The Summer We Forgot Each Other

Chapter Two

Chapter Two

Maeve

“Everyone already knows you’re back.”

Diane said it like a warning, sliding a plate of eggs across the counter to a man in a fishing vest who was very clearly not listening to us, or pretending hard not to.

“Already?” I asked. “I got here two hours ago.”

“This is a small town, baby. You got here two hours ago and Carol from the hardware store has already texted me twice.”

I groaned and dropped my head down onto my arms on the counter. The lunch rush had come and gone in a blur of orders and refills and the particular ache of feet that had forgotten what a full shift felt like. My hands still remembered how to carry three plates at once without dropping a single fork, though. Some things your body never forgets, even the ones you wish it would.

“What did Carol say?” I asked, without lifting my head.

“That you looked good. That it’s about time you came home. That she always said Rowan Hayes never should have believed whatever he believed about you.”

I lifted my head fast enough to make the whole room tilt.

“What does that mean?”

Diane wiped down the counter, not looking at me, which was the thing she did when she was choosing her words with more care than usual.

“It means people talk, Maeve. They talked when you left. They talked for a long time after. Half this town thinks you broke that boy’s heart for sport and drove off without looking back. The other half never believed that for a single second.”

“I did not break his heart for sport,” I said, low, and my voice cracked in a way I hated, a way that felt like admitting something.

“I know that,” Diane said, gently now. “You know that. But you never told anyone why you left, so this town filled in the blanks itself, and towns are never kind about blanks. Never have been.”

I looked down at my own hands flat on the counter, at the chipped polish I had not bothered to redo in weeks. Three years, and I still had not said the real reason out loud to a single person outside my mother’s hospital room and the lawyer who filed the paperwork that took me away in the middle of the night. Not even to Diane, not fully, though she knew enough of it to carry the weight without asking questions I was not ready to answer.

“He got a text,” I said quietly, the words tasting strange in my mouth after three years of never saying them aloud. “Telling him I never loved him.”

Diane went very still.

“I never sent that text,” I said.

“I know that too,” she said, and something in her voice made me look up sharply. She was watching me with an expression I could not quite name, careful, almost guilty, like she was holding something back with both hands and it was starting to slip.

“What?” I asked.

“Nothing,” she said, too fast, too bright. “Eat something. You look like you’re about to fall over.”

I did not eat. I sat there turning her face over in my mind, replaying that flicker of something she had almost let slip, and I told myself I was imagining it, that three years away had made me paranoid about every small silence in this town, every pause that lasted half a second too long.

Diane’s hands were shaking slightly when she picked the coffee pot back up, small enough that I almost missed it. I did not miss it.

The bell over the door rang.

I did not need to look up to know who it was. I felt it the same way I had felt him across the street that morning, that pressure behind my eyes, that heaviness with nowhere left to go.

“Diane,” Rowan said, his voice flatter than I remembered it, like he had rehearsed sounding calm the entire walk over from the boatyard. “You got a minute?”

“I’m working, Rowan.”

“It’s important.”

I finally looked up. He stood just inside the door, hands shoved deep in his pockets, jaw tight the exact same way it had been that morning across the street. He was not looking at Diane at all. He was looking at me, and something about the way he looked at me, careful and unguarded for one unpracticed second before he caught himself, made my chest hurt in a way I had not felt in three years.

“Hi,” he said, to me, like the word cost him something he had not budgeted for.

“Hi,” I said back, because I could not think of a single other thing to say. Three years of things I had rehearsed saying to him evaporated the second his eyes actually landed on mine, every speech I had built in the shower or in the car or lying awake at two in the morning gone completely blank.

Diane looked between the two of us for a long beat, sighed, and untied her apron with more force than the knot required.

“I’ll be in the back,” she said. “You two figure out whatever this is without breaking my dishes.”

She left us alone in the middle of the empty diner, the smell of coffee and cinnamon rolls doing nothing at all to soften the silence that dropped over us. The second the kitchen door swung shut behind her. Sunlight came through the front window at an angle that lit up half his face and left the other half in shadow, and I found myself thinking, absurdly, that he had always stood like that, half in the light and half not, even back when we were fifteen and thought we understood every single thing about each other.

Rowan did not move closer. Neither did I. We stood there, ten feet apart, three years apart, and neither of us said a single word for a long, long moment. The clock above the register ticked loud enough to fill the silence, each second landing heavier than the last.

“You look different,” he finally said, his voice quieter than before.

“So do you,” I said.

“I have a lot of questions,” he said, and his voice had gone hard and careful in a way that scared me more than shouting ever could have. I knew how to survive. This quiet, controlled version of him was new, and it made the room feel smaller.

“I don’t have answers for you,” I said, which was another lie, the biggest one yet, because I had every answer he wanted and none of the courage it would take to hand them over.

A part of me wanted to watch his face c***k open right there, to see if three years had actually changed the boy who used to hold my hand under this exact counter when we were fifteen and hiding from the whole world outside. Another part of me was terrified it had not changed at all, that if I let myself look too long I would remember exactly why I fell for him in the first place, and that felt more dangerous than anything he could possibly say to me now.

He studied me for a long moment, like he was searching for the version of me he used to know somewhere underneath the stranger standing in front of him.

Whatever he was looking for, he did not seem to find it.