Summary

I Stay with Syd:

The narrator reveals she was never the only friend of Syd's that the married man flirted with when he visited her at the beach. The man offered to have an affair with the narrator out west, separate from his affair with Syd, but the narrator rebuffed him. This upset the man, who made a show of kissing Syd as a way to passive aggressively assert himself. The relationship between Syd and the married man was always tenuous, though Syd thought it had a movie-like element, which prompted her to extend the romance. While Syd visited the man, the narrator would stay the beach house a week out of a month, and it seems to her she has been there for so long. A coming storm threatens to break a tree over the house and bedroom...