“Yep.” Sure it kind of resembled a giant mushroom, but the price had been right.

“To tear down?” she asked.

“I’m fixing it up,” I declared, my voice a hell of a lot stronger than my certainty. That had been one of the conditions of the purchase.

The house groaned, and we tilted our heads to the left as the previously assaulted shutter submitted to gravity and plummeted down the gray-shingled exterior, landing next to its partner like a tombstone in the sand.

“Even the exterior is jumping ship,” Mia muttered from my other side, folding her arms across her chest. As our only Outer Banks native, her appraisal gave me pause. If anyone knew beach houses, it was Mia. She was more than Sam’s sister-in-law; she’d grown up an hour north of here and was currently studying architecture at UNC.

“It survived the last hurricane,” I argued on behalf of the house.

“On life support,” Mia muttered, walking forward to examine the stilts.

Hence why it had been so cheap.

“It’s not that bad.” My voice pitched a little high. Maybe it was weathered, rather ugly, odd-shaped, and appeared to be falling apart, but I’d been assured that the bones were good.

I received two doses of side-eye from my girlfriends.

“It was bad enough for you to call in reinforcements.” Sam raised her eyebrows. “Not that I’m complaining. I’m just glad I happened to be visiting Grayson’s parents when you called. Plus, it’s been ages since I’ve seen you.”

Guilt pricked me right in the heart.

“It hasn’t been ages. I saw you at your wedding just two months ago.”

“Oh, you mean the half hour you were at the reception before leaving Vegas? You didn’t even say good-bye to Paisley.” Her tone teased, but I felt the underlying worry.

“Yeah, well…” I took a deep breath, searching for the words that had eluded me for the last twenty-two months. How did you tell your best friends that as much as you loved them, you simply couldn’t stand to be around them? Or their happiness? “I wanted to stay, but I…couldn’t.” It sounded lame even to my ears.

“Still?” she asked softly.

“Still.”

Sam was the only one in our group of friends I could talk to without being 95 percent fake about how I was doing. Maybe it was because she’d been my roommate for a while in college. Maybe it was because she didn’t point to the calendar and push me to be all healed, pretty, and ready for social niceties. Or maybe it was because she didn’t shove her happiness in my face. The others…well, they oozed happiness and then left it lying around like glitter you could never get out of the carpet.

And sure, Sam had fallen in love with Grayson, one of our flyboys, while he was in army flight school, but Grayson hadn’t been tangled up in what followed afterward.

It was always Josh and Ember.

Then Paisley and Jagger.

And Sam and Grayson.