The Summer We Forgot Each Other

Chapter Three

Chapter Three

Maeve

“Night, baby. Don’t stay up too late.”

Diane’s voice drifted up the stairs, followed by the click of her bedroom door, and then the house went quiet the way it always used to at this hour, pipes ticking somewhere in the walls, the porch light humming faintly outside my window.

I sat on the edge of my old bed for a long time before I moved.

It was strange, being back in this room. Diane had never changed it, not once in three years, like some part of her always believed I would come back and need it exactly the way I left it. The same water stained ceiling. The same crooked shelf holding the same chipped seashells I collected the summer I turned twelve. My old notebook was even still in the drawer, the one I used to write in when I could not say things out loud, its cover soft and worn from being held too many times by hands that were smaller than mine are now.

I picked it up and did not open it. Not yet. Some things you have to sit beside for a while before you are ready to look directly at them.

I used to think I knew exactly who I was. Maeve Carter, the girl who could talk her way out of anything, who laughed too loud and did not care who heard it, who believed, stupidly and completely, that love was the kind of thing that simply happened to you and then stayed. That version of me died somewhere on the drive out of this town three years ago, somewhere between the hospital and the highway, and the girl who grew up in her place learned to do things differently. She counted exits in every room before she sat down. She kept her voice quiet in restaurants. She learned, the hard way, that the people who are supposed to protect you are not always the ones who do.

I am not sure, I like her more. I am only sure she survives better.

That is the thing nobody tells you about surviving something. It does not feel like winning. It feels like grief with nowhere left to go, so it just stays in your chest and rearranges the furniture until you learn to live around it instead of through it.

I thought about my mother, the way I always do at night when the house goes quiet enough to hear my own thoughts. Her laugh. The way she used to hum while she cooked, off-key, completely unbothered by it. The way she used to tell me, back before everything, that love was worth the risk even when it scared you, that the scared part was actually how you knew it mattered. I used to believe her completely. I am still not sure if I believe her now, or if I just want to, which might be a different thing entirely, or might be the same thing as wearing a disguise.

I thought about Rowan too. I could not stop thinking about Rowan, if I am honest, which I am only ever honest about in the quiet of my own head, never anywhere else.

He looked at me today like he was trying to solve something. Like I was a puzzle he used to know the answer to and had somehow forgotten overnight. I understood that feeling better than he probably realized, because I had spent three years doing the exact same thing to him in my memory, turning him over and over, looking for the moment he decided I was not worth fighting for, and never quite finding it, because the moment never actually existed. Someone built it for us. Handed us both a lie and let us tear each other apart with it instead.

I did not know that yet, not really, not in a way I could have explained if anyone had asked me that night. I only knew that something about the way Diane’s hands had shaken over the coffee pot did not sit right in my chest, a small wrongness I could not name, the kind of feeling you get when a room has been rearranged slightly, and you cannot say exactly what moved.

I got up and crossed to the window. Across the dark water, the boatyard lights were still on, small and yellow against the black tree line, and I wondered if he was still out there, working late the way he used to when we were younger, and he did not want to go home to a house that never felt quite warm enough. I used to sit with him some nights, out on the dock, not saying anything at all, just being there, because some silences are a kind of comfort and some are a kind of punishment, and back then ours had always been the first kind.

I wondered what kind of silence we had now.

I opened the notebook, finally, and found a blank page near the back, past all the entries from a girl who used to believe in easy things. I did not write about him. I was not ready for that yet. I wrote about the diner instead, and the smell of cinnamon rolls, and the way Diane’s face had looked when she said I looked like my mother, careful and soft and a little bit broken, the way people look at you when they are grieving someone right alongside you without ever saying the word out loud.

I wrote, at the very bottom of the page, in handwriting smaller than the rest, that I did not know how to be here without becoming the girl I used to be before everything fell apart. And then, underneath that, smaller still, I wrote that maybe I did not have to become her again to survive this town a second time. Maybe I only had to become someone new, someone who had already lived through the worst of it and come out the other side still standing, even if she was standing a little differently now.

I closed the notebook and turned off the lamp, and lay awake a long time listening to the pipes tick and the porch light hum, thinking about a boy across the water who did not yet know the truth, and a truth that was going to change both our lives the second it finally found its way into the light.

Tomorrow, I told myself. Tomorrow I would go back to arguing about tent placement and pretending none of this cost me anything.

Tonight, I let myself feel exactly how much it did.