Page 56 of The Best Worst Thing

Fall

Summer burned on.

Labor Day came and went, and still, temperatures rose. The days stayed long. The sun stayed hot. The dusk stayed pink.

During the week, Nicole and Valerie threw themselves into the podcast. They talked to women on years-long waiting lists to adopt, women who’d had children and regretted it, women who’d frozen their eggs in a mad dash to preserve their fertility only days before they’d begun chemotherapy, stunned and confused and, sometimes, not even fifteen years old.

They focused on good storytelling above all else, but by early November—when Nicole flew to Virginia for Valerie’s anatomy scan—they were beginning to lay the groundwork for growth.

Logan closed the big tequila deal, which kept the agency flush, but somehow left Quentin more impulsive—and more meddlesome—than ever before.

Logan took a half-dozen calls with a top-notch recruiter, went on a handful of interviews, and—at Nicole’s urging—met with an old creative director friend a few times to dream up an agency of his own, but nothing really changed.

Between his Dungeons the quickly deleted, I-still-love-you emails from Gabe; and the barrage of too-nice baby gifts Nicole’s mother-in-law had delivered to Nicole’s doorstep every single day couldn’t break the summer’s spell.

But eventually, the season began to turn.

The days grew shorter and shorter. The sleeves on Nicole’s little date-night dresses, longer and longer.

And before they knew it, there were pumpkins on porches and cotton cobwebs on clotheslines and the clocks had fallen back and that first November mist had rolled on in, cold and gray and strange.

But it didn’t matter.

Because for Nicole and Logan, the navy five o’clock sky and the cool, fog-cloaked streets and the cans of cranberry sauce piled high at the front and center of every last grocery store in town didn’t change a thing.

Snow could have fallen on Pacific Coast Highway, and they wouldn’t have batted an eye.

Because for Nicole and Logan, these past few months, time had managed to stand still.

Couldn’t it have stayed that way forever?