Chapter One

Sand had never felt so soft. It was strange, unnerving, and delicious all at once. For someone accustomed to the gritty, pebbly, sometimes stabby sand of the upper east coast, the nearly white expanse covering the beach that butted against the Gulf of Mexico felt wrong—and criminally right. It didn’t feel like sand at all. More like flour. No, confectioner’s sugar.

Whatever the proper comparison, oh, it was decadent, and the tension in Allison’s shoulders began to unknot as she continued digging her bare toes into the piles she’d shoved together with her heels. She shifted her gaze from her feet—toes recently painted the bright pink of her childhood dreams—to the elderly couple walking slowly in the gentle lap of the surf. One man kept his hand steady on the other’s lower back. Their heads were bent close together, each covered in a faded baseball hat, and every few steps, one man would throw his head back in laughter while the other looked on, clearly pleased he still had that effect on his partner.

A dying ember of hope flickered deep within Allison. She smiled, caught herself, and scowled. Within the space of a breath, the ember was extinguished.

It was nearing 5:15 p.m. and the sun was beginning to sink lower in the cloud-streaked sky. By instinct, Allison rubbed her bare arms, then laughed. Shaking off the habits of “real” winters would take time. Colliding thoughts of time and habits tied a quick ribbon around her lungs, its bow punctuating her breath with a stinging gasp.

So many habits to break, and all the time in the world to create new ones.

She pushed her feet deeper into the sand and locked her gaze on the horizon, now glowing gold. She’d prefer not to create new habits—well, scratch that. New good habits were fine. New bad habits, ones she would need to strike out, scrub away, scour off: those she could do without. It seemed to Allison, however, that she was an expert at forming new bad habits. She’d made a list of them, a slightly mad, bulleted rundown of all her failings from the age of twenty. She was in her mid-thirties when she’d created that list, fully in the embrace of a terrible breakup alongside the reappearance of an ex she had no business even speaking to. (Naturally, they’d done more than speak, which had summoned six new bolded items to the list.) Now that she was nearing forty-two, The List required several pages.

It was so long and so horrible that she’d been tempted to leave it in Portland when she’d packed up to move across the country. She’d held it with the tips of her fingers, even dangled it over a half-full industrial-strength black trash bag. The moment her fingertips released the sheets of poison, her heart had done one of those weird trip-hop-skip things and she’d gasped, dug deep to pull up coordination she’d never known she had, and managed to grab The List before it plopped into the sea of trash it, frankly, belonged in.

But mistakes, for Allison, were not trash. They were points of reference, reminders of What Not To Do Ever Again.

Did she follow her own rules? Of course not; she was a Libra. But still. She wanted the proof, the full measure of everything she’d done wrong, in hopes she would never (or at least infrequently) do it again.

A shriek from the water’s edge pulled Allison from her mental prison. She squinted at the water, her vision blocky and dark around the edges from gazing a bit too long at a point near the sun. A handful of children had arrived, breaking the relative calm and quiet of the beach. A frown tugged the edges of her lips—once a curmudgeon, always a curmudgeon, it seemed.

Kids were fine! Plenty of her friends back in Portland had kids, and she’d been a more-than-decent Aunt Alli. But right now? Their presence was not…preferable. She’d just wanted a chill sunset moment at the beach before—

As another playful scream erupted from the incredibly healthy lungs of a toddling child, Allison rolled her head back and shook it. Her hair fell back into place as she righted her neck and avoided looking at the army of kids now littering the water’s edge. She tucked an errant piece of hair behind her ear, then tugged the bill of her baseball hat lower. Probably not her best move, shoving a hat onto her head before meeting her not-quite-girlfriend for dinner at a restaurant with a dress code.

Allison stood, brushing the fine sand from the back of her jeans. Her fingers grazed the spot where her back pocket was slowly ripping itself away. She’d have to go home before dinner anyway; this outfit would be frowned upon not only by the host, but also by Holly. She could fix her hair, or at least try to.

“You need to make an effort,” she muttered as she walked toward the water, pausing to roll her jeans an extra time—another ritual from summers spent at Jersey beaches where the ocean was unpredictably splashy. Here, there didn’t seem to be any rogue waves at all.

What there was, however, was a group of twenty-somethings setting up camp a few yards away. As Allison neared them, she groaned in tune with the jarringly loud music. She fought the urge to shoot the group her—if she must say so herself—rather refined eye daggers as she passed. She did glance at them, as surreptitiously as possible beneath the cover of her hat, feeling both strings of rage for their thoughtless disruption of the chill beach atmosphere and jealousy for the laughing, easy camaraderie among them.

With the water lapping at her ankles, Allison walked down the beach, away from the little children and the older children. She pulled off her hat, wanting to feel what was left of the sun on her face. All she’d wanted was to watch the sunset in peace. To regroup and steady her jangling nerves. To, maybe, come to a decision that would feel right instead of just make sense.

But no! The universe clearly was not interested in giving her space to commune with nature, to settle her racing mind. It was, instead, rife with disruptions and agitations. Just like—

“No. No, no, no.” Allison stopped in her tracks. It couldn’t be. There was no way.

Slowly, with trepidation and certainty that she wished was a little less certain, she raised her arm and touched the crown of her head. Her hand yanked away upon contact and she shut her eyes briefly, not wanting to see what she already knew was smeared on the tip of her middle finger.

Had she had tears left to cry, they would have spilled out upon sight of the bird shit coating her fingertip. Alas, she’d cried herself dry before leaving Portland and all she had left in her was a feral scream that was pushing the limits of social acceptability. She squelched it, leaving it spiking in her throat, but just barely.

Miserably, Allison looked at her other hand. The very one, yes, holding the baseball hat an ex had given her years and years ago. It was old, faded, perfectly broken in, and the ultimate protector from a runny pile of bird excrement landing atop her freshly washed hair.

Perhaps this shit show was another sign from the universe, but its meaning was lost on her. With a final glance at the sinking sun, she turned to walk up the beach. Now she had no choice but to shower again, and if she was going to be on time for this date, she had to head home before the sun took its bow.

Just as well, Allison thought as she trudged toward the sidewalk. She considered putting the hat back on but didn’t want the memory of the poop stuck to the inside of the hat. Besides, she knew close to no one around here, so if she fostered a reputation as Bird Shit Lady, so be it.

As she waited to cross the street, her eyes landed on something foreign yet beautiful. She blinked, trying to right the image in her head. Christmas lights? Methodically and artistically wrapped around the trunk of a palm tree? She tilted her head as though that would bring clarity. Sure, it was November, and the holiday season was rapidly approaching. But shouldn’t there be fake Christmas trees lining the streets? Something more traditionally festive?

She was jostled from her confusion by an older woman trying to cross the now carless street. Allison fell in step behind her, still gazing at the cheery trunk of the palm tree.

“When in Florida,” she mumbled, shaking her head and cringing at the feeling of dried aviary crap clinging to her scalp.

Palm trees decked with Christmas lights, fine. Feces flung from flying feathered creatures? That she could do without.