Pandora was high style, gorgeous, fun, and flamboyant. She was in graduate school for engineering in England and, Covid permitting, planned to fly back to her grandmother’s beach house on Sullivan’s Island for the summer.

Annabelle was a local girl. She and Linnea had attended the same private high school in Charleston but had never been friends. Linnea was part of the South of Broad elite society of old Charleston. She and her friends had hung in the same circles since the nursery and seemed destined to continue throughout their lifetimes. In contrast, Anna was a scholarship student who lived with her mother in a poorer part of the city. She’d never blended in with the popular group at Porter-Gaud. Though she and Linnea had had a rocky start last summer, over the past year working together at the aquarium they’d experienced a tidal shift in their relationship. Annabelle’s habitual resentment of Linnea’s privilege had ebbed, and in turn, Linnea’s ability to open up, as a true friend must do, began to flow.

Linnea heard the crunch of Annabelle’s car pulling up in the driveway. She got up to go greet her but hesitated at the edge of the deck. She sighed with annoyance. She didn’t want to get tangled up with John again. Once burned/twice shy and all that. Instead of walking out on the driveway where John could see her from his window, Linnea crossed her arms as she waited for her friend to arrive. This could make for an annoying few weeks, she thought. When was John to hightail it back to his beloved California?

“Just go,” she muttered. Then lifted her frown to a smile as Annabelle’s face appeared from around the corner.

“I come bearing wine!” Annabelle called out as she climbed the deck stairs, a bottle of red in one hand, a bottle of white in the other. Her long red hair hung straight past her shoulders and on her ears she wore large gold loop earrings. She was dressed, as usual, in jeans and a black T-shirt that read Save the Seabirds.

“Bless your heart!” Linnea called back, grinning. They walked together into the house in search of wineglasses and a corkscrew.

“Red or white?” Annabelle asked, corkscrew in hand.

“Today we’re going to need both.”

Annabelle chuckled in her low-throated fashion. “I hear you.”

Linnea watched with awe as Annabelle twisted off the capsule around the neck of the bottle. She made it look so easy.

“How do you do that?” Linnea asked. “I’m pitiful trying to scrape that wrapper off.”

“Comes with practice,” Annabelle replied smugly. “Perks of being a bartender. Interesting fact: the original capsule was wax. Each bottle had to be dipped in wax to seal the end to prevent mold growth. The next innovation was lead. No surprise, that didn’t work out, for obvious reasons, but it took them till the 1980s to switch to these polylam ones.”

“So, if you collect old wines…” she said, thinking of her father.