I didn’t think about it again until much later.
On the last afternoon, everything changed.
We were sitting under a striped umbrella, the waves rolling in slow and steady. Paige had been quiet for almost an hour. She kept looking at me, then looking away when I caught her.
Finally, she held out her hand.
“Give me your phone.”
“Why?”
“I want to take one last picture of us.”
I laughed. “Last picture? We’re forty-four, Paige, not ninety.”
She didn’t laugh. She took off her sunglasses and set them carefully on the towel. Her face was so serious that my smile slid right off mine.
“I mean our last picture as best friends.”
“That’s a weird thing to say. Are you moving to Antarctica?”
She didn’t answer. That was when I saw her hands. They were shaking.
In thirty-seven years, I had seen Paige sad, furious, drunk, and heartbroken. I had almost never seen her scared.
