Chapter Three

Pro tip: Never sign an on-camera release without reading the fine print.

It's weird to think it was only three months ago that Griffin got picked for Business Savvy in the first place. The details of the reality show are all blurry to me now—he pitched some vague startup idea, went for an in-person audition, and was pretty much swept off to Manhattan to start filming the next day.

When he left, I wasn't worried about anything other than missing him. Griffin's always been Griffin: personable, aggressive, driven. He may not have been spilling over with brilliant ideas, but I still expected him to come home with some kind of good news, even if he didn't win.

I did not expect him to come home with some absurdly beautiful woman named Lisel, who sat with him on my bright pink couch as he held her hand and told me she was the "love of his life" while three cameras were trained on us. Nor did I expect for Business Savvy to be a runaway hit, thanks in part to Griffin and Lisel "merging both their startup ideas and their hearts." And I certainly didn't expect when our break-up episode aired two weeks ago that my crying face would get turned into a meme on every social media platform the world over, where I've been both mocked as a na?ve fool and revered as the new Patron Saint of Women Who Have Been Cheated On.

In defense of the meme, I did look pretty ridiculous. Blotchy-cheeked, snot dribbling down my face, eyes so full of tears that I could have opened my own water park. All they needed were a bunch of close-range shots of my theatrical sobs, and boom, an internet sensation was born.

The volcanic meltdown wasn't even about the heartbreak. It was the shock. The complete and utter disbelief not just to be betrayed like that, but in my own home, by someone I'd loved for so long I never once thought to question the feeling. It was the bone-deep and immediately crushing realization that so much of what I thought I knew about my life was wrong.

I look back and can't help thinking I should have been better prepared for it. I have experience with the ground dropping out from under me. Losing Annie wasn't just losing my sister—it was losing a piece of everything in my world. When you have a sister, you don't realize how much of the way you think, the way you exist, is framed not just by your own thoughts, but hers. Don't realize how much of her colors the way you look at the world until she isn't in it, and you're staring at all the same people and places you've known your entire life and trying to recognize some new version of them, with the old colors gone.

But losing Annie was something that happened to me. Getting thrown to the wolves was something Griffin did to me. It wasn't an unfair, random, scary happening in the universe. It was deliberate. It was planned.

And somehow, I still can't bring myself to hate him for it. It would be easier if I could. But then I'd have to play more than the "what if" game. I'd have to peer at every single moment in the past ten years I chose to spend with Griffin. I'd have to acknowledge the way he never wanted to talk about the future further than our next trip, the way he called me his travel buddy as often as he called me his girlfriend. The way he encouraged me to do things that scared me, but often pushed me further than I was prepared to go. The way I knew our relationship was always missing something, that essential spark that people in love seem to have, but I had just grown too familiar with the idea of us to worry about it.

I'd have to look at all those flags in every shade of red and be every bit as mad at myself for ignoring them.

By mile six of my morning run, it's only this anger and the guava iced tea I chugged sustaining me. I'm so far in my own spiraling thoughts that I don't even notice two figures running toward me on the beach until a familiar voice crows, "June!"

Dylan waves at me with both hands, effusive as ever. I'm surprised to see him out here—seven in the morning is late for him. We may be siblings, but god only knows what was in the genes he absorbed in the womb. He's basically what happens when the Energizer Bunny has an affair with the Hulk and their love child subsequently marries a gallon of cold brew coffee to make another child. He's never not on the move, whether he's up at the crack of dawn swimming on the beach or coaching the university's track and cross-country teams or doing pull-ups on any mounted pole he sees.

He'd be positively insufferable if he didn't also happen to have the personality of a Labrador retriever and a heart of gold. Well—gold and massive amounts of cake pop–flavored protein powder.

"Look who it is!" Dylan calls, and only then do I realize the person running next to him is none other than Levi.

My pace falters once he comes closer into view. His hair is damp and tousled with sweat, his face gleaming in the early morning sun. But it's the gym shorts and the sleeveless shirt that inconveniently draw my eyes to places I'm unused to roaming—his toned shoulders, the new angles cut into his lean arms, the steady flex of his legs moving against the sand.

Technically, I'm no stranger to these parts of Levi. We all had to wear itty-bitty scraps of uniforms back in high school, when Levi and Dylan and I were all on the cross-country team. I clear my throat, trying to be as casual about it as I was back then, but then Levi gets close enough that I can see the beads of sweat collecting on his skin. One of them slides down his collarbone and it takes everything in me not to stare at it traveling under his shirt, not to imagine its path as it slides down farther.

I blink away, then almost laugh at myself. I haven't had thoughts like this about someone's body in—well, ever. It must be a side effect of being away from Levi for all these years. Maybe now my brain is just overcompensating for the lost time by trying to account for every inch of him it possibly can.

Yes. That's it and only it. And if Levi's eyes happen to linger on my own bare legs, that's probably all it is for him, too.

I've only just managed to collect myself by the time we all come to a stop. "Guess I missed my invite?" I ask lightly.

Levi opens his mouth, but Dylan beats him to it, patting Levi on the back hard enough to bruise. "I ran into him on the way to the gym and dragged him out here. I didn't even realize he was back in town!"

As far as I know, Levi's been in better touch with Dylan than he has been with me, but that's not saying much. Still, that's the thing about Dylan—it's not even that he can't hold a grudge. He is physically incapable of forming one in the first place.

I raise my eyebrows, turning toward Levi without actually looking at him. "That makes two of us."

Dylan is still grinning, blissfully unaware of the tension as Levi tries and fails to meet my eye. "We should definitely make this a morning thing, then," says Dylan. "Just like the good old days."

I nudge my sneaker into the sand. "If Levi's actually sticking around."

I feel the weight of Levi's gaze on me when he says, "I'm here for a few weeks. Renting out the first floor of the blue condo on the boardwalk."

That's only two doors down from Tea Tide. I can't help but wonder if that was on purpose, or just all that was available.

"Excellent," says Dylan as an alarm goes off on his watch. He's so easily distractible that Mateo programmed it to remind him when his shifts started. "I gotta book it to practice. Nice to have you back, Levi. See you around!"

And then Dylan unceremoniously takes off like a rocket, leaving me and Levi standing open-mouthed on the empty beach in his wake.

It feels too abrupt to start running again, so I start walking back in the direction I came at a fast clip. Levi falls into step beside me so easily that for a moment, I feel like the world is slipping into old versions of itself. Like if I close my eyes right now, listen to the lap of the waves, and feel the spray of the wind on my cheeks, I could open them to all the other countless times I walked this beach with Levi. When we were kids looking for spots to build sandcastles. Preteens belly flopping on our boogie boards. Teenagers racing each other during long practices.

We made for an unlikely pair growing up. Levi was painfully shy, and I was in just about everyone's business, by virtue of being Annie's sister. But when we were one-on-one, it was another thing entirely. He'd come to life, this bright-eyed, big-smiled, overly ear nest kid, brimming over with so many ideas and so much to talk about that we could barely stop running our mouths to breathe.

Now all those old words feel so lost that the only thing I can think to say is "A few weeks?"

Levi nods. "I have a lot of vacation time saved up."

I'm not sure how to categorize the strange thrill in me—if it's hope or dread or something else.

I don't let myself peer at it too closely. It's only a matter of time before he's pulled back into the orbit of the other lifeless hedge fund drones he calls coworkers, who break the time-space-sanity continuum by working thirty-hour days and turning their blood into Red Bull. I can count on none fingers the number of times he's been home for more than a few days since he graduated from Columbia.

"Ah," I say. "So this has nothing to do with you running away from your life."

"Jogging from it, maybe. Dylan just kicked my ass. I won't be able to run for a week."

The laugh that comes out of me is sharp and unexpected, piercing the morning quiet of the beach. It shakes the tension just enough that when I glance over, I catch that new almost-smile on his face. This time, though, I find more of the old version in his eyes—the subtle crinkle, the quiet gleam.

A gleam that fades when he lowers his head to better meet my gaze, closing some of the distance between us as we walk.

"I wanted to talk to you," Levi says, his voice low. "I heard about what happened with Griffin."

I set my sights on the main stretch of boardwalk in the distance, picking up the pace. "And I heard about what happened with Kelly," I say evenly. "Is that why you're here? So we can form a Benson Beach viral break-up support group? Because I don't really have time for niche extracurriculars right now."

Levi's long legs so easily match my strides that I can't help but glance at them. At the easy flex of his calves. At the way his sneakers leave steady imprints in the sand so much wider than mine.

"Are you okay?" Levi asks in that same quiet tone.

I blink at the question, because obviously not. I threw okay out the window long before this whole mess with Griffin, which is honestly just icing on the "June's life is falling apart" cake.

"Are you ?" I shoot back.

Because here's the thing: I went social media viral. Levi went Page Six , E! News , asked-about-on-red-carpets viral. From what I read and what Sana dug up, Kelly's super-high-stakes, fancy real estate job quite often put her in touch with celebrity clientele looking for big SoHo lofts with pools or penthouse apartments with Central Park views. It's just that up until a few weeks ago, she'd never cheated on Levi with any of them.

Enter Roman Steele.

To be clear, I'd rather eat sand than defend Kelly. But Roman Steele is easily on the top of anyone's "hall pass" list. He got his start charming audiences in offbeat rom-coms in his twenties, then spent the next decade as the backbone of a massive superhero franchise, where he and his six (eight? ten?) pack abs and sideways grin skyrocketed to international fame. Now in his early forties, he's settled into that roguishly handsome former-bad-boy-turned-serious-actor look, is the face of a global charity for children's welfare, and just wrapped up filming for two separate period films that are both getting early Oscar buzz.

It's no surprise that a large chunk of the world over wants to either be him or be with him. I guess Kelly took her shot at just that.

When a set of blurry photos of them kissing by the window of the penthouse he'd closed on started making the rounds, it only took a day or so for sleuths to identify Kelly. At first the coverage was all very Cinderella story—local, hardworking New York gal plucked out of obscurity by handsome, perpetually single movie star; it turns out he was just looking for the right down-to-earth woman all along!—and it went on that way for about a week before the press got wind that Kelly was fully engaged to someone else.

Then the story went from big to cataclysmic, and Levi got caught in the crossfire. Rabid Roman Steele fans were determined to get as much dirt on Kelly as they could, and Levi's existence was a gold mine. Tabloids started writing articles exposing her, and when Levi refused to comment, he was framed as everything from an unwitting, empathetic victim to a calculating finance villain whose apathy led Kelly to cheat. From the looks of the pictures, he was even getting tailed for a few days outside his Upper West Side apartment.

Levi and I were like two sides of a fucked-up coin. I was going viral underground on the internet, and he was going viral above it over every boomer mom in America's television screen. He has every right to be as un-okay as I do.

But Levi doesn't answer my question. He reaches out and touches my wrist, not stopping my stride but slowing me enough that I have to turn and look at him. Have to face that same storm brewing in his eyes from yesterday, only to realize it wasn't just mine, but partly his own.

He's angry. I can see it now that I'm looking for it. In the bob of his throat. The tense line of his jaw. I've seen the whole gamut of Levi's emotions—he was always the more sensitive of us growing up, the quickest to laugh at a joke and the quickest to tear up at a slight—but I've never seen him look like this.

The moment I realize it's over Griffin, it stops me in my tracks.

Levi takes a breath, and some of the tension goes with it. "I've never seen you cry like that."

I hear the ache in his voice before I see it in his face. That pang I felt for him back at Tea Tide, that reflex to feel his hurt like it's my own—he felt it for me, too. Feels it still. And there's something about seeing it take shape in him that makes it more real than it was, makes me momentarily hate him for it.

I pull my wrist out of his grasp and start walking again, faster now. "Well, there are about a hundred thousand GIFs if you ever want to again."

But Levi refuses to let me deflect, easily keeping pace. "I mean it. It scared me. I wanted to call you, and I realized I couldn't just do that anymore."

Ah. I get it now. His life imploded, so he's doing that thing where he tries to pick up all the pieces of it he can still put back together. Of course he'd think of me. I'm every bit as down as he is right now. I'm easy pickings compared to whatever's waiting for him back in New York.

Some tug in my rib cage reminds me that's not true. That in my worst moments, the ones where I thought Who can I call? or Who wouldn't think less of me for this? , it was Levi who first came to mind.

But I never wanted Levi back in my life because he thinks I'm broken. I wanted him back because he wanted to be back.

"Well, if you came back to Benson Beach to see if I'm in one piece, it's all good," I say. "I'm thriving. Never been better." I turn my body toward him and spread my arms out in front of the ocean, flashing a hammy grin. "Take a picture for posterity."

Levi's expression is a mingling of concern and exasperation, a look I know well. Back in the day, it was the look I got for sneaking warm Franzia for the ride home after away meets on the cross-country bus. Seeing it now is an odd kind of relief. At least a few things between us haven't changed.

I slow my strides. "Levi, I appreciate it. Whatever this is," I say, gesturing at the entirety of him. "But I know you've got a mess of your own to deal with. Probably a bigger one. Hell, Griffin and I weren't engaged or anything when he broke it off."

"Kelly didn't break it off."

I look up so comically fast that my brain might as well have played a record scratch. "Oh?" I ask, my voice half an octave too high.

Now Levi's the one who won't meet my eye, his cheeks flushing faintly. "It's—complicated. We're spending some time apart."

Well, shit. For better or worse, this is another thing about Levi that hasn't changed. He's loyal to the end and loyal to a fault. I think it's why he gravitated to our family, why Annie made herself his best friend at the age of six and never budged an inch on it. She was fiercely protective of this part of Levi when he was too na?ve to be, the same way she was protective of me and Dylan.

But that was when we were kids. Levi's a grown man, and Kelly— I don't even know her.

I squash the pang back down again and replace it with my new mantra: Not my problem. Not my problem. Maybe someone out there is equipped to help Levi work things out with a woman who cheated on him with GQ 's Man of the Year, but it certainly isn't me.

"So what's the plan, then?" I ask, sidestepping the adultery-shaped elephant in the room. "You come back to Benson Beach, do your whole apology tour, take a town car back into the city when you're done, and ride off with Kelly into the sunset?"

The words are meant to scare him off. I trust that he has good intentions, but not enough to trust where they're coming from, or how long they'll last.

But Levi isn't deterred. "Mostly I want to make up for lost time."

I stretch upward toward the sky, loosening up my post-run muscles. I don't miss Levi's eyes grazing my body again, but I don't do anything to discourage it, either.

"Well, if that's the only reason you're in town, I sincerely hope you have other things on the agenda with your ‘vacation.' Because I don't see that happening anytime soon."

"It's more like leave," he says.

"Oh, is that why you're carrying your laptop around?" I ask pointedly. "To take leave?"

To my surprise, the tips of Levi's ears turn red. It's such a specific occurrence that I know exactly what's brought it on. Levi has always been easily embarrassed, but never so much as when it comes to his writing.

"Wait. Are you actually drafting something again?" I ask, half out of curiosity and half out of disbelief.

I'm not expecting him to cop to it. Annie used to pry his drafts out of his hands like they were his actual beating heart.

But looking back, I guess I never had to do that. Annie was a writer, too, but she only knew to ask Levi for the stories he'd written down. She didn't have any idea that most of them, he'd already told me out loud.

"An old manuscript," Levi admits. "I'm trying to rewrite it before an editor who wants to read it takes a yearlong sabbatical next month."

" The Sky Seekers ?" I ask before I can help myself.

Levi lets out a laugh, but his eyes soften. "I can't believe you remember that."

Not far from this beach is a long stretch of woods where the four of us used to roam—Annie, Dylan, Levi, and me. Annie would lead the charge and blaze ahead of us on the trail. Dylan would fall behind, staring at bugs and weirdly shaped tree roots. And Levi and I would walk side by side as he made up stories, an entire fantastical world he built up one sunny afternoon at a time.

It's still in me the way my bones are, the way my oldest freckles and quickest reflexes are. A story that he started spinning so early on that it felt every bit as much my own as it was his.

"I can't believe you can't believe I remember it," I retort, the edge of it masking the unexpected hurt.

Levi's ears are still tinged when he clears his throat and says, "Well, this is different. More literary fiction."

"Oh. That existentially fraught New York one?" Which, in my defense, is a slightly more polite way of saying "self-insert sad boy fan fiction." Levi tilts his head, but before he can ask, I add, "Annie told me about it when we were in college."

There's a hush at Annie's name that even the breeze seems to respect, and it occurs to me that I haven't seen Levi since the funeral. The day was such a blur of tears and arrangements and strangers that the memory of seeing him there feels almost dreamlike—I can't remember what was said, only remember the moment when the eulogies were over and the bubble of people around me had dispersed, and there was Levi, wordlessly holding me, a long calm in a terrible storm.

I shiver. Back then it felt like the grief would swallow us whole. It's different now, more like the waves at our feet—constantly ebbing and flowing, swollen one moment and quiet the next. A tide I can dip my feet into and let myself feel, or a swell that will hit me from behind when I least expect it.

Levi takes in a slow breath next to me like he's going to say something, but I don't want to talk about Annie now. I don't want to go anywhere that deep when I can't trust he'll be here tomorrow.

So instead, I make a show of squinting toward the boardwalk. "How about this?" I ask. "If I beat you to the pier, you give your editor The Sky Seekers , too."

Levi lets out a huff of a laugh. "Oh. So now we're racing to determine my entire literary future?"

"I thought you wanted us to be friends again?" I ask innocently. "This is how we settled things when we were friends, is it not?"

"You just watched your brother try to murder me," Levi protests. "I can barely feel my legs."

My thoughts drift to watching those legs flex against the sand earlier, and I have to shake my head before my eyes start drifting toward them, too. Whatever was in that iced tea this morning, it is giving my brain some unusually, uh, vivid thoughts.

"And I was up past midnight doing inventory. We're evenly matched," I say, drawing a starting line in the sand with my foot. "On your mark…"

Levi looks at the starting line and then at me, staying rooted in place a good five feet away from it before deadpanning, "Haven't I endured enough embarrassment for a lifetime?"

"Get set…"

"June Hart," he says, half exasperated, half pleading.

I turn back to him with a smirk, tilting my chin. "Levi Shaw," I say back, taking my time with each syllable. I mean it as a challenge, but there's this breathless moment when our eyes connect that feels entirely like something else. Less like a challenge, and more like an invitation.

Every inch of my face burns. Before he can get a good look at it, I regain enough sense to yell "GO!" and leave him in the dust.

After a stunned moment, Levi makes an indignant noise and takes off behind me, and I let out a cackle that immediately gets swallowed by the wind. My feet feel like they're flying, like the wind at my back is pushing me forward, every pump of my legs lighter and easier than it's been in years. Like there's an old charge humming under my skin, coursing through every muscle.

By the time we're halfway to the pier, I can hear the steady pulse of Levi's footfalls, the quick, even breaths close to my ear. I feel the crackle of his energy against mine, a smile blooming on my face even as I gasp for air. These races always used to start for different reasons, but they inevitably had the same end—we'd always tie. I knew it wasn't Levi letting me win, either. We were just that laughably, ridiculously in sync.

We're close enough to the pier now that I wonder if today, after all these years, we're about to break the streak. If I really might beat him. The idea of it doesn't know how to settle in me, so I just do what I've always done and run with every last piece of me I've got.

Then a firm arm wraps around my waist, knocking all those pieces out of order. I feel the heat of Levi's entire body against my back as he pulls me up from the ground, my legs still pumping, laughing so hard from the shock of it that all the air whooshes out of my lungs. He swings me around with enough ease that my pounding heart gives way to an unfamiliar flutter, one that makes me feel like I'm floating even as Levi uses our momentum to topple himself into a sand dune, the two of us rolling on top of it with his arms still tangled around me, bracing me against him.

We finally come to an abrupt stop, both of us too winded to move, breathing hot, charged air into each other's faces.

"You cheated ," I accuse, wheezing out a laugh.

Both his arms are still wrapped around my waist, and I can feel the adrenaline pulsing between us where the hard muscle of his arm meets the soft skin of my hips. His eyes spark with a mischief I'm not expecting, one that feels like a hairline fracture in the shield I've had up against him for so long.

"We never made any rules," he says, his voice low and teasing.

His face is so close to mine that I have to glance between his eyes to meet them, that I can smell that same earthy sweetness from yesterday. It isn't the closest we've ever been, but the closest I've ever felt. Like suddenly there is a new kind of gravity between us, pulling us with its own force.

We hear the clamor of early morning surfers piling down the wooden stairs by the pier, and the jolt of it splits us apart. I spring to my feet first, knocking the sand off my thighs and the tops of my arms, trying not to watch Levi out of the corner of my eye as he does the same. There's a tension between us then, a fragile one that can make or break us.

Maybe I'm a fool for this. Maybe I'll regret it. But there is something reignited in me, something new and nostalgic at the same time, and all at once, the idea of losing this chance at being friends with Levi scares me more than the threat of losing him again.

I clear my throat. "I still vote for Sky Seekers ," I say. "But if you're really staying, you can write in Tea Tide, if you want."

Levi nods carefully, respecting the weight of the offer. The quiet trust in it. Then he says gravely, "I'll bring my viral break-up support group application."

I let out a sharp, unexpected laugh as I jog away from him, one that lingers in the back of my throat by the time I've reached the boardwalk. Levi being here may just be a blip, the kind I'll kick myself for falling for later. But even if it is, nobody can take that run across the sand with him away from me—this new thrum in my bones that has me feeling more like myself than I've felt in a long time.