What We Choose novel · Chapter 16 of 24

Chapter 16: Harbor Lights

Dessa

The red dress was the first thing I'd bought with my own money since August.

Long sleeves, a straight neckline, wool so soft Kenna kept petting my arm in the store.

"You're wearing it to the place where you got dumped," she'd said.

"I didn't get dumped. I did the dumping."

"Then you're wearing it to the scene of the crime. Even better."

Kenna had a shift she couldn't trade, so it was just Colter and me on the drive up the coast.

He wore a dark suit and a tie he'd tied three times in the hall mirror.

"You look like a man going to court," I told him.

"I'm going to a party in my own town." He pulled into the lot behind the Wharf Lofts. "That's worse."

The plaza was strung with white lights again.

The same paving stones and the same glass doors, with no ribbon on them now.

A twenty-foot spruce stood in the middle, still dark, waiting for the switch.

A brass quartet was playing carols by the cocoa table.

Half of Larkhaven was there in good wool coats.

I put my hand through Colter's arm.

In August I'd walked across this plaza alone, and everybody had moved out of my way because I was the sick girl.

They moved again now.

But they looked at us differently.

The woman from the yacht club, the one who'd squeezed my arm that first night, saw me and didn't come over.

She just lifted her cocoa a little, like a toast.

The hardware store guy nodded at Colter.

The pie lady from the fair waved with her whole arm.

My scalp was cold.

There was a little fuzz coming in now, two weeks after the last chemo, so pale you could only see it in the light.

Colter leaned down to my ear.

"You okay?"

"Ask me in ten minutes."

Up on the little stage, Sienna was at the microphone.

White coat, gold at her wrist, blowout perfect.

She was still the director of community relations. Her lawyer had told her not to quit anything.

"Welcome, everybody, to Harbor Lights!" Her bright laugh. "Bayline loves Larkhaven, and Larkhaven loves us back!"

The same line.

She'd said the same line to the same people four months ago, right before I took the microphone out of her hand.

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