Chapter One
Now
When I found out my mom was dead, I was scrubbing vomit off the floor of the bar bathroom.
It was just before midnight, and I’d been at Dogwood House for close to seven hours.
I was caked in sweat and chunky glitter, and I bore the battle scars of three beers that had been spilled on me by a bachelor party who hadn’t even tipped.
My phone vibrated on the sink, and I shook my head and ignored it. Rig. As if I’d had a change of heart, in the middle of the night. But he called me again, and again, then finally texted the words he knew would get my attention: It’s your mom.
I called him back, and he upended my whole life in a few words.
It was sudden cardiac arrest, on a late-night walk around the lake.
Her cousin—my Aunt Val—had been the one to find her.
She’d been only fifty-one. Way too young to die.
Healthy and strong, on the brink of the most important summer of her life.
And now, she was gone. Without any warning or preparation.
I shrieked so loudly that people started pounding on the door, threatening to break it down if I didn’t open it. I just slid slowly to the floor, feeling the earth shift entirely beneath me.
“No, that can’t be right, when the ambulance gets there, they’ll—”
“She’s gone, ladybug,” Rig said, gently cutting me off. “They’re already here.” His voice cracked, and I closed my eyes, struck dumb by the raw shock of pain.
Rig’s voice had always been comforting, and I was briefly disoriented by the wave of nostalgia that came over me. But listening to him now, as he told me that she’d been dead before she hit the ground, was the least comforted I’d ever felt. And the most alone.
The tears were flowing freely down my face, into my mouth and onto my shoes. My mother was not—She could not be—No. She’d texted me just last week, hadn’t she? A picture of the new mess hall, which I hadn’t responded to.
“This isn’t real. Say it isn’t real. Please.”
“I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry.”
“What do I do?” I whispered, though I already knew. Of course I knew.
Rig sighed, the sound terrible and heavy on the other end of the line. “You come home.”
I could picture him with shocking clarity, knowing he was sitting hunched over on his heinous plaid couch, the same one Chelsea and I had fallen asleep on hundreds of times as kids; somehow, it had been left untouched by the fire.
He’d be running his hands through his hair, helpless, wondering how he was going to run Dread’s Cove without my mom.
They’d been doing it together for almost thirty years.
He’d be looking out the window at the full moon, bright and ominous, seeing the sky lit up with the stars I never saw the full scope of here in Atlanta.
“Do you need me to come get you? I’ll drive down there right now. Or I can send Wes.”
There was a buzzing in my ears as he spoke, a numbness in my fingers that was slowly crawling its way up my arms, over my shoulders, down my spine.
“No, it’s okay.” I swallowed the boulder-size lump in my throat, drummed my chewed-up fingers on the cool tile floor.
“I can do it. I’ll drive myself.” Even though the thought of being back there—of seeing camp for the first time in five years, seeing it without her, and without Steph—was enough to steal all the breath from my lungs.
Enough to consume me, yank me beneath the surface, down into the depths.
“I know what happened that summer was hard on you,” Rig said, like he was reading my mind. “You’ve got a lot of bad memories here. But you’ve got good ones, too. This is where you belong. With your family.”
The banging on the door was getting more insistent.
I hauled myself up off the floor and opened it to a line that was ten people deep; the purple-haired woman at the front looked murderous.
But when she saw my face—my bloodshot eyes, mascara and snot-smeared cheeks—she put her hands up in surrender.
I barreled past her, down the dark hallway, and out into the night.
On the other side of the alley, at the front entrance of Dogwood House, a group of a dozen college girls were cackling and snapping photos of one another.
I watched them for a long moment, slack-jawed, because I couldn’t reconcile the fact that the world was still moving, that people were still laughing and happy, and my mother was no longer alive.
I pressed the phone closer to my ear and squeezed my eyes shut. “I’ll be there,” I said. “I’ll be there soon. Give me a few days to get my—to get it together.”
“Thank you.” There was so much exhaustion in his voice.
So much despair. “I know that the timing—I know that this is horrible. All of it. But the last thing your mom would want would be for us to postpone anything. She and Chels have been working on next weekend for months, and—well, getting the Cove reopened is all she’s wanted for years.
I guess what I’m saying is, we’re gonna need you, kid. I’m gonna need you.”
I sucked in a breath, overcome with a guilt so strong that it almost knocked me over.
I had sworn up and down that I would never, ever return—that summer had taken far too much from me. But I’d taken things, too. Things I thought I’d never be able to give back.
Things I was so tired of carrying.