This is the last place Nic would ever go.

I’m not even sure why I came. That “fix it, Dad” feeling? I can practically hear Cass saying, “You get pissed off when I rescue you. ” I swallow the lump in my throat.

We were doing so well there for a second.

I drive back toward Seashell, hitting the gates just as Cass’s BMW roars up the other direction on Ocean Road, a little too fast over the speed bumps.

We both slow to a stop, our headlights picking out individ-ual blades of grass on well-mown, carefully tended lawns on either side of the street, their brilliance turning the green into gray and white.

The passenger-side door of Cass’s car opens, and Viv climbs out, crossing over to me.

“You gonna hear me out?” she asks.

“You gonna help me find Nic?” I return.

She walks around the front of the Bronco, opens the passenger-side door and slides in.

I expect Cass to zoom away immediately, but he doesn’t, idling the BMW by the side of the road, waiting . . . for what?

Me to get out and talk to him? What am I supposed to say?

I stay where I am, and after a few seconds, he pulls forward and leaves us in the quiet of the night.

“I didn’t mean to,” Viv says, quickly, like she’s accidently broken a plate or something.

I slow to Seashell’s only stop sign. Shift into park, because no one’s behind us. No one’s in any hurry this time of night.

Ever, really, on Seashell. That’s one of the promises that should be on the sign separating us from the causeway. All the time in the world.

Except that that’s a promise no one can really make.

Forever.

“You got together with Spence by accident?” I ask, then hate the harshness in my voice. If anyone can understand that, it should be me. But Viv isn’t supposed to have “crumble lines.”

Or not this kind. And if she did . . . why didn’t she tell me?

She leans her head back against the headrest, eyes shut.

“What do I say to you, Gwen? I hate that you know this. I’m glad you know this. I want to make excuses . . . I want to say they’re enough. But they’re not. I hurt Nic. You. If I didn’t lie to you, I sure didn’t tell you the truth, even when we said no secrets. Joke’s on me. Because, let’s face it, in my head I was all judgey about you and some of your choices. Alex, freaking Jim freshman year. Ugh. Cass, the first time around. Spence . . .

I pretended not to be, but I was . . . smug. Like I couldn’t get what you were thinking, so you must have been wrong. I guess you knew that. You had to have felt it. I guess that’s why we couldn’t really talk this summer. ’Cause I suddenly got it.

And . . . and I didn’t want to get it! I wanted Nic. Only. Ever.

Until . . . Until I didn’t anymore. And I didn’t know what to do with that.”

Did I know, deep down? Maybe. This weird feeling I’ve had this summer . . . I thought it was because things were different—me the third wheel, not a threesome anymore. But maybe I somehow knew that we really were, really, not a threesome anymore.

I lean my forehead on the steering wheel. “But Spence, Viv?

Why him—of all people?” I turn so I can see her, flipping my hair away from my face. “Did you do it to . . . to hurt Nic? Is that what this—Spence—is about?” As I ask, I feel an unwanted pang of sympathy for Spence, the handy weapon in someone else’s war. Again.

“No. Not at all.” She flushes. “But hell, Gwen . . . I thought Nic and I were . . . in this together. And then he’s all . . .

‘well . . . eight years from now, we’ll’ . . . Eight years! What am I supposed to do, while he’s off having adventures, meeting girls who . . . I don’t know. Dangle from tow ropes with their teeth? He’s supposed to stay impressed with the girl who keeps everyone’s water glasses filled? Screw that. I . . . can’t compete.

And I . . . don’t want to. What’s wrong with wanting to be here? If what I want is a little less big, less noble, than what he wants . . . does that make me a loser? That’s the thing. I don’t feel like a loser with Spence. He . . . I . . . Al got that contract to work with the Bath and Tennis Club late this spring . . . and it seemed like everything he did there, we’d run into Spence, because even though his dad owns it, his dad is kind of . . . out of it. At first I started talking to him just because of business.

But then . . . he’s not who I thought he was. At all.”

I’m starting to wonder who is. But to be fair, I have to weigh the six or whatever girls in the hot tub against Cass’s unflinch-ing loyalty and those flashes of perceptiveness I’ve seen myself.

“I started feeling . . . really liking him . . . that’s why I wanted the ring. I thought it would make me stop thinking about Spence and focus on Nicky.”

“You do know that’s incredibly messed up, right?”

She raises her hands in defense. “You don’t get to be the only one who can be stupid and blind, Gwen.”

“Yeah, welcome to my world.” I’m laughing despite myself.

But then I sit up and look at her, my lifelong friend, with the cartilage piercings at the top of her ear that Nic hated, but never told her because she wanted them, and I hurt so much for my cousin—what he had, what he lost—that I have to fold my arms against my stomach to keep the pain contained. “Viv?

Did you ever really love Nic?” I ask it, and then wish I hadn’t.

I’m not sure I want to hear the answer.

“I’ll always love him.” She responds so quickly that I know it’s true. “He was my first . . . everything. I never thought—I never planned—he’d be anything but my only everything. But these few months, and especially the last few weeks—it’s not the same. He’s . . . not the same.”

“Maybe it’s just that he’s really tense,” I say, “maybe . . .”

Then I stop. Viv puts her hand on mine, clenched tight on the steering wheel, squeezes. Maybe I stop talking because I don’t know what to say. Or maybe I stop because I finally get that sometimes we hold on to something—a person, a resentment, a regret, an idea of who we are—because we don’t know what to reach for next. That what we’ve done before is what we have to do again. That there are only re-dos and no do-overs. And maybe . . . maybe I know better than that.