Chasing Summer

Ethan Walker

Chapter 3: Ethan Walker

Ethan Walker's phone had been buzzing for eleven straight minutes, and he had let every single call go to voicemail.

Jonah Pierce — Missed Call (11). The name sat at the top of his lock screen like an accusation. He set the phone face-down on the windowsill of the small rented room above his uncle Walt's marina office and stared instead at the water, where a sailboat was coming in slow under the orange wash of early evening.

He had not always lived like this — a single room, a duffel bag he hadn't fully unpacked in four months, a life small enough that nothing in it could shatter if he let it go. A year ago, he had co-owned a marine architecture firm with his name on the door beside Jonah's: Walker & Pierce. They had built docks, refit yachts, designed a floating restaurant that had won a regional award. Ethan had been, by every external measure, exactly the kind of man his father had once hoped he'd become — ambitious, capable, building something that would outlast him.

Then the accident happened, and he had walked away from all of it inside of six weeks, signing nothing, explaining nothing, leaving Jonah to absorb a partnership's worth of obligations alone.

The phone buzzed again. This time, instead of a call, a text arrived, the preview visible even face-down through the thin case: I'm not giving up. The Whitfield contract closes Friday and I need your signature or we lose it. Call me back, Ethan. Please.

He didn't call back. He never did, not really — occasionally he'd send a single line, I'll handle it later, which satisfied no one and bought him another week of silence. It wasn't that he didn't care about the company. It was that caring about it required being a version of himself he wasn't sure still existed, the version who believed effort was rewarded, who hadn't yet learned what a single distracted second on a wet road could undo.

He opened his contacts, almost without meaning to, and scrolled to a name he kept saved but never called: Lily — do not answer. The label was a joke he'd written for himself eighteen months ago, in a moment of bitter, protective resolve, and it had stopped being funny a long time before it stopped being true. His younger sister had tried to reach him four times in the past year. He had let every single one ring out, the same way he was currently letting Jonah ring out, because some doors, once shut, felt safer left that way.

His own phone buzzed a third time, and this one made him go cold.

Unknown Number: She's asking about you again. I think she's getting close to finding you.

Ethan read it twice, his thumb hovering over the screen. He didn't recognize the number. He didn't need to. There was only one she would bother texting him a warning about, and the thought of Lily standing on this same stretch of coastline, asking questions he wasn't ready to answer, sent something cold and fast through his chest — a tightness that had nothing, this time, to do with his heart condition, and everything to do with eight years of carefully maintained distance threatening to collapse.

He put the phone in a drawer, the way you'd put away something sharp, and went downstairs instead, because his uncle had asked for help re-coiling the line on the dock, and physical work was the only language Ethan still trusted himself to speak fluently.

Walt was sixty-three, weathered, a man of few words who had taken Ethan in without asking a single question four months ago, for which Ethan remained more grateful than he knew how to say. "You look like the inside of a storm cloud," Walt observed, handing him a coil of rope.

"Long day."

"You've had a lot of those lately."

Ethan didn't answer, focusing instead on the rope, looping it with the precise, repetitive motion that asked nothing of his mind beyond the next loop. Walt let the silence sit for a while before adding, almost offhand, "There's a girl who comes to the beach most evenings. Sketches the sunset. Owns the bookshop on Cedar Street."

"Why are you telling me this?"

"Because you've been staring at that same stretch of water every night for a month, and I figure if you're going to keep doing it, you might as well do it next to somebody instead of alone." Walt clapped him once on the shoulder, the closest thing to affection the man allowed himself, and went back inside, leaving Ethan standing on the dock with the rope slack in his hands and the evening light doing its slow burn across the water.

He thought about Claire, the way he always did when the light turned that particular gold — the exact color the sky had been the last time he'd seen her laugh, six weeks before everything ended. He thought about the version of himself who used to believe the future was something you could plan for, instead of something that could be taken from you in the space of a single wet curve in the road.

He thought about Lily, somewhere out there, looking for him. He'd known it, at some level, for weeks — the unfamiliar number, the warning text, the particular quality of inevitability that had been building at the edges of his careful, constructed solitude since he'd arrived in Seabrook. He'd moved through his life these past eight years like a man who understood something catastrophic was always slightly over the horizon, always approaching, never quite arriving, and had arranged everything around the assumption that if he kept moving, kept minimizing it, kept the circle of his life small enough, the catastrophe might pass him by or at least find less to damage when it arrived.

He was beginning to understand, standing on the dock in the late evening light, that this plan had been flawed from the beginning.

That you could not actually outrun the things that lived inside you. That Lily's search would end regardless of how far he'd moved or how carefully he'd hidden, not because she was relentless — though she was — but because eight years of guilt had a way of filling every room you entered regardless of which room you'd retreated to.

He thought about the cardiologist's number in his phone, the appointment he'd canceled twice. He thought about the particular quality of the tightness in his chest that had been present, in various degrees, for so long now that he'd learned to move through his days as though it wasn't there. The way denial, practiced long enough, became its own kind of skill.

Walt's words landed differently in the quiet after he'd left: You can't actually disappear, son. Not really. Ethan had always thought of his retreat to Seabrook as strategic. A way of managing the final chapter of things with dignity, with control, with as little collateral damage as possible. Standing here now, watching the light die on the water, he was less certain about the dignity. The control felt increasingly like an illusion he'd maintained past its useful life.

And then, despite himself, he thought about the girl Walt had mentioned. The bookshop. The sunsets.

He told himself he was simply going for a walk.

He was lying, and some small, stubborn part of him knew it the entire way down to the beach, where a young woman with charcoal-stained fingers stood at the edge of the tide, sketchbook tucked under one arm, watching the sky the way other people watched something they loved.

He did not know yet that her name was Summer. He only knew, watching her, that for the first time in longer than he could comfortably measure, something in his chest loosened instead of tightened — and that the loosening frightened him more than the ache ever had.

It was the particular fear he would understand later, of someone who has stopped believing they deserve anything good, suddenly confronted with the possibility that they might be wrong.