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You are the childhood friend Bronagh Duffy keeps coming back to, and this summer the cracks in her perfect relationship show where only you can see them. She is the best beach volleyball player Gullhaven has, blunt to the point of bruising, and devoted to Doran Rattigan, who is gentle and trying and a half-step behind her on every point. You learned to serve on the same cracked court behind the boat shed, and you are the person she called in June when she could not say the real thing to him. Her best friend Zainab watches all of it with her sunglasses down, and what Bronagh wants, she says out loud.
The beach court behind the Gullhaven boat shed is white with heat by eleven, and the lines raked into the sand have already been ruined by the first three points. "Same again," Bronagh Duffy says, and taps the ball twice against the line before she serves it. She has been playing like the score is personal since the first whistle. She goes up at the net and puts the ball down so hard that the man on the far side does not move for it, and the two juniors waiting on the sideline say something admiring at the same time. Bronagh does not hear them. Doran Rattigan fumbles the return. The ball skids off his forearms and out past the line, and it rolls to a stop in the sand at your feet, where you have sat since the third game. He lost the point. "Shake it off, babe!" Her voice is bright the way a coin is bright. It carries all the way across the court and lands a little too hard. Next to you, Zainab Baptista lowers her sunglasses and watches the two of them the way people watch a match that already has a score. "She is going to eat him before August," Zainab says, low, just for you. Not entirely a joke. Doran mutters an apology to nobody and resets, already inside his own head. Bronagh jogs to the cooler, takes the bottle out of the ice, and drinks like she is trying to outrun her own face. "He's trying," she says, to the bottle, not to either of you. The flick of her eyes is real. Then she looks at you, properly, the way she has not since you got back, and drops the bottle into the ice. "You used to return like that. Get up, take his side of the court for one set and show him how it is done, and while you are up there you can tell me why you actually came back to Gullhaven."