Greeting her were wall-to-wall items from the Seaside Resort, including stacks of red leather banquet chairs, boxes of hotel linens, folded tables, cutlery, and signs. SEASIDE RESORT POOL. RECEPTION. NO PARKING. Ruth had rescued and crammed all the Seaside Resort storm survivors into her house.

“Shit.”

Sixty-two days until spring; sixteen days until her thirtieth birthday, when she would inherit the cottage outright and could sell it.

She made her way to a couch by a dark stone fireplace climbing to the vaulted ceiling. Sitting, she dropped her overnight bag to the ground and dug her second burger out of the bag. Screw breakfast. She needed comfort now. She sat for several minutes focusing on the burger’s flavor and sipping her too-sweet soda as she stared at the towers of clutter.

As the last of the soda gurgled up the straw, she rose and wove down a narrow path through the maze of items toward the back screened-in sleeping porch. The door’s well-oiled hinges opened easily. Briny, cold air rushed toward her as she stared out over the crashing waves illuminated by the full moon dangling in the sky.

When she was a child, Ivy and her best friend, Dani, had slept on this porch more nights than she could remember. Dani and Ivy would giggle until midnight, when Ruth would finally shout from her first-floor bedroom for them to sleep. There was something freeing and exciting about sleeping out here with the ocean breeze cutting through the humid air dripping with moisture, the squawk of the gulls, and the gusts carrying the laughter of hotel guests still lingering by the hotel’s pool.

When Ivy had first moved to New York, she had a terrible time sleeping. The honks and shouts of street noise were a poor substitute for the crashing waves that had lulled her to sleep ever since she was a small child. And lying on a cot in the YWCA, listening to two residents fighting, she’d wondered how she could have been such a shitty friend to Dani and a bad girlfriend to her ex, Matthew.

The three had run together since middle school. She’d started dating Matthew junior year of high school, and their dreams for the future had quickly tangled together. He didn’t want college, like Ivy and Dani, and he believed the three of them should open their own business. She agreed, because she had no better idea. Dani was thrilled, admitting that she’d been accepted to art school, but the housing-market crash had made finances really tight for her dad. A year of making money would solve all her problems for the much-needed school tuition.

When Matthew announced he’d found a work-to-own arrangement for a small restaurant, Ivy freaked. Dani would leave in a year for school, and then she’d be here with Matthew in a life she wasn’t ready for. And still it took a few weeks and four beers at a graduation party for her to screw up the courage to tell him she was backing out of the deal and moving to New York.