."

"You're not being dragged. You volunteered."

"I sighed, Talia. That's not volunteering."

"It is in this marriage," Talia said, taking Cass's arm as they headed toward the path. Milo trailed after them, already debating whether board shorts counted as athletic wear.

Renee stood up. "I'm heading back," she said, glancing at me. "You coming?"

"Yeah," I said, grabbing my plate. "Same direction anyway."

We fell into step on the path that wound between the bungalows. The morning was warm without being aggressive about it, and the sounds from the restaurant faded quickly into the quieter rhythm of the grounds — birds, distant water, the crunch of our sandals on the gravel.

"So how bad are you actually going to be at this?" Renee asked, not looking at me.

"At volleyball? Genuinely terrible," I said. "I wasn't exaggerating about the chips. That's my entire athletic history."

"You were fine in the kayak," she said.

"You had to coach me through half of it."

"I gave you one tip. You figured out the rest."

"That's a generous read of what happened," I said, and Renee made a sound that was almost a laugh.

"Milo's going to be a problem out there," I said after a moment. "He's going to treat every point like a life event."

"He does seem like the type," Renee said.

"Him and Talia together are going to be chaos," I said. "They feed off each other's energy."

"Speaking of those two," Renee said, glancing at me, "what was all that whispering about? When we got back to the table."

"No idea," I said. "I asked and got a weather forecast that may or may not have involved snorkeling."

"Something was off there," Renee said.

"You noticed that too?" I shook my head. "Milo straightened up so fast he almost broke something, and Talia was suddenly fascinated by her juice glass."

"Weird," Renee said.

"That doesn't bother you?" I asked.

"Should it?" Renee asked.

"It bothers me," I said. "Milo had a face like he'd swallowed evidence."

Renee actually laughed at that — short, easy, her shoulders dropping a fraction. "He did look like that," she admitted. "But Talia had it worse. That juice glass fascination was criminal."

"Completely criminal," I agreed, and we were both smiling now, the kind of shared amusement that didn't need to be explained because we'd both been sitting at the same table watching the same two people act like complete idiots.

We reached my bungalow and I slowed, turning toward the door.

Renee kept walking, then half-turned. "See you at lunch?"

"See you at lunch," I said.

She raised a hand slightly — the closest thing to a wave Renee Miller would ever produce — and continued down the path toward bungalow 12.

I went inside and dropped my key on the side table. The notebook was still on the desk where I'd left it, closed.

I sat on the edge of the bed and kicked off my sandals.

I looked at the notebook for a moment, thinking about the pages inside — the first thing I'd written in months that hadn't felt like pulling teeth. Something about that was still warm, still close. And underneath it, faint but unmistakable, there was something else. Not a story, not yet. But the shape of one, maybe. A character who helps people put themselves back together while quietly falling apart herself. A woman who listens more than she speaks and says more in silence than most people say with words. It wasn't the kind of thing I wrote — not even close — and I had no idea what I'd do with it. But it was there, the first flicker of something that felt like it could become an idea if I let it.

And then, quietly, Renee's voice: Well, let me know when you do.