Chapter Seventeen

"Mateo, no ," Dylan says with a gasp, launching himself toward his fiancé heroically.

Mateo freezes, still holding the tiny ceramic baby he picked up from our parents' mantel. The usual person our parents have on call to clean between Airbnb bookers was busy this morning, leaving it to me and Dylan, plus one procrastinating Mateo, who has a stack of papers full of phone numbers and Instagram handles he has no interest in grading today.

"Is it fragile?" Mateo asks, eyes wide behind his glasses. He and my mom are so bonded by their love of history podcasts and flea markets that I'm pretty sure the idea of doing anything to upset her would cause him physical pain.

"I wish," says Dylan ruefully, keeping a wide berth between himself and the ceramic baby. "It's haunted is what it is. You could launch that thing straight into the sun and it would come out with its creepy grin intact on the other side."

Mateo stares down at it, puzzled. "It's an infant."

I roll my eyes, taking it from his careful hands and setting it back on the mantel. Technically, this cleanup is taking me away from the little free time I have to come up with better long-term ideas for Tea Tide. But given that my brain's resting state right now is "panic about Kelly stepping foot in Benson Beach," I probably wasn't going to get much done anyway. So I'm taking the advice Sana gave me on my way out of her apartment an hour ago. I'm not going to overthink it. In fact, I'm just not going to think about it at all.

Seeing as I've checked my phone approximately fifteen times in the last two minutes, that's easier said than done.

"Dylan had a nightmare about it coming to life when we were younger and tried to throw it away," I explain to Mateo.

Mateo's eyes soften, turning to my brother with that same lovesick look he's had ever since we were teenagers. "Aw. Little Dylan."

I snort. "He was fifteen. Also, say cheese."

Mateo turns just in time for me to tap the camera app on my phone and take a quick picture. "What for?"

"Your students let me into the ‘Professor Díaz's SWEAT!!!er Vests' account on Instagram," I finally confess. "I don't think they've seen this one, so I'm earning my keep."

Mateo's mouth drops open. "For someone who's been dodging literal paparazzi right and left, I'd think you'd be a little more sensitive to the sanctity of my Friday vests."

Indeed, this one featured a subtle pattern of knit comets and dinosaurs in a deep navy and royal green he'd opted to pair with a short-sleeve button-down. It seemed like a waste for him to spend it here indoors all day, changing sheets and recounting Dylan's grudges against a Precious Moments knockoff.

Dylan leans in and puts a loose arm around Mateo's shoulders, mouth half-full of a granola bar he liberated from the pantry. "Leave my fiancé alone, you monster."

"He was my best friend before you realized you wanted to suck face with him," I remind Dylan with a pointed look.

"Hmmm." Mateo plants a quick kiss on Dylan's cheek and shoots me a placating look, but otherwise continues to rearrange the mantel. "It must have been nice to have autonomy outside the Hart family, but I can't seem to remember what it was like."

To be fair, Dylan has been absorbed into the Díazes every bit as aggressively as Mateo has been into us. Dylan first won their love with his bottomless appetite and appreciation for all of Mateo's family's cooking, secured it with the uncanny lifting abilities he's put to work at every Díaz wedding, quincea?era, and baby shower for the last decade, and immortalized it by proposing to Mateo in his parents' massive backyard so that the Díaz cousins could immediately descend on them with enough wine and cake that they probably could have just gotten married on the spot.

"Also, please tell me this irrational fear of ceramic babies isn't a manifestation of your actual fear of children," says Mateo. "Because as we've discussed, my mom is expecting no less than three."

Dylan looks offended. "Only three? That's not enough for our soccer team." The tenderness of the moment is slightly undercut by Dylan side-eyeing the ceramic piece and saying, "Plus I assume none of our kids will be possessed by Satan like this thing is."

Dylan uses the arm he still has slung around Mateo's narrow shoulders to squeeze him into his side, the gesture so innate and familiar that I feel an unexpected pang in my heart. I wonder where Levi is right now. I wonder what he and Kelly are saying to each other. I wonder enough to check my phone yet again, because I am nothing if not a sucker for an empty screen.

Except it isn't empty. There's a text from Griffin. Just checking in about that special! They could even squeeze us into the New York studio next Saturday—they'll book you a hotel and everything!

I roll my eyes and tuck the phone back into my pocket, getting back to work.

"Seems weird that strangers sleep in here, huh," says Dylan when we reach the one room we always come to last.

For the most part, Annie's room is exactly the way she left it—bubblegum-pink walls, massive seashell collection, ancient Sims CD-ROMs, and all. But the dressers were cleared out for guests, so everything worth saving is now kept in a locked cabinet in the walk-in closet.

"Yeah," I agree, my chest too tight to say much else.

"And strange that things just keep moving without her." Dylan reaches out and picks up one of her debate trophies, one of the many where they misspelled our last name as "Heart." Annie never corrected them. She liked it better that way. "Especially now. Me with Mateo. You with Levi."

I let out a breathy laugh. Dylan turns to me and says, "I bet that'd make Annie happy."

My throat feels thick with all the mounting guilt. I've been so wrapped up in my feelings for Levi that I've forgotten there are other people in our crossfire, too. That if we don't work out, Dylan might find out we lied the entire time. That if we do, it might not have made Annie happy at all. That years ago, Annie was so intent on me and Levi not happening that she got into a screaming match with Levi over it.

I haven't even had time to process that yet. It doesn't know how to settle in me. Maybe because I don't think Annie's anger had much to do with me at all—she just wanted Levi to be in California with her, and I was a factor standing in the way of it.

But I was also her sister. And I think that's why I can't peer at that argument too closely, can't follow it all the way down. I know she was only seventeen when she said it, but at one point her own plans with Levi were so important to her that she didn't care if I got hurt so she could keep them. She didn't care if Levi did, either.

"Yeah. Maybe," I say.

Dylan sets the trophy back down. There's nothing reverent or careful about it, which is its own kind of respect, I've come to realize. I always tiptoe around everything, but he treats the idea of Annie the same way he treated her when she was here.

"Gotta say, though," says Dylan. "As fucked up as it is, what happened to you and Levi—it's… nice."

"Nice?" I say, raising my eyebrows at him.

"I mean—nice having everyone around again."

I fluff one of the pillows on Annie's bed. "You missed your buddy Levi, huh?" I tease him.

For once, Dylan isn't ready with that easy smile. "I've missed you, too, sis."

I lean my knees against the edge of the mattress, feeling suddenly uncertain. "But I've been home a long time now."

Mateo knocks softly on the doorframe. "Hey, Cassie says we can swing by and take a look at some mock-ups for the cake, if we want to meet her at the bakery."

"I can finish up here," I offer.

Dylan tilts his head at me. "We've barely had a chance to catch up. You're sure you don't want to come with?"

There's a moment I almost say yes. Cassie is still checking in with me periodically about meeting to talk about expanding, or at least other ways we could tweak Tea Tide. Maybe it's just the way everything in my life has shaken up lately, but the idea doesn't put the same pit in my stomach it has for the past two years.

Then my eyes sweep past a framed photo—me and Annie in poofy princess dresses at my sixth birthday party, both of us drink ing apple juice out of fancy teacups, our hair tangled in our crowns from running around in the backyard.

I'm angry with her, I realize. For what she said to Levi that day. For what it set into motion. But more than that, for the years afterward when she still had him as a friend, and I didn't.

I know that part was my fault and not hers. But I'm angry about it anyway, and guilty for being angry, and so tangled in all of it that I can't even let myself think about doing anything drastic with Tea Tide right now. It would almost feel like it was out of retaliation, if I did it with this anger in my heart.

"I should stick around here today," I tell Dylan.

He lingers for a moment, long enough to prompt me to look up. But by then, he's already headed toward the door, leaving me alone in Annie's room. I settle on the edge of her bed, breathing deep, trying to let the anger go. Trying to fill the space it takes up with the good, because we had more than our fair share, and Tea Tide will always be at the heart of it.

I can't pinpoint a moment we decided to open a tea shop in town; I just remember that it was a thread that followed us our whole lives. We were all early risers, and my mom would make a massive pot of tea every morning and make it last the whole day, letting us sneak sips when we were little and have our own cups when it was decaf. We had these giant seafoam-green mugs my dad got my mom for her birthday, and I remember clutching mine with hands all sticky from Eggo waffles or coffee cake on weekend mornings, sitting in a too-big chair on the porch, listening to the ocean and watching the neighbors go to and from the beach.

My mom always used to say how nice it would be to have a tea shop by the sea. How it was a shame that the closest place with decent tea service and good scones was in the city. It made those annual Christmas trips to the city special—we always went to the Russian Tea Room for their holiday service while Dylan and my dad went off on their own—but it was one of those ideas we all daydreamed about, turning it back and forth like a lazy wave in our minds until eventually it stopped turning and just sank in: we could do it ourselves.

I had no intention of holding Annie to it—Stanford opened her up to such a massive world of opportunity that I wouldn't have done anything to limit it. But she persisted in talking about it her whole time there. Planning color schemes, dreaming up menus, keeping an eye on prime Benson Beach locations. She wanted a quiet, pretty place where she could write. She wanted to leave her mark on the place we called home.

"I'm just going to do it," she said to me over the phone one day. I was somewhere at the top of Norway, staring at fjords in bright daylight at midnight. She was freshly graduated and back in Benson Beach. "It'll be here waiting for you whenever you get back."

It was our dream, but it was also my safety net. An assurance that I could go as far as I thought I needed to go and still have a life waiting for me. A job. A sister. A home.

I understand now that it was less Annie assuring me that there was a place for me and more Annie asking me to come back and take it.

The little girls in the photo are still watching me. I turn away from them and toward Annie's closet, now empty of all the things I borrowed that never found their way back. Without consciously deciding to, I pull the key out from under the nightstand and walk over to the drawers full of her things.

Dylan put them all in here in the days after the funeral, so I'm not sure what to expect. Mostly it's old toys of hers from when we were kids. Her baby blanket. A few art projects from when she was younger. A finisher's medal from the local 5K Dylan convinced her to do when she was a senior and he was a sophomore, after which she wheezed at him very pointedly, "Never. Again."

The next drawer is more of the same, plus the graduation program listing her as the salutatorian, where she gave a two-minute speech about how she wasn't qualified to dispense any knowledge, just goodwill—a speech that infamously ended with the words, "Good luck out there, everyone. The only real advice I can offer you? Just try not to fuck up."

I smile at the memory of the absolutely scandalized look on the principal's face as my parents tried to muffle their laughter from the audience. It was a phrase she uttered often and with relish, but certainly not one anyone ever expected her to blurt with dozens of camera phones trained on her. But that was Annie for you—she said what needed saying, whether you wanted to hear it or not.

I set the program on top of a pile of loose papers, but not before I see Levi's name on one of them. I know precisely what the papers are before I decide to lift them out of the drawer. It's the missing pages from when Levi started The Sky Seekers . Annie must have printed them out when we were all still in high school, and she and Levi were constantly swapping their pages back and forth to critique.

What's funny is I've spent the last two weeks trying to plow through Levi's new manuscript about New York, and I've only managed to get about halfway through. But this—I sit on the carpet and gulp it all down in one go. It makes me startle at old memories. Makes me delight in all the little details, at the cheeky dialogue between the characters, at the unique ways Levi has of looking at the world and the way we interact with it.

But it also makes me ache. It isn't finished. It's just the potential of something—a story that, with the right care and focus, could be crafted into something iconic. A story that wouldn't just be a testament to Levi's writing talent, but his ability to see into people's hearts.

Maybe it's a story Levi will never write, but it's one he deserves to remember. So when I stack the pages back together, I don't set them back in the drawer. I tuck them under my arm, glancing at the picture as I back my way out of the room, at the two cheesing girls in their princess dresses.

"He needs these," I tell little Annie, and I have to think older Annie knows that, too.