“Here, you need this.”

I laugh, a brittle, broken sound as Lindsey pours me a gigantic sized serving of boxed wine into a coffee cup and passes it my way.

“I’m fine.”

“You will be fine after we get nice and drunk off of this shitty wine and watch Gilmore Girls until three in the morning.”

I smile at my roommate and sigh as I take the wine from her hand. “Okay, okay. Fine.”

“I wore you down, huh?”

“Something like that.”

She pours herself her own biggie-sized mug of wine and clinks it to mine. “And fuck Derek. Seriously, fuck that guy. Grow a pair of balls, right?”

I frown into my mug. “It’s not really his fault.”

Lindsey rolls her eyes and drags me to the crappy, threadbare IKEA couch in our living room. Actually, most of our furniture is crappy, threadbare IKEA stuff. The apartment in general is a shit-hole, in a shit-hole neighborhood with shitty neighbors and we probably pay entirely too much for it, because it’s New York.

But it’s our first place off campus, and to us, it’s a palace, and worthy every freaking penny.

“How exactly is it not his fault for getting all emo and dumping you over something like that?”

I sigh. “I mean, I get how he could be mad at that.”

“Yeah well, like I said, grow a pair and man up,” Lindsey spits out.

“I shouldn’t have written it.”

“He shouldn’t have read your diary.”

I look down into my wine. “It’s kind of like I was cheating.”

Lindsey snorts. “Uh, no, it’s not. Not at all.”

“Emotionally cheating?”

“So you wrote a letter to that ex of yours, big deal! And it’s not like you were even actually writing him a letter, it was in your diary. That’s like, private stuff. And besides, everyone does that.”

I look up at my friend with a wry smile. “Do you write ten-page journal-letters to your exes?”

Lindsay pauses and I roll my eyes. “See? It’s weird.”

She smiles. “At least you’re not drunk dialing him or obsessively writing and then erasing text messages to him over and over again like everyone else does.”

“Yeah, I can’t do that, though.”

“Right, because he’s…where again? Living off the grid?”

“No, just, off my grid. He’s in Europe, I think.”

“Sounds glamorous.”

“I don’t care.”

“Well, in any case, you weren’t cheating. Derek had no right to read your private stuff like that.”

He didn’t, but that doesn’t absolve me of the crime, and I know that. I’m also not that surprised at this happening eventually. Because deep down, I knew it would come to this.

It always does.

This is me doing what I do best – sabotaging my own happiness. Sidelining my relationships as soon as they get to be anything even remotely serious. I compare. I evaluate. I try and stack them up against the man who ripped my heart out and ran away with it. And the worst part is, it’s not even a fair fight, because no one will ever compare to him.

And I know that.

“Silas.”

I flinch at his name, shaking from my thoughts and darting my eyes back to Lindsey.

“What?”

“I said when exactly was the last time you talked to Silas?”

“The night we broke up.”

I’ve never given her the whole story - her or anyone, actually. Part of it is because I don’t know the whole story, but it’s also too painful to bring up the details.

Instead, it’s just “the night we broke up.”

The night he left.

Three days after we got married.

I’ve thought about pawning the stupid ring a hundred times. Heck, I thought about it just two months ago when Lindsey and I were scrounging cash for the security deposit on this apartment. But I didn’t. Just like I didn’t the hundred times before when I thought about finally letting it go.

The ring that’s hidden on the little chain under my shirt. People spot it sometimes, and questions come up. To Lindsey, to Derek, to anyone else who’s ever asked, it’s just a family heirloom – my grandmother’s ring I like to wear.

Lindsey might know about Silas, in the general sense of him being my ex-boyfriend that I still have hang-ups about, at least. But she doesn’t know that.

No one does.

It’s just me, my closed-off thoughts, my buried memories, and my walled-up heart.

* * *

“Hey babe.”

Blaine’s ultra-surfer California accent mellows through the phone. He’s actually originally from Ohio, but the blonde, top-knot and tanned surfer look is kind of his thing - it’s his brand. And believe me, I get brands. So, even though I know the voice is fake, I guess I get it to a certain degree. He’s just owning his own image.

The thought of what Silas would say about someone going through life with a carefully cultivated and fake accent enters my head, and I scowl momentarily. For one, because I know his reaction would be so typically childish, and two, that he’s even entering my head at all.

I’ve gone eight years with forgetting Silas Hart as a full-time job. I am not quitting now.

“Hey!” I say brightly into the phone, standing off to the side of the backyard garden watching Stella and Sierra setting dinner. “We’re just about to start dinner! Are you in?”

“Aww damn, sounds so good! It’s just…” he trails off, and I frown.

“What’s up?”

He groans dramatically. “Ivy, promise you won’t be, like, mad at me?”

I furrow my brow. “Blaine, what-”

“I missed the last ferry, babe.”

My face falls. “Oh.”

“Aaaah, shit, I knew you’d be mad!”

I shake my head. “No, I’m not mad, I just-” I look at my toes in the grass. “I just thought you’d be here soon.”

“Yeah, well hey, I just thought I’d crash here for the night and come on up tomorrow.”

I frown again. “Wait, what? You can just take the late train tonight you know, you’ll be here in like ninety min-”

“Uh, yeah it just sounds like this whole big thing though, you know?”

“What?”

No, I don’t know. It’s quite simple, actually. You get on the train, you sit down, you arrive an hour and a half later in Shelter Harbor.

“Blaine-” I sigh, bringing my hand up to run it through my hair. “I just sort of needed you here today.”

He makes a strained sound into the phone. “Babe…”

“What?”

He makes a clicking sound with his tongue and his teeth. “Babe, you know that’s not really my thing. I mean, you gotta do you, you know? Thought we talked about this, Ivy.”

And we did, too. Well, he talked about it, a few weeks back over dinner at Roman’s in Williamsburg. How we need to “maintain our own strong independence as a couple.”

I frown, shaking my head. “Yeah, no, I know we did, I just-”

I just what? I just saw the man who left me shattered and stuttering eight years ago, and I need to forget about him with you? Like I’ve done with every relationship ever since him?

I don’t finish my sentence.

“So, we’re good then?” he says brightly.

“Yeah, yes,” I say quickly.

“Rad.”

Rad.

“So, I’ll check you tomorrow, kay?”

I nod, eyes closed and blowing air slowly through my lips. “Yeah, tomorrow.”

“Awwwwesome. Great talk, babe, I knew you’d understand. Later!”

The line goes dead.

I stare at the phone in my hand another minute, blinking in confusion before I open up my texts and fire one off to Ainsley, letting her know. The phone buzzes instantly with her reply.

I shrug as I type a quick “thanks, I’ll let you know” back, before pocketing the phone and heading back to my family.

* * *

“I’m so happy you’re home, honey.” My mom squeezes my hand later after dinner, sitting next to me at the big wooden table beneath the Japanese maple tree out in the back yard. Cafe-style string lights illuminate the garden she and my dad have tended for more than thirty years - an oasis I’m definitely not mad at having grown up with.

She lets go of my hand to pass me a plate of pie, cut from the lattice-top dish my dad apparently baked this afternoon.

Yeah, welcome to the Hammond house - we seriously are this much of a Norman Rockwell painting.

If I were back in Manhattan right now I’d be - I glance at the time - I probably wouldn’t have even had dinner yet. Maybe I’d be at Nomad at the Liberty Hotel getting cocktails, or calling a friend of a friend to get reservation hookups at Blue Hill. I’d be drinking an expensive, local craft-distilled all-potato vodka martini or a non-impact environmentally friendly, eco-farmed chardonnay.

Not homemade raspberry pie.

That said, after a day like today, I seriously need a drink, and the good Reverend Hammond isn’t exactly known to keep much in the house. Sure, Mom keeps a bottle of sweet, cheap, sauvignon blanc for occasions, but between her, Sierra, Stella and I, that was about a tenth of what I need right now.

“So tell us about this new line!” Sierra beams at me across the table. “Are they seriously going to carry it at Lululemon?”

Yes, they’re seriously going to carry the new line of sports bras and yoga pants at Lululemon, just like that coffee chain has been sniffing around for distribution rights on the new organically sourced antioxidant tea line we’ve been working on.

But I don’t want to talk about that.

I don’t want to talk about brand meetings and making sure the makeup I used on camera is fair trade and doesn’t contain anything terrible so I don’t get raked over the coals in some YouTube comment. I don’t want to talk about the fact that at some point while I’m here, I need to have pictures taken of me doing bikram yoga, or jogging or something here in quaint New England for the website.

I want to talk about the fact that the ghost from my past just welcomed me home for the first time in eight years.

I want to talk about the fact that my heart is still somewhere in my throat, or that I’ve been reliving and rewashing every damn memory I have of him in my head since the second I walked away.

Every memory, from running around as kids, to him showing me how to pick locks with a pin. From first kisses, to, well, first much more than that. My cheeks flush at the thought, and I reach for the glass of wine next to my plate of pie only to remember the one glass I had is long gone.

“Ivy?”

I look up to see Mom, Stella, and Sierra all looking at me intently, waiting on an answer. Dad’s playing with Carter on his lap, not paying attention.

“Oh, yeah,” I say quickly, clearing my throat. “It’s going into distribution.”

“That is so exciting, honey!” Mom gushes.

Five years ago, when the fashion and lifestyle blog I’d started in college started to take off, Mom and Dad thought I was insane to not pursue grad school.

“What are you going to do with an undergraduate in psychology?” Dad had finally pointedly asked over dinner.

Sell the fuck out, that’s what.

Because an Instagram account with nine-hundred-thousand follows is a goldmine, for the record. Wear that certain sports bra while I’m doing yoga at an eco-retreat in Mexico for $5,000 from the brand that makes it? No problem. Wear those certain shoes when I go for a run through Central Park? For $8,000, I’ll do it singing Britney fucking Spears at the top of my lungs.

But it’s not the money that Mom and Dad are proud of, they’re just happy that I’m happy, which is so “parent” it’s nauseating.

I’m doing dishes in the kitchen later, alone with Sierra, when she finally leans in close to me.

“Stella filled me in while you and Dad were getting Carter ready for bed.” She gives me a sour look. “That’s shitty that Rowan didn’t tell you.”

I shrug, drying a plate before sticking it up in the cabinets. “Eh, it’s fine.”

It’s not fine, but I’m trying to go five minutes straight without stewing on it.

And failing.

“Look, I’m not trying to cover for him, but he was probably worried you wouldn’t come home if he mentioned it.”

I raise a single brow. “I wouldn’t have.”

“That’s fair.” Sierra leans her head on my shoulder. “I’m really glad you’re home, though.”

I grin.

“Any idea what the fuck he’s doing here? I mean, just Dad’s thing, or is there something else?”

I shrug. “Who the hell knows. He was being really vague about it.”

She makes a face. “Jesus, you guys really talked, huh? Not just like a passing thing?”

I nod.

“How’d that go?”

Horrible, like a stab to the heart. Like everything I’ve been holding back and holding inside and drowning in work and plastic veneer relationships is coming rushing out like blood. Or wonderful, because it’s so hard to hate the man who stole your heart eight years ago.

“It was fine,” I say as casually as I can.

“Just fine?”

“Just fine.” I shrug again. “It was eight years ago, I’m not still hung up on my high school boyfriend like a weirdo.”

She wags her brow. “Okay.”

“I’m not.”

She groans and rolls her eyes. “Fine. So, speaking of boyfriends, how’s Blaine these days?”

I slump my shoulders. “What if we picked a new topic entirely.”

“That good, huh?”

I turn flicking soapy water at my little sister. “Okay dork, how’s your love life?”

Her face goes red as she snorts. “Hard pass.”

“Oh that good, huh?” I say, mimicking her and tossing my hair exaggeratedly over my shoulder.

She gives me a mock scandalized look and starts to dip her hand threateningly into the soapy water of the sink before the clearing of a throat behind us stops her.

“Yeah, if you’re just going to flood the place, I can take over.”

I turn, grinning at my dad. “Nah, we’ve got it. We’ll try to restrain ourselves.”

“Did you bring your own organic free-trade dish soap you can use on those?”

Sierra snorts and I turn and stick my tongue out at my dad.

He chuckles. “Seriously, your mom and I have this. You two should go see Rowan, I know he’s missing that he wasn’t here tonight.”

“Wow, is Reverend Hammond telling his daughters to go to the local dive bar?”

This time Dad rolls his eyes as Sierra gasps dramatically. “Such scandal!”

Dad folds his arms over his thick chest and raises a brow. “First, it’s not a ‘dive’ bar.”

“Dad,” Sierra shakes her head, grinning, “it totally is.”

“Not since your brother took over the place,” Dad insists.

My sister and I glance at each other, smirking.

Okay, it’s slightly less divey than it was. But O’Donnell’s is without question a true local’s spot. No cutesy “quaint New England” crap on the walls, no lobster roll special, no fish and chips, none of that. Guinness, Bud Light, and obviously Sam Adams on draught, and Jamesons - not Bushmills - on the back bar. That’s basically it.

“It is not,” Dad mutters with a grin. “Besides, I should know.”

“Oh and how’s that?”

Sierra laughs. “Did you not know?”

I look at her questioningly, but Dad just casually shrugs. “What, I’m an investor now.”

I burst out laughing.

“The scandal deepens! Should we bring this up at the park dedication?”

Dad grins through his beard as he shakes a finger at us. “Get.”