Page 23 of The Break-Up Pact

Levi doesn’t let me get away with it. “She also had you up her sleeve. Brainstorming with her. Coming up with all those scones.”

I shake my head. “She hated half my ideas, though.”

“Like what?” Levi asks.

“Like—little things.” I think back, tempted to laugh about some of it. “Like whether we should offer free Wi-Fi, or what the holiday specials should be. But bigger ones, too. Like making the vibe less formal. More of a ‘no shoes required’ kind of place. Make it easier to drop in and out, making it easier to collaborate with other businesses on the boardwalk, if we wanted.”

Then I hesitate. It seems almost embarrassing to say this now, given the state of things, but the way Levi’s looking at me—steady, with the kind of understanding I haven’t felt in so long—I can’t help myself.

“And I always had this idea that once Tea Tide was settled, we could have more locations.”

I follow it up with a self-deprecating laugh, but Levi’s focus on me only settles deeper.

“Maybe this boost will get you squared away, and you could look into it?”

“Nah, this will just help me break even. We’re circling the drain over here,” I say, jerking my thumb toward Tea Tide in a gesture I hope is casual enough to cover up the very real anxiety. “I promised Nancy to front three months’ rent on next year’s lease just to prove we’re not going to fall behind again.”

I don’t press into the real reason why I could never expand the shop, which is less to do with money and almost everything to do with Annie. She pictured it as something insular, something hyperlocal. She wanted to pour everything she had into it. She wanted to spend whatever time she wasn’t working behind the counter sitting at one of the little tables, writing her novels and holding court as people came and went. She wanted it to be a shared space, but a small and orderly one. She wanted it to be her home.

I’ve always loved the community aspect of it, too. But where Annie’s sense of that rooted her here and only here, I’ve always been more restless about it. More eager to share. I pictured it messier, more open. I pictured a cluster of Tea Tides in other beachside towns, with the same foundations but their own communities, their own little touches and quirks that made them unique.

It was the part of me that loved traveling with Griffin, at first. I love exploring new places, finding all the hidden cracks of them to see into other people’s worlds. Eventually our traveling became less about that and more about Griffin’s daredevil tendencies, but that itch is still there in me. I told myself that maybe one day I’d get to scratch it through Tea Tide. Nothing opens people up into each other’s worlds like the space to chat and linger and share art and ideas.

I’d discussed it some with Annie, when I was still abroad—the idea of rotating local art displays or hosting writer nights instead of just the paid events like parties and bridal showers. She wasn’t fully on board, but I had the sense I could get her to come around. But even if I wanted to look into it now, I’ve been so swamped just trying to run the day-to-day business that it’s fallen by the wayside. Maybe Levi is right that Annie would be proud of me for trying as hard as I have, for trying to keep true to her vision, but right now, I’m not so proud of myself.

“You know I could help with fronting the rent,” Levi offers, his tone careful even though we both know what I’m going to say.

Because I do know—I have known. Levi and I may have spent the last few years knocked out of each other’s orbits, but even if it came up when I found him lurking with his coffee outside of Tea Tide and tore him a new one, he would have helped me right then, if I’d asked.

“I appreciate that. But it’s less about the money and more about whether we can sustain ourselves, you know?” I offer him an appreciative smile, one that I know doesn’t meet my eyes. “I have to be able to do this to prove that we can keep Tea Tide running on its own two feet.”

Levi nods, and the quiet that follows feels like something’s cracked open between us. Something we’ve been tiptoeing around ever since Levi got back. I stop walking, digging my heels into the sand. Levi eases to a stop next to me, his eyes soft on mine, searching.

“You said you meant to come back before this,” I say. “So why didn’t you?”

I try to keep the hurt out of my voice, but I can tell from the way the shame streaks across Levi’s face that I haven’t completely managed it. Still, I’m not sure how he’ll react to me asking. It’s been so many years of nothing more than the occasional quick text exchange between us that I’m still worried I’ll get closed-off Levi again, the version of him that left my life and seemed to stay out of it as thoroughly as he could.

But instead, he takes a breath so deep that I almost hold mine, waiting for what’s on the other end of it.

“A few weeks before Annie died,” he says quietly, “we got into a fight.”

I know Levi and I know Annie, so I also know what Levi means is that Annie picked a fight. Levi, for better or for worse, has always been as conflict avoidant as they come.

But still, hearing him say those words rattles me, deeper than I’m comfortable with. I’ve spent these past two years racked with my own guilt for the distance I had with Annie when she passed. Now Levi’s guilt is so plain in his expression that I’m feeling a shade of my own in it.

“It couldn’t have been that bad,” I say, a knee-jerk reaction to soothe it away for both of us.

Levi shakes his head. “It probably wasn’t. Or it wouldn’t have been. But we didn’t speak for a few weeks, and then suddenly I’m getting this call from my mom.…”

He blinks back sudden tears, and I’m tugged sharply into old memories. When we were younger, Levi had been so much more expressive than other kids we knew. Like there was a well always on the verge of tipping over inside him. He’d laugh so easily and his eyes would tear up so fast over little things that it felt like his heart was perpetually beating on his sleeve.

Somewhere along the way he outgrew it, replaced by the almost-smile, by this tight control Levi seemed to want in his world from the moment he left Benson Beach. Only now that I’m seeing an echo of that younger version of him do I understand that it never really went away.

“We, uh—we were fighting over some stupid plan of mine. A plan Kelly and I had,” he elaborates, his voice thick but the words steady. “The deal was that we were going to work our asses off until we turned thirty, save up as much money as we possibly could, then take a few years off to pursue other things. I’d write my novel. She’d paint.”

“And that upset Annie?” I ask.

Levi lets out a strained laugh. “Oh, she’d been mad about it for a while,” he says. “She knew. And you know how her big plan was for us to write together. She kept trying to sell the manuscript she’d been working on, and a few times she got close. She wanted me to be in the trenches with her. I think she was worried about leaving me behind. So when Kelly and I stayed the course, she was upset.”

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