Chapter 28
Katie
Present Day
The Hamptons
I crawled under the covers, mind spinning. But it was nothing, right? That moment on the beach? Just a few charged and electric
inches, and that was all. There had been no contact, no reason to recoil. We were friends now. We had, in many ways, always
been. Even at his lowest, even that last year, when nobody else wanted anything to do with him. Maybe that was the point of
this summer. To take Tyler McNally off his pedestal. To rewrite that chapter of my life. To realize it had just been an obsession,
a cliché, some universal symptom of my own seventeen-ness, and nothing more.
My walkie-talkie garbled.
“This is Nick Carraway for Daisy. Over.”
I laughed. “They were literally cousins, Tyler.”
“I know that. But you’re not a Jordan. Over.”
I fingered the grooves of my necklace, tracing the warm letters of my name. “So, what do you think of West Egg?”
Silence for a moment.
“I have this familiar conviction,” he said, “that my life is ‘beginning over again with the summer.’ ” A pause. “Over.”
I rolled out of bed and tiptoed toward my window—the one that faced the sea, the one that faced the pool. Tyler’s cottage was aglow. His silhouette, pacing in those late-night half circles he’d been making for as long as I could remember. For as long as he and I had been doing this.
His light flicked out. I bit my bottom lip, then pressed my hand to the glass.
“Good night, Tyler.”
“Good night, Katie,” he said. “Over.”