He rubbed his eyes. “Coffee.”

“I get laid off from the company I have dedicated my entire adult life to, the company that you run, and all you can say is ‘Coffee’?” I was doing something uncomfortably close to shouting. Proper Southern ladies do not shout.

He put his hand up, and I didn’t want to notice his abs, but really, you couldn’t help it. On the flip side, this was the same kid who had hidden a lizard in my backpack my first day of fourth grade. I shuddered. What was wrong with me?

His Nespresso spit as I looked around. Everything was the same. Not one single knickknack or design book had moved an inch since I was in this house four years ago, though now the book covers had faded. Four years ago, I had just gotten engaged, and I had just found out Greer was dying. Four years ago, I’d found out that my dumb kid neighbor was capable of loving a woman beyond anything I could imagine. I softened toward him.

I took in my surroundings. Greer’s house. Greer’s husband. I was thrust violently back into the past. Four years ago, I’d felt a little foolish admitting how entirely obsessed I was with Greer Thaysden. But, really, who wasn’t? She’d been the account to follow on Instagram, had hosted one of the most successful podcasts on iTunes when podcasts were in their infancy. I had read her first book, like, five times, was on the waiting list for a goal-setting notebook she had collaborated with Moleskine on. Let’s just say, she was one of my idols. The one thing that I couldn’t wrap my head around was why beautiful, perfect, together Greer had married boy-next-door, little-brother-annoying Parker Thaysden. Thank goodness, though. Without that lapse in judgment, I never would have met my heroine.

Word was starting to get out that Greer, Palm Beach royalty and all-around maven, had been diagnosed with ovarian cancer—just like her mother had been. Every publication wanted to do a story on her. She declined absolutely everyone, as she always had. Everyone, that is, until me.

I hadn’t been able to attend Parker and Greer’s wedding—a fact that Parker’s mother and my mother might not ever let me live down—because I had been at a bachelorette party in Mykonos. The very pricey plane ticket was nonrefundable. I wasn’t canceling it, no matter who was getting married.

But my path had certainly crossed with Greer’s more than a few times in Palm Beach and at home in Cape Carolina. We hadn’t been friends, per se, but I blamed myself for that. Sure, we ran in slightly different circles, but I felt now that we could have been close if it weren’t for my being so intimidated by her. In my defense, Greer was a woman on the rise, on every Thirty Under Thirty list and, most notably, one of Town & Country’s Modern Swans that year, which was quite a coveted position to say the least. She was a woman with taste and fame, brains and power, and a good heart at the center of it all. The Goodness Greer column she had started, which not only talked about what she was wearing, reading, and watching, and where she was traveling, but also maintained this incredible thread of positivity and empowerment, had been so successful that she’d used its tidy proceeds to start one of the city’s most influential new nonprofits.