Always the Last to Know by Kristan Higgins Page 0,33

of Rome, on the Great Wall, in the spice markets of Mumbai. How we would fund this was unclear, but we were young. We could, er, backpack or however it was that people without rich parents traveled.

But as graduation drew closer, things got a little prickly. Noah had no problem with my plans for the next four years, but there was always a hint of condescension somewhere in there. Like once I’d gotten this “see the world/live in the city” bug out of my system, I’d understand that Stoningham was the only place to be.

But there was no way on earth I wanted to live in the town I’d grown up in. A thousand year-round residents, thick with pretension because of the brushes with celebrity or true wealth—Genevieve London of the handbag empire; an Oscar-winning actress who spent all of two weeks a year in her six-thousand-square-foot house. I didn’t want to run into the same people on the same streets in the same places I’d already been every day of my life. Staying here was an admission of fear of something greater . . . or a total lack of ambition. Only people like Juliet, with her Ivy League degrees and brilliant success, could come back to Stoningham without seeming like a loser. Or so it seemed to me.

I didn’t want to be Barb and John’s daughter and Juliet’s not-as-amazing sister. I didn’t even want to be called “Noah’s girlfriend.” I wanted to be myself . . . with Noah, still my parents’ daughter, but I wanted to be Sadie Frost, yes, that Sadie Frost, the artist.

Change. The word was a siren call that filled me with an energy and thrill I couldn’t describe. When you grow up in Connecticut, you’re defined by the absence of things. We had hills but not mountains. A shoreline, but not really the ocean. Farms, but not exactly farmland. Cities, but either scarred by urban blight or too small to hold their own with Boston and New York just a train ride away.

New York. Oh, New York. All the songs were true. I wanted to be in the hard, glittering city, with its harsh reflections and sharp-toothed skyline, its roar and breath, to meet new people, to not have my family history ambling beside me, to be the only one who defined me. I was eighteen. I ached for it the same way I ached for Noah, with the same molten red longing.

The fact that he had none of this desire baffled me. I thought we were supposed to want these things. Noah did not. He was utterly happy with the idea of waiting me out.

I didn’t hate Stoningham, but God, it was relentless in its familiarity. Every street, every inch of shoreline, every type of weather was something I’d lived over and over and over. The sameness was squeezing the life out of me.

We didn’t make any promises about the future . . . Each of us figured the other would see the light. Their light. I went off to New York, and the first thing I put up in my dorm room was a picture of Noah and me, our arms around each other on the town dock, both of us smiling. His curly hair whipped in the breeze, and my eyes looked more blue because of the sky and water behind us. Breaking up was not in my plans. Ever. We were meant to be. We could find a way where we were both happy and fulfilled. We were different from other high school couples. Our love, I was certain, would last forever.

I was wrong.

CHAPTER TEN

Barb

I never liked my name. I should’ve changed it when I was sixteen.

Barb. Barb Frost. Barbara Marie Johnson Frost. The most boring, unremarkable, midwestern name on every level. Oh, Frost was a fine last name, especially given that John was somehow related to Robert Frost. I’d been so excited by that when we first met. How thrilling, being related to the great poet! To have that gentle, insightful, famous blood running through your veins! Gosh!

“Well, I don’t know about that,” John had said, and maybe I should’ve taken more notice, because it was true. Turned out, there was nothing poetic about him.

At our wedding, his mother told me no one was quite sure how Robert Frost was connected to them . . . It was more of a rumor than anything that could be fact-checked at the time. Not that it mattered, but it seemed