The Summer of Us (Mission Cove 1)

My chest loosened at her words, and internally, I shook my head at my foolishness. I checked my watch and flipped the sign to closed. It was a little early, but the day was done, and luckily, I called the shots.

I had one more task to do and then I would call Linc.

Time passed quickly, and by the time I finished my task it had been over an hour and a half. Rather than call Linc, I decided to go up to the house and surprise him. It was obvious being in that house made him tense, and he might like the distraction.

As well as the surprise I made him.

My stomach dipped as I walked up the hill toward the house Linc grew up in. I had always hated the ostentatious look of it when I lived here as a teenager—and when I had moved back. It towered over our small town like a beacon of wealth and privilege no one else could hope to attain. I had only been inside it once when Linc and I were young. His father was away on a business trip, and Linc asked me to go to his house. He had taken me on a tour, showing me the massive structure room by room. So many of them were empty. Others felt staged. The family room with the big TV no one watched. The formal dining room with its gleaming table and silver that sparkled under the lights that was never sat in.

Linc looked sad as he showed me his mother’s old sitting room—empty and barren.

“He threw away everything of hers,” he said, the pain evident in his voice.

“You didn’t get anything?”

“A few little items I grabbed. I heard him making arrangements to have it all taken away, and once I heard him go out, I packed up some things and hid them in the basement in a room I knew he never went into. Things I knew he wouldn’t notice or care about, but I knew she loved.” He sighed. “I couldn’t take her chair or the little sofa she had. She always let me lie on it while she read to me. I had to leave the pictures she loved because if he figured out that I had taken even one, he would have hunted down everything and destroyed all of it.”

I grasped his hand. “Linc, I’m sorry.”

He stared at the room, the wallpaper faded, the shadows of long-lost pictures removed and destroyed leaving their imprints. I wondered if he was remembering the sound of her voice, a time when life wasn’t so difficult for him because he had her. His voice was thick when he spoke. “It was better to have a few things than none at all, you know? A few of her books, some of the needlepoint pieces she had finished but not hung up. Her letters from her parents. Personal things.” He shivered. “I think my father would have killed me if he’d found me going through her drawers and cupboards taking private stuff.”

I recalled his sadness, then his intense panic when he realized his father had returned home early. We both knew what he would do if he found out I was in the house. Linc had rushed me down to the kitchen, and I’d slipped out the back door, hurrying down the path that skirted the house and making my way home in the dark. Linc had been upset for days that he’d made me walk home alone. I had stumbled in the dark, scraping my hand badly. He checked it every day, kissing the torn skin and worrying about infection, fretting over me needlessly.

I’d never ventured into his father’s house again with Linc.

Until yesterday.

It had been a shock to see the boy I had loved for so long standing in front of me—no longer a boy, but a man. Gone were the developing muscles and youthful, handsome face. The shy smile and the guarded expression he often had to adopt when seeing me was absent, replaced by a confident air and demeanor.

The man in front of me wasn’t shy. He was tall, his shoulders broad, his waist trim. His hair was darker than I remembered, and he wore it longer than he had when we were younger. His sharp jaw was covered in scruff, and he wore an expensive suit tailored to perfection. Something deep within me strummed with recognition at the stranger in my shop, staring at me, his body tight with tension. When he pulled off his sunglasses, revealing the eyes that still haunted my dreams, I was shocked.

Then I became angry.

Angry enough to march up to his father’s house and confront him. To hurl the furious words I had kept inside for so many years. Slapping him had been one of the most violent things I had done in my life.