Levi seemed to enjoy my company, and had laughed and joked with me yesterday, but maybe that was just his personality. I didn’t want to read more into it than that. Especially since I’d been on the awkward receiving end of guys who had misread my own friendliness for romantic interest.

“Um, the fact you took him to your totally romantic lighthouse? And went out for lunch after?” Lucy put her hands on her hips and leveled a no-nonsense look at me. “C’mon, that’s at least second base.”

I flushed. “What are you, ten? Levi and I are just friends.”

“There’s no such thing,” she said.

I raised an eyebrow. “Friends don’t exist?”

“Oh, friends exist. But the way you two eye-sex each other every day at Busy’s goes way beyond friendship.”

“We don’t—”

“Trust me. You do.”

Now my face was hot for a totally different reason. Deflecting, I said, “I remember not so long ago you were too tongue-tied to even go up and talk to a boy. If Lorcan hadn’t worked up the courage to talk to you, you’d both still be mooning over each other.”

“I couldn’t trust myself to keep my cool around him! You know what a serious case of foot in mouth I have,” said Lucy. “Doctors have told me it’s inoperable. I’m cursed with it for life. Side effects include incredible awkwardness and loss of coherency.”

“Loser,” I said lightly.

“Well?” Lucy demanded, impatient for details.

Pretending not to know what she was asking, I gave her an innocent, wide-eyed look. “Well what?”

“Did anything happen between the two of you?”

“He just came to paint! Not everything is about sex.”

“Yeah,” said Lucy, grinning, “but some things should be.”

I glanced toward Busy’s, where Tom was just making his way outside with his watering can. Like clockwork, we could count on him to be out there every day at eight a.m. “Shit, we’ve gotta go. Ariel already texted to say she was sick”—“Ha! Sick!” groused Lucy—“so it’s just us this morning. Race you back!”

Hours later, my lower back felt stiff and sore from being on my feet all day. I felt like a Sim with a low energy bar. Stifling a yawn, I turned just as the door opened and a customer came in. What little energy I had left in me ebbed away entirely.

Elodie Hawkins, in the flesh.

With her statuesque height and high cheekbones, she’d always looked ready for the runway when we were in high school. She was the girl voted Most Likely to Succeed, and no one ever forgot it.

“Guess who’s back for the summer!” she said through a laugh, throwing her arms out. As if it was so easy to breeze back into town—back into my life.