The Summer We Forgot Each Other

Chapter One Maeve “You’re actually here.” Aunt Diane stood in the doorway of the diner with a rag still in her hand, like she had stopped drying a plate the second she saw my car pull into the lot. She looked older than I remembered. Softer around the eyes, a little more gray threaded through her hair. Three years does that to people, I guess. It had done worse to me, though I doubted it showed the same way on the outside. “I said I would come,” I told her, and got out of the car fast, before she could hug me, because if she hugged me first I would probably cry right there in the parking lot, and I had promised myself I would last at least one full day before that happened. She hugged me anyway. “You look thin,” she said into my hair, her voice thick. “You look the same,” I said, which was a lie, but a kind one, and she laughed like she knew it, a wet, surprised sound that made my own eyes sting. I held onto her a second longer than I meant to. She smelled like coffee and vanilla and something underneath that was just her, something that had not changed even though everything else had, and for one dangerous moment I let myself believe that coming back here might not break me the way I had spent three years assuming it would. The lake town had not changed either. That was the thing that got me the most, standing there with my duffel bag digging into my shoulder and my chest doing something complicated I did not have a name for. The same faded blue awning stretched over the diner window. The same crooked stop sign on Main Street nobody had ever bothered to fix, tilted at the same lazy angle it had been tilted at the day I left. The same smell of lake water and fried onions drifting through the warm air, like the whole town had been paused the moment I disappeared and someone had only just pressed play again the second my car crossed the county line. I told myself I could do this. One summer. Help Diane with the diner while her hip finished healing. Then back to whatever version of a normal life existed for a girl with no permanent address and a mother two years gone, a girl who had learned a long time ago that home was not a place you got to keep. I was still telling myself that, still building the summer into something small and survivable in my head, when I saw him. He was across the street at the boatyard, hauling something heavy onto a trailer, sleeves shoved up past his elbows, sweat already darkening his collar though it was barely noon. I would have known him anywhere, in any light, in any lifetime. Taller now. Broader through the shoulders in a way that made something low in my stomach twist, something I refused to look at directly, the way you refuse to look straight at the sun even when you can feel its heat on your face. He had not seen me yet. I had maybe three more seconds of being a stranger to him, three more seconds where he did not know I had come back, where I could still turn around and drive away and let him keep believing whatever version of me he had built out of one cruel text message. Then he looked up. I do not know what I expected. Nothing, maybe. Some blank, polite stranger’s face, the kind you give someone you used to know a long time ago and stopped caring about somewhere along the way. What I got instead was his whole body going still, the way an animal goes still right before it decides whether to run or fight. His jaw locked hard. His eyes found mine across two lanes of empty road and held there so long I forgot, completely and stupidly, how to breathe. For one second, the whole street seemed to go quiet around us, the way it does right before something breaks open. A truck rolled past between us, blocking him from view for half a heartbeat, and I found myself hoping, uselessly, that when it passed he would already be gone, that I could pretend this had not happened yet. He was not gone. If anything, he looked more certain, like the truck passing had given him just enough time to decide something. “Maeve,” Diane said quietly, close to my ear, her hand finding my wrist. “Come inside.” I did not move. Rowan Hayes set the crate down slow, like he needed both hands free for whatever came next, and started walking toward the road. “Maeve.” Diane’s grip tightened, firm now, urgent. “Not today. Come inside.” I let her pull me through the diner door, the bell above it jingling too cheerfully for a moment that did not deserve cheerfulness, and I did not look back to see if he had crossed the street. I did not need to. I could feel him standing there behind me the whole time, the same way you can feel a storm before it breaks, a pressure behind your eyes, a heaviness in the air with nowhere left to go. Inside, the diner smelled exactly the way it always had, coffee and cinnamon rolls and something faintly like burnt sugar, a smell so specific to my childhood that it hit me harder than seeing him had. Diane sat me down at the counter and poured me a mug without asking whether I wanted one, the same way she used to do when I was small and upset about something I could not yet name. “He still comes in here sometimes,” she said carefully. “Not often. Mostly on his mother’s orders.” “I don’t care,” I said, which was the second lie I had told in ten minutes, and probably not the last one I would tell that day. Diane looked at me over the rim of her own mug, the same steady, patient look she used to give me when I was fifteen and swore I was fine after crying in the bathroom for twenty straight minutes. She did not push. She never pushed. That was the thing about Diane. She let you lie to her for exactly as long as you needed to, and then she simply waited, coffee cooling between her hands, until the truth got too heavy to keep holding by yourself. “You look like your mother,” she said instead, gently. “More every year.” My throat tightened up so fast I got really shocked. I wrapped both hands around the mug and stared down into the coffee like it might hold an answer for how to survive a whole summer of this. “I’m only staying the summer,” I said. “I know.” “I mean it, Diane. One summer. Then I’m gone again.” She reached over and tucked a loose curl behind my ear, the same way she used to when I was small and scared of something I could not put into words. “Okay, sweetheart,” she said, in a voice that made it clear she did not believe a single word of it. “One summer.” Outside the window, across the street, Rowan Hayes was still standing exactly where I had left him, hands braced on his hips, staring at the diner door like he was waiting for me to walk back out and finish whatever I had started just by existing in this town again. I did not go back out. But I did not stop watching him through the glass either, not until Diane gently turned my stool the other way and told me to help her set up for the lunch rush, because standing still, she said, was never good for either of us, and some part of me, some old and tired part, already knew she was right.