Prologue
My suitcase had been packed for three days, but the carpet around it was a war zone of discarded hemlines.
I sat cross-legged on the floor, staring into the open nylon shell as if it were an interrogation room. Half of what I’d carefully rolled and tucked away on Tuesday had already been pulled back out. A pair of worn leather sandals lay nearly forgotten beside my knee.
Three dresses were splayed across the mattress like colorful casualties of my own indecision. Another hung over the back of my desk chair. It had survived two rounds of elimination, but now, under the harsh afternoon light, the floral pattern felt entirely too loud.
Or maybe it just hugged my hips a fraction too tightly. Being curvy meant finding a sundress that looked effortless was rarely an effortless process. Sometimes it was just exhausting.
Going to the coast trip wasn’t new. Ryan’s family had owned the beach house since he was a kid, and I’d spent enough summers there to have the routine memorized down to the exact smell of the screened-in porch.
Salt-heavy air. Sand that crunched underfoot no matter how often we swept. Long, languid evenings on the cedar deck where the horizon bled into dusk and the rest of the world just seemed to fade away.
It should have felt like coming home.
Instead, a frantic, tight little flutter took flight somewhere deep behind my ribs every time I pictured loading my bags into the trunk. It wasn’t fear, not exactly. It was the terrifying, intoxicating weight of expectation.
“You’re doing it again.”
I blinked, pulling myself out of the spiral as Nicole tilted into my doorway. She was holding two sweat-beaded iced coffees, the golden afternoon sun catching the bright edges of her hair and making her look entirely too put-together for my current state of chaos.
“Doing what?” I asked, though my chest tightened guiltily.
She let her gaze drift over the floral minefield covering my bed, then leveled a dry, knowing look at me. “You know exactly what.”
“I really do not,” I lied, reaching for the plastic cup she extended. The cold plastic felt grounding against my palms, which had gone slightly damp.
“You’re staring at a piece of luggage like it’s a crystal ball, Belle.”
I let out a breathless snort, moving my legs so she could navigate the room. Nicole stepped inside and dropped onto the edge of the mattress, her thigh missing a blue linen strap by mere inches.
“Please explain to me,” she began, taking a slow sip, “why a human being needs four separate daytime sundresses for a week where we’re mostly going to be in bikinis by the pool or wearing club dresses at two in the morning.”
“I might need options.”
“You might need clinical intervention.”
I grinned over the rim of my cup, letting the familiar rhythm of her teasing steady my pulse. Nicole shook her head, her fingers reaching out to trail over the hem of a pale floral print near her hip.
“This one is pretty, though.”
“Right?”
“But you already packed two almost identical ones.”
“They are completely different,” I insisted, defensive of my carefully curated illusions.
“They’re both sky blue, Belle.”
“One has a sweetheart neckline, Nic. It actually accommodates my chest without making me look like a tavern wench,” I pointed out. “The other is a wrap dress. The fabric on the wrap is heavier, so it doesn’t cling to my stomach when I sit down.”
Nicole stared at me, deadpan, before letting the linen drop back onto the quilt.
“You are deeply unwell.”
I laughed, leaning my head back against the solid wooden frame of my bed. The easy, unforced comfort of a ten-year friendship settled over us, a warm blanket against the sudden chill of my own nerves. We’d been sharing secrets since we were sixteen; trying to hide a thought from Nicole was like trying to stop the tide with my bare hands.
Which was precisely why the sudden shift in her expression made my stomach drop into a freefall. Her eyes narrowed, tracking the exact moment my smile faltered.
“There it is,” she whispered.
I froze, the ice cubes in my coffee clicking together.
“There what is?”
“That look.”
“I don’t have a look,” I mumbled, though the sudden heat prickling at the back of my neck betrayed me. “Oh, no. Please, Nic, don’t.”
“Oh, absolutely yes.” Nicole pointed her straw at me like a weapon. “You think he’s going to do it. You think Ryan is going to propose.”
The blush hit my face so fast it felt physical, a wave of sunburn rushing up from my collarbone.
“I never said that!”
“You didn’t have to. You’re shaking with excitement.”
I groaned, burying my face in my hands. The darkness behind my eyelids offered no protection from the truth.
The worst part wasn’t that she knew; it was that admitting it out loud made the hope feel fragile, easily broken. I hadn’t spun a grand narrative to anyone else. There had been a few carefully casual comments dropped to my mother over Sunday brunch, a couple of vague remarks Nicole had evidently stored away like a detective building a case.
Nothing concrete. Nothing anchored to reality.
But inside my own mind? Inside my head, it was an obsession.
Ryan had been slipping into a strange, quiet orbit for the last month. I’d spent countless late nights turning his behavior over and over like a smooth stone, trying to find a flaw in my logic, trying to convince myself I wasn’t just imagining things.
The secretive phone calls where he’d walk out onto the balcony. The abrupt way he’d shut his laptop when I walked into the kitchen, replacing whatever was on his screen with a smile that felt just a fraction too wide, too deliberate. Small, disconnected fragments that shouldn’t have meant a thing on their own, but when stitched together, they formed a pattern I couldn’t ignore.
And then there was that Tuesday night a month ago.
We’d been doing the dishes, the radio playing low, when he’d taken the frying pan from my hands, his fingers lingering over mine just a second longer than necessary.
“I don’t think I could get used to life without you around, honestly.”
He’d said it so casually, his eyes fixed on the soapy water, but the words had lodged themselves beneath my skin. They looped through my thoughts at the oddest times, while I was standing in line for groceries, or staring at a spreadsheet at work. It felt like a promise disguised as a passing thought.
After five years, it felt impossible not to look for the horizon. Five years of birthdays, of shared flu seasons, of lazy Sundays spent so tangled together on the couch that I sometimes forgot where my body ended and his began. He was woven into the fabric of my twenties.
Sometimes, if I tried to look back, the version of Isabelle who existed before Ryan felt like a stranger from a book I’d read a long time ago.
We weren’t perfect. We’d had screaming matches over stupid things, periods of silence that stretched too long, and moments where the sheer exhaustion of loving another flawed human being felt heavy. But the foundation had never cracked. It had always been us. The certainty of him was as vital and unconscious as the air in my lungs.
“You’ve got that dreamy look again,” Nicole’s voice cut through the fog, dragging me back to the hardwood floor.
I dropped my hands, blinking against the light.
“I do not.”
“You do. You look like a Hallmark movie.”
“I am a cynical, modern woman,” I argued, though it sounded weak even to me.
“You’re a romantic who is currently planning her wedding bouquet based on a vibe,” Nicole countered, her tone softening as she shifted her weight on the bed, pulling one leg beneath her. “Seriously, Belle.”
The use of my actual nickname, the one she reserved for when the joking stopped, made me pull my shoulders back.
“I’m just saying... if he proposes, it’s going to be incredible. I’ll cry, I’ll plan the bachelorette party, I’ll be ecstatic,” she said gently.
“But if he doesn’t?” I asked, my eyes dropping to the plastic lid of my cup.
“Then nothing changes,” she said quietly.
She was right. Rationally, logically, she was entirely right. If Friday came and went without a ring, it wouldn’t mean Ryan loved me any less. It wouldn’t erase the half-decade of history we’d built, brick by brick. The future wouldn’t dissolve.
Yet, as I looked back at the suitcase, the fantasy refused to untangle itself from my expectations. I could see it so clearly it felt like a memory instead of a hope: a sunset walk along the dunes, the wind whipping my hair into my face, Ryan stopping, his hand sliding into mine with a deliberate, grounding weight. The shift in his eyes right before he reached into his pocket.
The small, involuntary smile tugged at the corner of my mouth before I could stop it.
“Oh my God,” Nicole groaned, throwing her head back against my pillows.
“What?”
“You’ve already rehearsed it.”
“I have not!”
“Isabelle, your face is a dead giveaway. You’ve picked out the lighting.”
“It might have crossed my mind once or twice,” I admitted, the heat returning to my cheeks as I looked away, staring at the hem of the blue dress.
“Once or twice since I sat down?”
“Shut up.”
She pointed a finger at me, a mock-stern expression on her face. “Tell me you haven’t looked at Pinterest.”
I bit my lip, staying silent.
Nicole made a sound of pure defeat. “Oh, you are so gone.”
“It wasn’t a deliberate search!” I laughed, the sound bubbling up to cut through the heavy layer of my own anticipation. “An algorithm fed it to me!”
“Sure, Belle. Blame the internet.”
We dissolved into an easy, breathless laughter, the kind that only comes from years of total transparency. But as the noise subsided, my gaze drifted back to the open suitcase, and the warmth in my chest settled into something deeper, quieter.
Tomorrow, we’d drive toward the ocean. There would be long, sun-drenched afternoons, late-night drinks on the deck with his parents, and those quiet, early morning walks on the shoreline before the rest of the house stirred.
Maybe Nicole was right. Maybe I was letting my expectations run dangerously far ahead of reality. Maybe there wouldn’t be a ring hidden in his shaving kit.
But as I looked at the scattered blue dresses, I realized the hope had already grown roots too deep to pull up. It was a quiet, persistent hum beneath my skin, whispering that everything was about to change.
“Alright,” Nicole said, breaking the silence as she stood up and lightly nudged the side of my suitcase with her sneaker. “Before you mentally pick out your bridesmaids’ dresses, you’re helping me drag my heavy-ass bags downstairs. Come on.”
