SUNDAY
I pull up to the salt-weathered house late Sunday afternoon, seagulls announcing themselves above and the ocean crashing in far below. As I step out of the car, I suck in the Pacific Northwest air, like it’s the first breath I’ve taken in two and a half years. It’s briny out here on the coast, where the sky stretches endless and blue over water that sparkles in tiny fractals, and where one week from now, my little sister will be married under the red-roofed lighthouse that juts out from the green headland a short walk away.
The trunk of the rental car heaves open with a groan, a stark contrast to the perfect Oregon day. It’s fitting that my return to the West Coast would not only be on the heels of losing my job, but involve a dented Mazda that sounded like a freight train running off the tracks the entire way from PDX. Coming back here was never going to be easy, but the journey could have been a little kinder.
Inside, the house is largely the same. The kitchen sits at the front, the long oak table that we can all fit around under the windows. Through a small mudroom opposite are French doors leading to the screen porch that runs along one side of the house. When everyone else arrives the day after tomorrow, there will be laughter rolling in from the yard, conversation in the kitchen, music playing.
For now, there’s only silence.
I drop my car keys on the granite island and walk my bags into the living room, where the sun streams in through the floor-to-ceiling windows. I should go upstairs and unpack, start the week on a responsible note, settle myself in before the others arrive. But a wave of all the memories this place holds suddenly washes over me, and I find myself unable to move another step. This house has seen me through so many versions of myself, and this newest one feels like a stranger here, an intruder.
I brace myself. If I’m going to survive this week, I need to pretend that I haven’t intentionally been staying away these past few years. I take another deep breath, pour a glass of wine, and fold my legs under me on the couch. It was this view of the ocean that sold my parents and the Websters on the place when they purchased it together twenty years ago. And now, with the familiar feel of the sun warming my shoulders, the sight of the waves shimmering before me, that same view quiets my mind for the first time in days.
MONDAY
I wake up the next morning sprawled face down on top of the comforter, a dull throb behind my right eye. What started as one glass of wine turned into three on the back deck as I watched the sun go down over the ocean, curled under a well-loved Pendleton throw in one of the Adirondack chairs out there.
I close my eyes again for a minute, listening to the waves rolling in, enjoying the cool breeze drifting through the window as it brushes across my neck.
And that’s when I hear the front door.
My eyes fly open. I sit up and scramble for my phone, checking to see if Stevie has texted that she and her fiancé, Leo, decided to head up early, but I don’t have any new messages. Still, it wouldn’t be that unlike my sister to show up unannounced. I stand with far too much confidence for a hungover woman alone in a coastal house, and shuffle downstairs.
Just in case, in the living room, I pick up a heavy geode from a sideboard and raise it above my head as I approach the kitchen, ready to—what? Pummel someone at short range?
At the sound of keys being tossed onto the counter, I lower the rock, my heart slowing. “Hello?” I call. “Stevie?” I poke my head through the door, catch sight of the person turning at my voice.
It is not my sister.
At first, I think I might be making him up, as if despite the energy I’ve spent repressing him since the second I stepped foot inside this house, some memory managed to spring free and wander around like a reminder of everything I’ve been missing. But this person is flesh and blood, fully corporeal.
I take him in like there’s a curtain slowly rising up to reveal him. Here are the long legs that used to bike around town with me when we were kids, here are the forearms that used to lean against the bar across from me, here are strong shoulders and here is a head of messy, dark hair.
“Joni,” Ren says, my name familiar on his lips. “Hi.”
I stare back at him. Dust particles catch in the bands of light filtering in through the kitchen windows behind him like he’s a particularly well-lit figure in an indie film. His gray T-shirt sits against the tan of his arms, Wayfarers tucked into the front pocket.
I had one more day to get ready for this, one more day to live in delusion that this moment might never come, that I would never have to face him. The person who knows—knew—me better than anyone in the world. The reason I’ve avoided Oregon for so long. I was going to be cool, casual, act like nothing had changed between us while our families were around and ignore him the rest of the time. I wasn’t going to be alone with him.
If the vague nausea I was feeling before was because of the wine I drank last night, now it is firmly due to the fact that not only do I have to face him alone, but I have to do it pantsless, in only a Portland Mavericks T-shirt that hangs partway down my thighs. As luck or fate or the laughably unfair universe would have it, he’s here a day early, wrecking my plans.
“Hi, Ren,” I croak. I clear my throat. “I didn’t know you’d be here.” Obviously.
My eyes snag on the barely there lines that frame the corners of his mouth, twin parentheses serving as proof of how much joy I know can fill up his body. They deepen even when there’s just a hint of a smile on his face. I used to chase them like I did his laugh. But Ren isn’t smiling now.
“I’m sorry,” he says, in what might be the most quintessentially Ren answer possible. He’s apologizing, like he really did break into my personal vacation home. “I didn’t mean to startle you. I would have called if—”
“No, it’s okay.” I hadn’t told anyone I’d be here early, hadn’t wanted to alert them to the reason—the sudden and dramatic end of a job I loved—behind my last-minute schedule change. There’s no way Ren could have known I would be here. “What are you doing here?” I ask him.
It takes Ren a beat to answer. He reaches up to either tug at his hair or rub at his neck, but he releases his arm at the last second, settles his gaze on me. “I thought I’d head up before everyone arrives tomorrow to get some things out of the way,” he says. “You know, mow the lawn, clear the path down to the lighthouse, that sort of thing.”
Right. Ren would be here out of selfless reasons. As Stevie’s maid of honor, I have a list of all the things I’ll need to prepare for starting tomorrow, but Ren, helper that he is, is diving in well before anyone even asks him to.
“Of course,” I say. “Same.”
“Your hair—” Ren says, and I glance up in time to see him nodding toward me.
“Shorter,” I say, smoothing the back of my hair, which just clears my shoulders, the only vestige of its former self my bangs. I cut it a year ago, after Stevie told me hair holds memory or emotion or something along those lines. I was willing to try anything to fill the hole that had taken up residence in my life.
“You’re still—” I gesture at him, coming up short, nerves climbing up my neck. His hair looks like it’s been trimmed recently, but it’s still his usual style. His shoulders seem like they might be broader under his T-shirt, but he’s always been in good shape, so maybe it’s just a trick of the light. The ways he’s different are too minute to mention: a face and body two and a half years older in ways only someone intimately familiar with them would notice.
“—tall,” I finally finish, wincing a little.
“Yeah,” Ren says. “Been trying my hardest to knock off a few inches, but…” He shrugs, and I realize too late he’s trying to make a joke, so my laugh comes out stilted.
“Well,” I say. “I’m in my old room, but I’ll stay out of your way.”
Ren raises a fist to his forehead. For a moment, the mask falls, his eyes honing in on me again. Ren’s always had a way of seeing through me, and suddenly I’m sixteen again, crying against his shoulder because I just failed a math test, or eighteen, anxiously poring over a dog-eared welcome packet as we drive north to Portland as college freshmen, or twenty-seven, standing on a cold sidewalk on New Year’s Eve, the last time I saw him.
“Right,” Ren says, eyes still on mine, then, “Actually, I should probably mention—” He stops short when he sees the small flinch on my face, like I’m bracing for what he’s going to say next. His fist drops to his side. “We’re on the screen porch again this year.”
I clamp my lips together. “Hmm?” I say.
“You and I,” Ren says, nodding between us like that is the part of his sentence he needs to clarify. “They put us on the screened-in porch again this year.”
“Who is they?” I ask, though there’s only one possible answer. Our families. The other people you’ve been avoiding.
“Well,” Ren says. “The last couple years—” He pauses.
I paste as placid a look on my face as possible, like it’s normal that I haven’t been here for the last two summers, like it’s normal that he and I are no longer a we, bound together by something that I used to think was profound, and now just feels like time, proximity, all those things that can tie people together.
“Stevie and Leo have been in the room you two used to share, and Thad’s in the one I usually take.”
“No worries,” I say, smile tight, already angling my way out of the kitchen. What did I expect? That they’d walk by my room in hushed reverence all this time, maintaining it like a shrine when there’s hardly enough space for all of us as is? That Stevie and Leo wouldn’t use it as their own? “Let me know if you need any help. Otherwise, I’ll meet you on the screened-in porch tomorrow.”
His brows bend toward each other and his eyes go dark. “Right. I won’t get in your way, then.”
I, a nearly thirty-year-old woman, salute him on my way out.
From FRIENDS TO LOVERS by Sally Blakey. Copyright 2025 by Sally Blakely. Published by Canary Street Press, an imprint of HTP Books/HarperCollins.
This was a great sequel to the first book. I still need to read the third one. I think I liked this one slightly more than the first book. The romance was messy, but I really enjoyed it. 
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