The Summer We Forgot Each Other

Chapter five

Chapter Five

Rowan

“Hayes, you gonna load that crate or just stand there staring at it?”

Old Man Petey’s voice cut through the noise of the boatyard, and I blinked, realizing I had been standing over the same crate for a full minute without moving it an inch.

“Sorry,” I muttered, hauling it up onto the trailer harder than it needed. “Long morning.”

It was not a long morning. It was barely noon. I just could not get my hands to work right, could not get my head to stop circling back to the fact that I had not slept properly in three days, ever since Diane mentioned at the hardware store that her niece was coming back for the summer. I had told myself it did not matter. I had told myself a lot of things that week that turned out to be lies.

I straightened up to stretch my back, wiped the sweat off my collar with the back of my wrist, and looked across the street out of pure habit, the same habit I had never quite managed to break in three years, checking the diner window the way some people check their phones.

She was standing right there.

For a second I thought I had imagined her, the way I used to imagine her in the first few months after she left, catching glimpses of dark curly hair in crowds that turned out to belong to someone else every single time. But she did not disappear when I blinked. She stood in front of the diner with a duffel bag over one shoulder, thinner than I remembered, older in a way that had nothing to do with age and everything to do with something I could not name, and every single thing I had built over three years to survive losing her came crashing down at once, all in the space of one look across an empty road.

I do not know how long I stood there. Long enough that Petey said my name twice more before I registered it. Long enough that a truck rolled past between us, and for one stupid, weak second I hoped it would just keep driving and block my view forever, because looking at her hurt in a way I had convinced myself I was done feeling.

The truck passed. She was still there.

Something in my chest that had been locked shut for three years cracked open, and it was not gentle. It felt like the exact opposite of gentle. It felt like every question I had ever gotten to ask crawled up my throat at once, all of them fighting to get out first. Why did you leave? Why did you let me believe you never loved me? Why does seeing you still feel like this after everything you did?

I set the crate down. I do not remember deciding to walk. My legs just started moving before the rest of me caught up, carrying me toward the road, toward her, toward three years of anger that had nowhere left to go now that the person it was aimed at was standing forty feet away instead of living safely in my memory where I could hate her without consequences.

Diane got to her first. Pulled her inside before I made it across the street, and I stood there on the wrong side of the road like an i***t, hands shaking, jaw so tight it ached, staring at a closed diner door like it had personally wronged me.

I should have turned around. I should have gone back to the boatyard and finished loading the trailer and let the day continue like any other day. Instead, I stood there for a long time, longer than I want to admit, watching the window, half expecting her to come back out, half terrified that she would.

She used to hold her pen wrong. Bottom of her hand instead of her fingers, some strange habit her mother tried to correct for years and never managed to. I do not know why that was the thing I thought about, standing on that sidewalk with my whole chest caving in. Of all the things I could have remembered about her, all the big things, the fights, the promises, the last text that broke something in me, I never fully repaired, my brain landed on the way she held a pen wrong.

Maybe that is what three years of missing someone actually does to you. It does not just take the big things and grind them down until they stop hurting. It keeps the small ones sharp instead, sitting quiet in the back of your mind, waiting for exactly the wrong moment to surface and remind you that you never really got over anyone, you just got better at pretending you had.

I went back to the boatyard eventually. Petey did not ask what happened. He had lived in this town long enough to know better than to ask a Hayes boy about the Carter girl. Everyone had, it was the kind of thing people tiptoed around at church and the grocery store and every committee meeting for three straight years, the way you tiptoe around a house you know is about to catch fire.

I worked the rest of the afternoon in silence, hauling crates and coiling rope and doing every mindless task I could find, trying to burn off whatever had cracked open in my chest when I saw her standing there. It did not work. By the time the sun started going down over the lake, I still felt exactly as unsteady as I had at noon, maybe worse, because now I had spent hours with nothing to do but think.

I walked to the diner that evening before I fully decided to. I told myself it was about getting answers. I told myself it was about finally understanding why the girl I loved more than anything had walked away from me without a single word of explanation, leaving me to build three years of a life around a lie I did not even know was a lie yet.

I was lying to myself, same as always where she was concerned.

The truth was simpler and worse. I just wanted to see her again, up close, in real light, not across an empty road with a truck rolling between us. I wanted to know if she still looked at me the way she used to, even for one second, even if I would never admit to wanting that out loud to a single living soul.

I pushed open the diner door, the bell ringing too cheerfully overhead, and there she was, close enough to touch, close enough to hurt.

“Hi,” I said, and the word cost me more than I expected it to.