Chapter Nineteen

I wake up the next morning with a pounding headache from tossing and turning all night, plus several texts from Levi.

I'm so sorry. I lost track of time. Thank you for sending the measurements, says the first one. He must have seen me mark it as resolved on our shared document for the wedding.

I'm expecting the next text to be some kind of reassurance or explanation about Kelly, about his "losing track of time," but instead it says, Do you still want to go through the pictures for the rehearsal slideshow today?

I blink at the screen, the words stirring me awake faster than my alarm did. Gathering our half of the photos for the surprise slideshow the families are making for Mateo and Dylan is a task we've both been putting off for reasons neither of us has to say out loud. So many of our group's best memories, so many of the photo-worthy moments we've got, have Annie right at the heart of them. But the next Airbnb renters are coming tomorrow, so if we don't go tonight, we won't be able to get in for a week.

Also—"The Levi"? August Hart. You have some explaining to do.

My lips tug upward, but the satisfaction is fleeting. There are no other texts, and suddenly the silence about the Kelly situation is screaming between my ears. I should just ask what's going on, but I can't bring myself to do it. It feels too needy. Like this is some sort of test in our trust, and if I'm the one who bends right now and asks, it means I'm the one who's questioning it. It means I'm the one who doesn't have faith.

And then I realize whatever I'm feeling right now—it's not just the dread of the situation. I'm angry with him. He spent years shutting me out, and this feels like a quiet version of it. The last thing I want to do right now is go through old pictures with him. The last thing I want to do is rehash the last time we were on the verge of something, and he pulled away.

I groggily type back a text with a joke to break the tension, hoping it might prompt him to explain, but I'm too upset to finish it. Instead, I send a curt, No worries. I can handle the pics.

Levi starts to type back immediately. What time are you heading over?

I set the phone down. Still no explanation about Kelly. Not even an explanation about where he is right now. Which must mean she's still in town, possibly even staying in his condo. My stomach churns. She's possibly even in his bed.

I sit upright, the thought of it sending another angry charge through me. I know Levi. I know that isn't what's happening right now. But I'm also furious that I'm so in the dark about all of this that he's leaving me to imagine it. Maybe I didn't have a right to know what was going on between him and Kelly when we were just playing at a relationship, but after everything we said to each other, after everything we did, this feels almost cruel.

I know he doesn't mean for it to be. I hear the word in my head— unsettled —and I remember that's what he is right now. That's what our entire lives are right now. And I can make space for that. I just didn't count on what might happen if he were unsettled about me.

He doesn't show at Tea Tide that day, but he's waiting for me outside my parents' house when I walk over. My brows lift in surprise, and only then do I realize I was scowling the entire way. He's leaning against a beam on the front porch, his head tilted down. His eyes sweep up to meet mine. There's an apology in them, and something else. A quiet caution that makes me want to stay rooted to the sidewalk and not let him say a single word.

"How long have you been standing out here?" I ask.

He holds my gaze. "I don't want you to have to go through those photos alone."

I nod, and for a moment, the rest of it fades. The reality of the task in front of us sinks in, and as I feel the weight of it settle between us, I'm glad that I don't have to shoulder it alone.

But once we walk inside, it suddenly feels like we're in a play. The stage directions are telling us to walk down to the dusty basement, to pull out the photos my mom has categorized by year in the back closet. They're telling us to sit on the couch and start spreading them out neatly on the coffee table. They're just not giving us any lines until I finally work up the nerve to say, "Is Kelly still here?"

"No, she went home a few hours ago," he says evenly.

The word home strikes a dissonant chord. I can't tell if he means her home or theirs.

He shifts on the couch, angling himself toward me. "I'm sorry she showed up like that," he says. "That was—I mean, you know how unexpected that was. And the timing was just—absolutely awful."

I can tell he's going to say more, but I can't spend one more second wondering. "Are you two getting back together?" I blurt.

His eyebrows rise, his face so immediately stricken by the question that I realize it never even occurred to him I'd ask it. "No. June. I'm sorry," he says, not just with the sincerity of before, but genuine earnestness. He turns and looks at me, really looks at me for the first time since we walked into the house, and he must see it then—the uncertainty, the dread, the frustration. "Oh, June."

He reaches out and wraps an arm around my shoulders, and I press my forehead into his collarbone. The relief is so staggering that I can feel the slightest quiver in my voice when I say, "I didn't hear from you all day. I wasn't sure what to think."

"I just was—yesterday really threw me for a loop," he says, using the hand wrapped around me to squeeze my shoulder. "There were a lot of things she wanted to say, and—things I needed to say, too. We were together for a long time."

"I know," I say, but it doesn't come out as understanding as I want it to. There's an edge in my voice, an edge I've been teetering on ever since he answered her call.

"June," he says, pressing the words into my hair. "I meant everything I said that night."

I linger there for a moment, my eyes closed, trying to let the words sink in. But I'm too uneasy. Too on guard. I pull away from him slowly, meeting his worried eyes.

"But it's like you said," I say carefully. "You were together a long time. And until a few days ago, you were trying to make it work. And then she's here, just like you wanted, asking for you to get back together—that is why she was here, right?"

Levi nods, his eyes sweeping down. Then he gathers up the hands in my lap and holds them in his, his touch featherlight. "I told her I've moved on. And I have, June. Kelly and I have been drifting apart for a long time now. I think I was just so jarred by everything else in my life shifting that I was holding on to the idea of us. I'm pretty sure that's why she came here, too. Just out of fear of everything changing." He squeezes my hands gently, like he's pressing the words into me. "But I don't feel that way anymore. Things between me and Kelly—they're over."

"But," I supply. Because I know there's a but. I might believe every word he's saying, but I saw it in his eyes at the front door. I heard it in the silence of this past day.

Levi's grip softens. "I'm going back to New York for a little while. Just to square things up."

I go as still as he is, like I'm seeing something flash out of the corner of my eye and bracing for potential impact. "Like what?"

"The apartment. My job." Levi looks away from me again, toward the small pile of photos we've been poring through. "And… to be honest, to finish the draft. It's due soon, and I haven't made much progress."

I slowly pull my hands out of his, settling them back in my lap. Levi just leaves his own resting on my thighs, like he's waiting for them to come back.

"I guess our little pact didn't help matters," I say, trying to keep my tone light.

Levi turns back to me, shaking his head vehemently. "June. Every second of the Revenge Exes has been more ridiculous than the last, but you have to know I wouldn't have traded a single one of them for the world."

The knot of dread in my chest loosens slightly, enough that I feel a reluctant smile twitch at my lips. Levi seems relieved to see it.

"What I mean is—every time I try to write that manuscript, the tone is just all wrong. Like being here instead of where it's set is throwing me off," he explains.

The twitch of a smile disappears, my brow furrowing in concern. "So basically, being here where you're happy instead of there where you're not?"

There's that same expression he was making at the door when I arrived, the one with the apology in it. Like he doesn't want it to be true any more than I do. It makes me ache for him—both the Levi in front of me and the Levi who wrote that first manuscript. The one who was so determined to face everything alone.

"Where are you staying?" I ask.

"There's a spare room in the apartment we were using for an office, so I'm going to stay there." And then, off my worried expression, he adds, "Kelly works long hours. I'm barely going to see her."

But I'm not worried about Levi being around Kelly. It's the fact that he's choosing to be around her. That after everything we just said to each other, all the unspoken promises I thought we made the other night, he's choosing to be somewhere I'm not.

"How long will you be gone for?" I ask, my throat dry.

"Two weeks—three at the most, depending on what arrangements I make for the move." He says the words quickly, like he's been rehearsing them in his head since he decided. "We'll just be an hour and a half apart. We'll still be able see each other. And then I'll be back."

"So you're leaving soon," I realize.

He hesitates for a moment and then says, "I'm leaving tomorrow."

This stings with more force that I'm expecting it to, enough that I'm blinking like I just got bowled into by a sharp gust of wind. I press myself farther into the couch, farther from him.

And then I almost laugh. "I guess I'll see you next weekend," I say.

"Yeah?" Levi asks, a lift in his voice.

"I'm doing that special with Griffin." I give him a tight-lipped smile and say, "You don't mind if I use the whole Revenge Exes thing to blow up our spot one last time?"

Now it's Levi whose eyes are cloudy with worry. "Of course not," he says anyway. He lets out a breath of a laugh. "Aren't we technically still Revenge Exes?"

We are, but suddenly I don't want us to be. I want us to just be June and Levi, the way we should have been from the start. I want to have enough of a foundation together that Levi wouldn't have things to settle in New York, and I wouldn't have all the doubts swirling in my head.

"Yeah," I say. "Guess so."

Levi leans in, close enough that I'm aching for him to be closer even as I feel like I have to hold some part of myself away. "What made you decide to do the special?" he asks.

"Part of it is to get a last surge of traffic for Tea Tide. But the other is just… for closure." Only now that I've said it out loud do I realize how much I want it. A firm ending of my "Griffin era." A clean slate so I can start out fresh with whatever's coming next, whether Levi is part of it or not. "It's like you said about Kelly. We were together a long time. This will be a clean break." I tilt my head at him. "Or at least, one where I'm not crying a geyser into a hot mic."

He nods stiffly, accepting but clearly wary. I can hear the reluctance in his voice when he settles on saying, "Just—be careful."

I tap my palm on his knee, light and quick. "You too."

We search each other's faces then, and I see it—the unwavering trust. The mutual understanding. The way we know each other too well to feel anything but. Maybe it will be enough to get us through this and maybe it won't. It's the first time in my life I've ever been scared at the feeling of hope, knowing just how much possibility is on the other side of it, but I cling to it just the same.

We set to work on the photos then. The first few boxes are easy to search through—squishy versions of Annie and me and Dylan, our parents parading us around Benson Beach with cheeks shiny from sunscreen and Cheerios tangled in our hair. It seems wild to me that at one point, my parents were wrangling three kids under four years old when they weren't much older than I am now.

We set aside a few cute shots of baby Dylan for the slideshow—a particular favorite of mine has Dylan propped on Annie's lap, with me sitting next to her and staring down at Dylan like he's an alien—and move past the baby pictures. Levi starts showing up in them not long after that, first in shots with just Annie, then in shots with the rest of the Harts as we quietly absorbed him into our chaos.

Levi stops at one and holds it off the table. It's Annie and Levi in their kindergarten class together, dressed up as Raggedy Ann and Spider-Man and holding matching candy bags. Annie's got a frilly sleeved arm wrapped around Levi's shoulders, and his toothy grin is so wide under his mask I can practically hear the little-kid laugh about to bubble out of him.

"You two were so close," I say quietly.

Levi's own voice is hoarse as he stares at the picture like he's both in that memory and a hundred others at once. "Yeah."

"We have doubles of that one. You should keep it."

Levi nods and sets the photo aside from the others before carrying on, notably slower now. We work like this in relative quiet—a respectful, shared thing, like we're trying to avoid walking on two different graves. Levi's memories of Annie, and mine.

It feels like the present is suspended, like we're dipping in and out of years gone by. The elementary school years full of face paint and field days, the town Fourth of July parade and long beach days in the summer, sandy limbs and wet, tangled hair. The preteen years full of braces and middle school dances, Annie in her debate club T-shirt, Levi carting around the AlphaSmart keyboard he used to type on before he could buy a cheap laptop, me and Dylan on the bleachers at our first track meets. Fewer shots of high school—mostly ones of family vacations and graduations, because by then we were starting to save everything online.

The last box is a mess, but a delightful one. It's stuffed to the brim with Polaroids from Dylan's old camera taken in overexposed sunlight, all of us at a theme park the summer before I turned seventeen—a perfect summer. The summer before I started crushing on Levi, and we were all just happily coexisting in each other's orbits the way we had as kids, but with the freedom of teenagers who had access to a car. I cackle at a particularly prophetic image Annie must have taken of a tiny, pre–growth spurt Mateo staring moony-eyed at an oblivious Dylan, who was busy plucking a nacho fry out of a platter in Levi's hands.

"I can't believe it took them until college to get together." I laugh, pulling the photo aside for the slideshow, fully aware that Mateo will make me rue the day. "Mateo had it bad ."

"Don't know if it would have done him any good to figure it out earlier. Dylan just didn't seem interested in dating until college." Levi smirks at the next picture, all of us exhausted and sweaty on a bench, Mateo yet again sneaking a glance at Dylan. "But yeah. He had it bad."

Our laughter tapers off at the next picture. Me and Mateo asleep in the back seat. Mateo's head is propped on the window, but mine is resting on Levi's shoulder, and Levi's eyes are on me.

"I remember that day," says Levi with an unmistakable fondness.

"Me too." I tap a finger on my sleeping face and say, "Someday you and that boy are going to have a strangely passionate internet fanbase by the throats."

Levi hums. "Someday you're going to do a whole lot more than that."

His hand has wandered to my thigh, the pressure of his fingers searching, cautious. I lean into him, and it's so tempting to give in to the warmth uncoiling in my chest right now, in to the sweet hum just under my skin that starts exactly where his hand is resting.

But louder than that is the ache of everything that feels unresolved right now. The fear that Levi will go back to New York, come to his senses, and change his mind. The fear that this is just going to be an encore of the last time we broke each other's hearts.

"Someday you're going to have a whole lot of regrets," I say to the picture.

"Hey," says Levi, grazing his nose against my temple. He stays close, his breath warm against my cheek. "We're going to be okay. These weeks will fly by. I'll be back, and things at Tea Tide will settle, and we'll throw Mateo and Dylan the best damn wedding Benson Beach has ever seen and make total fools of ourselves on the dance floor."

I turn my face toward him, and Levi kisses me slow and deep. Levi kisses me like it's an apology and a promise. I kiss him back, terrified, because I can't help but kiss him like it might be goodbye.

It's Levi's own words I'm remembering as I stamp this moment into my heart, trying to take hold of something even as I'm preparing to let it go: Let's take the whole moving back thing off the table. We take all of it off the table, even. We just take it one step at a time. You and me.

Those steps suddenly feel like we're taking them on a tightrope, and I'm the only one of us willing to look down.

We pull away, but Levi's hand stays steady against my jaw. I lean into it, savoring the feeling even as I ask him something that might damn us.

"If you stay here, what are you going to do?" I ask. "I mean—are you going to write like you planned?"

"That's what I'm hoping," he says.

I ease myself away from him, then root through my bag at my feet. My fingers stop on the papers I carefully put into a thick folder yesterday, that I've had stashed away since. It feels less like I'm giving him an old manuscript and more like I'm surrendering the very last piece of my heart.

"I found this in Annie's things," I tell him, handing him the early scenes of The Sky Seekers .

I see the recognition dawn as he flips through it. The recognition and something else—a longing. A nostalgia. They streak across his face so quickly that it would be easy to miss it if I hadn't felt all of it myself.

"Anything you write is going to be a hit. I know that," I tell him firmly, sincerely. "But I thought you should have it. Not just for the sake of your writing. But because it's yours."

He thumbs through it, taking it all in—both the typed words and the scrawled notes in the margins. Some of them his and some of them Annie's. Not just a story, but a capturing of a moment in time.

When he looks up, he gives me a watery, grateful smile. The kind that cinches in my chest.

"Thank you," he tells me. He sets the pages next to the photo of Annie with the same kind of reverence. "I've been remembering pieces of it lately, but—this is so much more than I ever thought I'd have back." He lets out a self-conscious laugh. "And it's nice to know I had other ideas once. I've been so focused on getting this manuscript done that I'm not even sure what to start on the other side of it."

"Well, if you ever want to revisit an old idea, you know I've got even more than that stashed in my brain," I say, tapping my temple.

"I'd like that," he says warmly. "Even if I don't go back to it. But I'd like to think someday I will."

There's a wistfulness that settles between us then, one that makes us both go quiet, lost in our own thoughts. I wonder if we're in the same place right now—wandering through our old woods, the sunlight streaming through the trees, the cicadas humming under our feet, the world an infinite, sprawling thing ready for us to create anything we wanted.

After a few moments of quiet, I nudge him with my elbow and say, "Maybe someday you'll even write me into something, huh?"

I mean for it to be a cheeky way of letting him know I still recognize all his characters. Annie did, too. It's right there on the first page in her purple ink: You planning on asking me and Dylan for our life rights orrrrr??

But Levi's expression dims. His eyes linger on mine, the guilt in them so acute that it's almost like his trail of thought has woven its way right into my own head. Flicked on a light and exposed something I probably should have noticed a while back.

"Oh," I manage.

Because it feels like a cosmic joke. I was so focused on wondering why I wasn't in The Sky Seekers to even think to look for myself anywhere else.

"The girlfriend the main character is so tortured about in your New York book. The one he loves but feels like he has to leave behind, to break up with for her own good." I close my eyes, feeling a rueful smile bloom on my face. "That's me, isn't it?"

When I open my eyes again, Levi's own smile is just as sad. "I was just—processing, in my own way," he says. "I missed you so badly. You have no idea."

But of course I do. I spent the same years missing him, every version of him I could imagine. The Levi who was my best friend. The Levi I fell for in high school. The Levi he is right now, because there is no iteration of Levi I haven't pined for, haven't wanted at my side. When you love someone the way I love Levi, it becomes every bit as much a feeling as it is a part of your own soul. Something inevitable. Something permanent. Something that never quite had a clear beginning and will never end.

It should be an earth-shattering moment, letting myself acknowledge that I'm in love with Levi. But it isn't. It's quiet and gentle and sure. It has been a part of me for so long that it doesn't know any other way to be.

No, it isn't the love that scares me. It's what might happen to it. I pull in a quick, shaky breath and say, "I'm going to go ahead and guess they don't have a happy ending."

He does just what I'm hoping he'll do. He leans in to wrap his arms around me, to hold me so firmly that I sink into the warmth of it, breathing him in like I can keep the feeling of this in my chest after we come apart.

"It's only a story, June," he says. "We get to make our own endings."

I nod into his chest, but that's just it. I don't want an ending. I want a beginning. And right now—with Levi leaving in the morning, with the doubt swimming in my heart, with so much unresolved between us and the pasts we're leaving behind—I feel like I'm still holding my breath, waiting for the story to start.