Halfway there, Sara Olins came out of her classroom. “Oh good, you’re just who I need. You have a minute, don’t you?”
She didn’t wait for an answer, but steered Julie inside.
“I can’t get this mural down by myself without tearing it, which would be such a shame.”
Julie looked at the wall. Ten feet of second-grade depictions of “People in Our Neighborhood.” She pulled over a stepladder. “I’ll release the tape, you hold the edges.”
By the time they’d rolled it up, wrapped it in plastic, and found a place for it in the closet, the principal had left for the day.
Julie stood outside his door, half defeated, half relieved. What had she been thinking? She’d worked her whole life for this.
She tore up the letter right there.
But the original was still in a file on her laptop. And she wouldn’t delete it. Not just yet.
Chapter 1
Two Weeks Later
Vacation. It couldn’t get here soon enough, thought Julie, but looking out the window wouldn’t make Kayla and Aggie arrive any earlier; her two best friends since forever were always late. Notoriously late.
Girl Scouts, soccer camp, junior prom, the vacations they’d been taking together since college—they’d never yet arrived anywhere on time. Even as teachers the two of them were always running into the classroom along with the bell.
Julie had been doing a lot of waiting lately, for school to end, for vacation to begin. For something to happen. She needed this vacation to figure out how to get her life back on track.
She turned from the window and made one last mental sweep of her living room. Lamps unplugged, laptop packed, cell in purse, extra chargers in her suitcase. Printer off. Desk . . . not cleared.
The stack of travel brochures she’d been collecting for the last two years and that she’d meant to recycle the night before still sat there, a painful reminder of all the places she wouldn’t be going during the next school year. She’d put them out in the bin now.
She wouldn’t need them anymore, now that she’d been denied a leave of absence, and it was time she stopped thinking about what might have been.
Recycle bin, she reminded herself.
A prolonged honk jarred Julie back to the here and now.
At last. Vacation had arrived and—she glanced at her watch—only seventeen minutes late, practically early.
She hurried across the room and opened the door just as an electric-blue SUV stopped at the curb and Kayla and Aggie jumped out of the car. They were both in vacation mode, in short shorts and tees. Kayla was beanpole thin with shoulder-length dark hair, today tied back in a ponytail that she’d pulled through the back of a hot-pink baseball cap.
Aggie was unselfconsciously poured into a pair of stretchy short-shorter-shortest cutoffs and a tight T-shirt, proud to sport her hourglass-in-a-post-Twiggy-world figure.
Julie was wearing new shorts from Aritzia and a Freddie Mercury T-shirt. She’d attempted to clip up her curly hair into a twist with tenuous success. She’d even done a pre-vacation sit out in the backyard so she wouldn’t look like rice on the beach. Still, she felt not quite ready for prime time.
Kayla stopped at the back of the SUV and opened the hatch; Aggie made a beeline for the front door.
“Hurry up. Happy hour’s waiting! Is this all your stuff?” She breezed past to pick up Julie’s laptop. “Kayla’s making more space in the trunk. Good luck with that one.” She spotted the brochures that Julie had left on the desk.
“Oh goody, plans for our next vacation.”
“No! They’re not . . .”
Aggie shoved the brochures into Julie’s beach bag just as Julie lunged for them. “Man, this is heavy, what do you have in here?”
“Beach stuff and a few books.”
“Better be juicy romances and not a textbook.”
“My Contemporary Trends class starts in three weeks.”
Aggie rolled her eyes. “Another three points toward your master’s degree. I’m impressed, but I may be moved to toss it out the car window.”
“Very funny. I’m putting it in the trunk.”
Though right now Julie wouldn’t cry if Aggie did toss it. She was the only one of the three working on her master’s degree. Better salary, better job security. Better do it now, her mother had advised. So she had.
She hadn’t told Kayla and Aggie about her request for a leave. At first she didn’t want to share it in case it didn’t happen. Now that it had not happened, she wondered if she should mention it at all. She knew they