Chapter 15

The road trip was Becky’s idea.

This should have been, Lookmhee reflected later, a warning sign. Most things that started as Becky’s idea ended up being either the best or the most chaotic experience of her recent life, and the road trip turned out to be both simultaneously, which was very on-brand for Becky.

The plan, as Becky presented it on a Thursday evening in Engfa’s apartment with the energy of someone who had already booked the accommodation and was only now informing the relevant parties, was this: a long weekend away. Four hours by car. A small town on the coast that Becky had read about in a travel piece she claimed to have found organically and that TK claimed she had been researching for two weeks. Rental cars — two of them, because six people and luggage did not fit in one car without someone being unreasonably uncomfortable. Departure Saturday morning. Return Monday evening.

“I’ve already booked the place,” Becky said, to the room.

“You booked it before asking us?” Engfa said.

“I booked it because I knew you’d all say yes.”

“You don’t know that—”

“Freen?” Becky said.

“Yes!” Freen said immediately.

“TK?”

A pause. “Fine,” TK said.

“Engfa?”

Engfa looked at her with the patient expression. “You’ve already booked it.”

“I have.”

A sigh. “Fine.”

“Lookmhee?”

Lookmhee looked at Sonya. Sonya was looking at Becky with the expression of someone who already knew what was coming and had decided how to respond to it.

“Sure,” Lookmhee said.

“Sonya?”

“What is the accommodation?” Sonya said. Not a yes. Not a no. A question, which from Sonya meant she was considering it.

Becky pulled out her phone. She showed her a picture. “A rented house. Three bedrooms. Right on the coast. It has a porch with a sea view.”

Sonya looked at the picture. Then at Becky. “Three bedrooms for six people.”

“Some of us can share.” Becky’s voice was perfectly even. “It’s a long weekend. It’ll be fine.”

Sonya looked at her for a long, level moment.

“Fine,” she said.

Becky smiled. It was the smile she wore when something had gone exactly according to plan, which it clearly had, and which Lookmhee was only now beginning to understand the full implications of.

✦ ✦ ✦

They left Saturday morning in two cars.

Car one: Becky driving, Freen in the passenger seat already playing music before they had left the car park, TK in the back with her book and the long-suffering composure of someone who had agreed to this and was committed to seeing it through.

Car two: Engfa driving, Sonya in the passenger seat with her work bag because she had brought a manuscript she was editing, Lookmhee in the back with her notebook and a travel coffee from Common Ground and the particular feeling of someone about to spend a long weekend in a small house with five people including the person who left coffee at her door every morning.

The drive was four hours. Engfa was a good driver — calm, unhurried, the same way she did everything. Sonya read her manuscript for the first hour and a half and then put it down and looked out the window at the landscape changing around them, the city giving way to smaller towns giving way to the particular wide, green flatness that came before the coast.

“What are you working on?” Lookmhee asked.

Sonya glanced back at her. “A collection of essays. First book from a new writer. She’s very good — raw in places but the voice is there.”

“What’s it about?”

“Distance,” Sonya said. “The essay form of it. How people hold onto things across geography and time.” She looked at the manuscript on her lap. “There’s an essay about letters that hasn’t been written yet, only correspondence that still exists. She reconstructs the relationship from what the other person wrote.” A pause. “It’s the best piece in the collection. She doesn’t know that yet.”

Lookmhee looked at her. At the clean profile turned toward the window, the manuscript in her hands, the way she talked about someone else’s writing with the specific warmth of someone who genuinely loved the thing they worked with.

“You love your job,” Lookmhee said.

Sonya glanced back again. Something in her expression shifted — surprised, slightly, the way she got when Lookmhee said something accurate that she hadn’t expected. “Yes,” she said. Simply.

“It shows,” Lookmhee said.

Sonya looked at her for a moment. Then back at the window. But the expression stayed different — something a little warmer than before, a little less guarded.

From the driver’s seat, Engfa said nothing. But Lookmhee caught the slight curve of her mouth in the rearview mirror and looked out her own window.

✦ ✦ ✦

The house was exactly as the picture had shown — small and white and right on the coast, a porch that looked out over a grey-green sea, the smell of salt air coming in through windows that had been left open. It had a large main room and a kitchen and three bedrooms arranged along a narrow hallway.

Becky did the room assignments with the energy of a general deploying troops.

“Engfa — first bedroom, it has the best light, you’ll like it. Freen and I—” she gestured at the second bedroom, the slightly larger one with two narrow beds — “will take the middle room.”

Freen beamed. TK looked at Becky with the look she wore when she was observing something she found interesting.

“TK,” Becky continued, “there’s a fold-out in the main room—”

“Fine,” TK said.

“—and Sonya and Lookmhee get the third bedroom.”

A pause.

Not a long pause. Barely a pause at all, really. But it was there, in the way that certain pauses were there — present and specific, shaped by the people in it.

“Is there—” Lookmhee started.

“One bed,” Becky said pleasantly. “It’s a double. Very comfortable, the listing said.”

Sonya looked at Becky.

Becky looked back at Sonya with the absolute serenity of someone who had nothing to hide and certainly had not planned any of this.

“One bed,” Sonya said.

“One very comfortable bed,” Becky said. “The listing was very clear about it.”

Another pause.

“Fine,” Sonya said. In the tone that meant she knew exactly what Becky was doing and had decided that engaging with it directly would only give it oxygen.

Becky’s smile did not waver. It was, Lookmhee thought, the most unrepentant smile she had ever seen on another human being.

The bedroom was small and white and had a window that looked out at the sea.

The bed was, as advertised, a double. Comfortable looking. Neatly made with white linen. Perfectly, objectively adequate for two people who were adults and friends and completely capable of sharing a bed in a normal and uncomplicated way.

Lookmhee put her bag down by the window.

Sonya put her bag on the chair by the door.

They looked at the bed. Then at each other. Then not at each other.

“I’ll take the side by the door,” Sonya said. Practical. Resolved.

“Okay,” Lookmhee said.

“And we’re not talking about Becky’s transparent—”

“Completely agree.”

“Good.”

They went out to the porch with everyone else, which was easier.

✦ ✦ ✦

The day was good in the simple, uncomplicated way that days were sometimes good — sea air and the sound of waves and the particular looseness that came with being away from ordinary life and its ordinary rhythms. They walked along the coast in the afternoon, all six of them spread out along the path in the way the group always spread out, some people talking and some people quiet and the configuration shifting naturally as they walked.

Freen collected shells with the focused joy of someone discovering that shells existed for the first time. Becky walked beside her and made notes in her phone about the shells, which Freen narrated in detail, which was — Lookmhee noticed, watching them from a few steps back — a thing Becky did not do with anyone else. The note-taking was just listening, she realized. Just Becky listening to Freen in the only way Becky knew how to do it, which was actively, with her hands doing something.

She filed it away. The side storyline, running quietly in the background.

Sonya walked beside her. They had ended up at the back of the group without discussing it, the way they often ended up places together without discussing it. The path was wide enough for two. The sea was very present and very loud and very grey-green.

“She’s collecting shells,” Lookmhee said.

“Freen collects everything,” Sonya said. “Last year she collected seventeen pinecones from the park and brought them home in her jacket pockets. Engfa found one in the couch for three months.”

Lookmhee laughed. “Did TK know about the pinecones?”

“TK watched her do it in real time and said nothing.” A beat. “She also helped carry four of them.”

Lookmhee looked at her. “TK helped carry the pinecones?”

“She would deny it.”

Lookmhee smiled. She looked ahead at the group — Freen crouching by the waterline, Becky crouching beside her, TK standing behind them with her hands in her pockets looking at the sea. Engfa slightly ahead, hat on against the wind, the picture of contentment.

“I’m glad Becky planned this,” she said.

“Don’t tell her that,” Sonya said. “She’ll plan everything from now on.”

“She already plans everything.”

“She’ll plan it louder.”

Lookmhee laughed again. Sonya looked at her with the expression that was warm and private and not quite a smile but more than her neutral.

They walked in comfortable silence after that, which was its own kind of conversation.

✦ ✦ ✦

Dinner was loud and warm — something Engfa had made with the groceries they’d stopped for on the way, the whole group around the small table with candles because Freen had found them in a kitchen drawer and lit them before anyone could suggest otherwise. There was wine. There was the particular relaxed energy of people who had spent a day outside and were now warm and fed and unhurried.

Becky told a story about a work situation that got progressively more chaotic with each retelling. Freen contributed details that Becky had apparently not included and that made the story significantly funnier. TK fact-checked two details, silently, by raising an eyebrow, which Becky ignored with great dignity.

Lookmhee sat across from Sonya and thought: six months ago I did not know any of these people. Six months ago I was driving to a city where I had no one, listening to a podcast about living my best life in traffic. And now there is this — this table, these people, this specific warm chaotic feeling of being in the right place with the right people.

She looked at Sonya.

Sonya was listening to Becky’s story with the small, private expression she wore when something was actually funny to her — not the laugh, which was rare, but the particular stillness that meant she was amused. She had a glass of wine and her manuscript was back in the bedroom and she looked — easy. Easier than Lookmhee usually saw her.

She caught Lookmhee looking. There was a moment.

Lookmhee looked at her wine.

✦ ✦ ✦

They went to bed late.

The house had gone quiet around them by the time Lookmhee and Sonya made their way to the third bedroom — TK on the fold-out in the main room already reading, Engfa’s light off, the sound of Freen saying something in the middle room and Becky’s quieter response.

The bedroom was dark except for the moonlight through the window, which was considerable — the sea was bright under it, grey-silver and moving.

Lookmhee changed in the bathroom. Sonya changed in the bedroom. They met at the bed with the coordinated awkwardness of two people being extremely adult and normal about a situation that was making at least one of them — Lookmhee could not speak for Sonya — extremely not normal.

They got in on their respective sides.

Sonya turned off the lamp on her side.

Lookmhee looked at the ceiling.

The sea was audible through the window — waves, rhythmic, the sound that was supposed to make sleeping easier and was, Lookmhee thought, absolutely not making sleeping easier.

“The waves are loud,” she said. To say something.

“Yes,” said Sonya.

A pause.

“You can hear them inside,” Lookmhee said.

“Yes,” Sonya said again. Patient. Even. Giving nothing away.

“Good loud,” Lookmhee said. “Not bad loud.”

“I know what you meant.”

Another pause. The waves. The moonlight. The small, white room.

“Sonya,” Lookmhee said.

“Yes?”

“Thank you. For coming. For — all of this. The whole trip.”

A silence that was not uncomfortable. That had texture and warmth and something that was just the two of them in a quiet room being very aware of each other without needing to perform anything about it.

“Becky planned it,” Sonya said finally.

“I know. But you said yes.”

A longer pause.

“I would have gone anywhere you were going,” Sonya said. Low. Even. Said to the ceiling, to the dark, to the space between them. Said in the way she said true things — simply, without decoration, as if the truth was just a fact to be reported.

Lookmhee’s heart did the specific, complicated thing it had started doing every time Sonya said something real.

She turned her head. In the dark she could make out the profile of Sonya’s face — the still, composed face, eyes on the ceiling, jaw set with the particular set it had when she had said something that mattered and was waiting to see what it did.

“Sonya,” Lookmhee said softly.

“Not yet,” Sonya said. But softer this time. And something in it that was different from before — not a door closing but a door that was already opening, slowly, on its own.

Lookmhee looked at the ceiling.

She breathed.

She thought: I would have gone anywhere you were going. She thought: that is not a small thing.

She thought: that is, in fact, everything.

She did not say any of it.

She listened to the waves.

Beside her, after a while, Sonya’s breathing changed — the slow, even change of someone crossing into sleep. Lookmhee turned her head again and looked at her in the moonlight, in the way she would never do when Sonya was awake, the way you could only look at someone when they were unguarded and you were safe to look.

She looked for exactly two seconds.

Then she looked back at the ceiling.

She stared at it for a very long time.

She did not sleep for two hours.

When she finally did, she slept well — the deep, settled sleep that came sometimes when you were in the right place, when something had shifted into position without you fully realizing it, when the thing you needed most was simply there, beside you, breathing.

✦ ✦ ✦

In the morning she woke first.

The room was full of early light, the sea still going outside the window. Sonya was asleep on her side of the bed, facing away, her dark hair loose, her breathing slow and even. Lookmhee lay still and looked at the ceiling and listened to the waves and thought about nothing in particular for a few minutes, which was rare for her and felt, this morning, like a gift.

Then she got up quietly, took her notebook, and went to the porch.

The sea was enormous and very calm in the early morning, silver-grey under a pale sky. She sat on the porch steps with her notebook on her knees and her feet on the damp wooden boards and wrote until she heard the house starting to wake up around her.

She filled four pages.

She did not reread them.

She just sat with her notebook closed on her knees and the sea in front of her and thought: soon.

She thought: I think very soon now.

✦ ✦ ✦