Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-three

Packing up Tea Tide feels like its own kind of funeral, one that moves in stops and starts over the course of two excruciating days. I let the staff know first, in a meeting and over a few phone calls that I manage to stay composed for even though I feel like I'm rotting from the inside out. I call all our local suppliers to stop deliveries. I set up a storage unit on the edge of Benson Beach to hold the tables and chairs and stools, the baking equipment and the metal prep tables and our giant mixer, the teacups and the plates and the itty-bitty spoons. In a particularly grim moment, I even imagine a Death to Tea Tide scone—just throwing together every cast-off ingredient we have left in the back into a batter so it won't go to waste and walking away.

For now, though, I'm in a strange limbo in between the ending and the end. I'm packing the boxes up little by little each night on my own, but nothing has been collected yet. I haven't said a word to anyone about it. I'm gutting the place from the inside out, but technically we're still open for another few days, baking scones on a sinking ship.

Around midnight on day three of packing up what I can without disrupting too much of the flow, I accidentally drop a teacup. I stare at the shattered pieces of it on the pale pink linoleum floors Annie must have sent me a hundred near identical colors for before settling on. I crouch, leaning on one of the seafoam-green chairs she and I painted flowers on one Christmas when I was home. And I look at this teacup—a nothing-special teacup; just one of the dozens of identical pink floral ones hanging from the wall—and the instant my fingers graze the broken handle, I start to cry.

They aren't the big, gulping tears I was bracing for. They aren't even the wretched, guilt-fueled tears that have been stinging the backs of my eyes since Nancy delivered the news. The tears are quiet and insular and the kind that are only meant for me and for Annie. For two little girls who had big ideas and thought they had all the time in the world to see them through.

I've been trying to avoid thinking of Annie all through this process. I can't stop myself from thinking how disappointed she'd be, how angry. But I think maybe the truth is worse—she wouldn't be. She'd know how hard I tried. She knew how much this place meant to me, too. I'm not upset because I've let Annie down; I'm upset because Annie isn't around to let down at all.

I ease myself all the way to the floor, just sitting for a moment in the silence, holding on to the broken handle. In my mind these past few years, Annie has stayed static. The way she was is the way she always will be. And the more time that passes, the harder it is to reconcile that I'm still changing. That I always will be. And that with every single one of those changes, there's going to be a part of me that wants to turn over my shoulder and ask Annie what she thinks of it. A part of me that ghosts a thumb over my phone, that still thinks of her as the first call when something happens to rock my world.

Back then it felt like I needed her before I made any decisions. Not necessarily for her approval, even. I just felt better about my world when Annie knew the edges of it. It's what I'm itching for now, in the growing pains of everything changing so fast. I want so badly to know what she would think about everything that happened with Levi. I want to know what she'd do next with Tea Tide, if she were in my shoes.

But when I ask those questions now, there isn't any version of Annie who could answer them. Not seventeen-year-old Annie who had her sights set on Stanford with Levi. Not twenty-three-year-old Annie who started Tea Tide from the ground up. Not the twenty-nine-year-old Annie she'd be, one I've never met, one who might surprise me every bit as much as I've surprised myself.

I'm not stalling because I'm scared of asking Annie. I'm stalling because I'm scared of moving forward myself.

I set the handle next to the other broken pieces and ease myself back up, taking a moment to look around the space in one of its final, untouched moments. In the quiet, I finally feel it. Under the grief, under the guilt, there is a soft kind of sadness in me. One that started as a yearning and is now ending as an ache. One that has nothing to do with Annie and everything to do with me.

There were so many things I wanted to do with this place. I wanted to make it a community meeting ground locals could rely on and tourists could explore. I wanted to test out wacky, ridiculous scones and watch people's reactions to them in real time instead of hearing about them from thousands of miles away. I wanted to establish a presence here so firm that I felt confident recreating it in other places, giving them all their own personal quirks and touches. I wanted Tea Tide to have its own distinct kind of magic.

The magic isn't gone. I can still feel it humming under my feet like it was just waiting for me to seize it, for me to remember it was there at all. But I've been so busy trying to hold on to the past that I lost sight of the present, and now it feels like it's all falling out from under me, making the future hazier than it's ever been.

I take a breath then, and I push them out of me one by one—all the questions I've wanted to ask Annie. I let them slip back into the magic beneath me, dip under the boardwalk, slide into the sea. I wait to feel like there's something missing in me, but she's still there, the same way she always will be. The love doesn't leave. Just the parts I'm still demanding from it, when all it's wanted in these past two years is to settle in me. To accept that Annie's gone.

To accept that I have to make my own choices now. To accept that I have to live with them. To accept that I get to live, and I'd better start doing it on my own terms if I want it to count.

I drift back to the office as the questions start blooming out of the floor again, taking a new shape. This time, they aren't asking Annie. They're asking me.

What do you want to do?

I close my eyes and stand in the haze of the future. It's thrilling and it's scary how fast it can take shape and change and take shape again. How this ending can give way to so many little new beginnings. How I get to be the one to choose.

I pull my phone out of my pocket and find Cassie's email, and when the shapes change again, I feel a kind of peace wash over me that I haven't felt in a long, long time.