(Lena)
I had never been good at doing nothing.
It was something Cole had figured out about me early on and something I had never entirely admitted to myself until I was sitting on a deck in Hawaii with nothing required of me and nowhere to be and realized that my hands kept reaching for my phone before I caught myself and put it back down.
The third time it happened Cole looked up from his book.
"Leave it," he said.
"I wasn't doing anything," I said.
"You were about to," he said.
He went back to his book.
I looked at the water.
He was right. I had been reaching for it without thinking, the reflex of someone who had spent years filling every quiet moment with productivity, who had trained herself to believe that stillness was something to be earned rather than simply inhabited.
I
