I step out the front door of Holy Grounds and onto the sidewalk, a grimace plastered to my face. Why does Swan’s Hollow have to be so nauseatingly cute today? Between my lingering hangover and the spring blooms sending my allergies into overdrive, the description is both figurative and literal.

I breathe in and out through my mouth as I walk to the park to meet Abby, trying to calm my overstimulated senses. I really, really don’t want to puke on someone’s sidewalk this morning. It doesn’t help that the streets of downtown are crammed with cheerful storefronts, window displays a flurry of pastels in contrast to my sour mood. New bulbs push up through the damp soil in window boxes. Despite my best efforts not to breathe too deep, the air smells like warming asphalt and daffodils. Everything seems particularly green.

Swan’s Hollow isn’t inherently bad, I know, it just feels like a shell I’ve outgrown. The town is pretty and quaint, which is what tourists always love about it, and I begrudgingly admit it has its charms. It’s the smallness I hate, the way no one ever seems to leave. We’re so close to Boston but everyone seems happy staying right where they are. It drives me nuts. This town has a memory older than I can imagine and it’ll never let me forget my worst moments—the way I was so scared when my parents separated, the way people had gossiped when my dad married Gayle, asking how he could move on so soon, even though it had been years since his divorce.

In Swan’s Hollow I’m always the daughter of the weird photography professor who posed his nude models on the Town Hall steps during a snowstorm to protest something I can’t even remember. I’m the girl who got such bad stage fright during our fifth grade play that I puked in the potted philodendron in the school lobby before the show. I’m always me. And if anyone finds out the reason I’m home, I might as well stamp “sucker” on my forehead, too.

When I arrive at the playground and find Abigail installed on one of the park benches, my shitty mood from landing the job hasn't faded. The only thing that makes me feel a fraction better is seeing Nico bounce between the slide and the swings, his chest heaving in excitement.

Abigail turns and catches my eye when she hears me approach. “How did it go?”

I make a face. I already regret how fast I caved in and slunk back to Holy Grounds. I should have at least grabbed a coffee to soften the blow, but I walked away empty-handed. “You’re looking at Swan’s Hollow’s finest coffee slinger.” I give a half-hearted little twirl of my finger, then plop onto the bench next to her.

Abigail purses her lips and I bite my tongue. I may have left, but Abby never did. Swan’s Hollow is still her home, and when I make it seem like a stupid little town, it makes me seem like I’m judging her, too. I know she’s worked hard as hell to get where she is—parenting Nico on her own and working her way up to manage the bookstore. She’s the youngest store manager they’ve ever had, and she deserves it.

“Sorry,” I say. “I just hate the feeling of going backwards. Like, I had this whole life in Boston and now I’m back at square one.”

“Nah.” Abigail cracks a grin. “You’re at least at square two and a half.”

“How’s that?”

“Well, you’ve got me and Nico.”

“Both good things,” I agree, watching my godson play. He zooms in to grab a juice box from Abby before dashing back to the swing set, a real-life reminder that sometimes good things happen here, too. I watch him for a minute, and a pang of sadness slides an experimental claw under my skin. It’s not like I didn’t see Nico after I left town—every few weeks Abby, Nico, and I met up halfway between Swan’s Hollow and the city, at Rocco’s Diner. The little restaurant had a blue-plate special for five dollars—eggs Benedict, home fries, fruit, and coffee—and a playground out back where Nico could run. Plus, thanks to the wonders of the internet, Nico got to keep me up to speed with his obsessions on the regular—earthworms, race cars, the color blue.

But today, in person, Nico seems suddenly older. Real life fleshes out all the things that FaceTime can’t fill in—the big brown eyes with lashes he got from his mama, a peal of laughter, a half-healed scrape on top of his left knee. I can’t, for the life of me, remember how he got so big. It feels like I’ve been gone a lifetime.

Abigail hesitates, a sympathetic look on her face. “Have you heard from the Sugar Daddy since you’ve been back?”

I frown. “I wish you wouldn’t call him that.”

“What? Is it not true?”

The truth is more of a gray area. Matthew’s college degree and lawyer salary footed most of our rent and utilities—that was the only way we could afford the sleek two-bedroom in Beacon Hill that he’d wanted. My barista salary wouldn’t have made for the classiest of digs.

“Just call him Matthew.”

She wrinkles her nose. “Fine. You’re not going back to Matthew, are you?”

I picture the last time I saw him—his eyes angry and defensive as I hauled the last of my things down our staircase.

“You’re bringing the goddamn fig tree with you?” he demanded.

“Yes,” I shouted. I clutched the potted tree to my chest. “Precious is mine.” I know it’s stupid to have named a plant, but hey, that tree and I have a relationship. For almost four years I’ve been trying to keep it alive, and for almost four years Precious has been plotting ways to die.

The tree’s tucked into a corner of the guesthouse now, its lower leaves curled brown against the trunk. Evidence of yet another thing I haven’t nurtured enough, apparently.

“No, I’m not going back to Matthew. How could I?” I shake my head firmly. “No.”

“Good.” Abby narrows her eyes in thought. “You know, if you really want to go back to Boston, you need a game plan.”

“I mean, yeah. I have enough money for a deposit for an apartment, but I need to save for first month’s and last month’s rent.” As I say it out loud, the reality sinks in: I don’t know if I can afford my own place on a barista salary. The alternative—getting a roommate—doesn’t seem so shiny either, not after having lived with someone who so massively let me down. “Maybe I shouldn’t be a barista anymore, anyway. This needs to be a temporary measure.”

“So what do you want to do?”

I shrug. “I don’t know.” I shouldn’t have gone to school for writing, it should have been accounting or medicine. Something practical, something where I would have an actual career by now. Why couldn’t I have been built that way?

“Why don’t you join one of those companies where you can sell makeup, or whatever?”

I laugh. “Okay, first, look at me.” I gesture to my cutoff jean shorts and tank top. My hair is only clean because Abby made me shower last night, but it’s back in my standard topknot.

“Hmm.”

“No one wants to buy makeup from me,” I assure her. “And second, those things are pyramid schemes. If I’m going to do anything, I’d want to have my own product. Be the person at the top who makes all the money.”

I spent the last year running the online shop for my Boston café, selling small packs of coffee beans along with mugs and T-shirts with the store’s logo. I know how much money you can make at the top. I just don’t have an actual product of my own.

“Can you sell a book?” Abigail asks, and I think of my stalled novel. I’ve been working on this thing for the last two years—a historical novel about a geisha in Japan, set in the 1800s. I’d been so happy researching away in the Boston Public Library, trying to get all the details right, but maybe it was all a distraction from the fact that it sucked. I’d sent the thing off to dozens of agents, but after the fifteenth rejection I had to admit maybe it was me. The final straw was the one agent who actually bothered to write me more than a form letter. She called the story “meticulously researched but lacking in originality.” Which, great.

“Go back and write what you know,” the agent scrawled in the margins. Except isn’t the whole point of fiction to make something up?

Now with Abby staring at me so eagerly, I force my face into a smile. If I can go back and edit my book for the fifth round, maybe there’s a chance. But at this point it’s just another thing I’ve run away from.

“I’d love to sell a book.” That, at least, is true, but I feel like a fraud even calling myself a writer. “The thing is, there’s no guaranteed payout.” I avoid mentioning how I haven’t written in weeks, how writing seems like scraping blood from a stone right now. Every syllable holds too much risk.

“You could be a hooker,” she suggests cheerfully.

I swat her on the arm. “I’d be happy to work for myself but not quite like that. I need to do something in between selling makeup and selling my body.”

The last time I’d worn makeup and been willing to get naked had been the night of the party. It makes me think, with a twist in my stomach, of the lube I’d picked out for Matthew that night, the way everything I’d hoped for that night—for my life—had come crashing down. I spent the night of the party marooned on Mandy’s couch, unable to go back inside my own house while Matthew shuffled around in there, yet unable to leave without my things. Everything had changed in an instant—I’d left for the party as part of a couple and fled the party single and alone. But still, under the memory of the things I’ve lost, an idea blooms.

“Something between selling makeup and selling my body,” I repeat.

“Yep, heard you the first time,” Abby teases.

I stand up, tightening my bun, the idea unfurling into something bigger.

“I need to go.” I give Abby a one-armed squeeze.

“You just got here.”

“I have an idea that just might work.”

“To sell your body?” Abby asks.

I smile. “Something like that.”

“Don’t let me be the one to hold you back.” She laughs and waves me out of the park. “If you need us, you know where we’ll be.”