Safe Haven (Cedar Shores #1)

Prologue

Excerpt from Bailey Jones’ seventh book, Heartbreak

For me, the lake was never about the wild-edged, waterfront town that brought us back each summer. While growing up, the lake was, of course, a big part of the reason I loved to go, but it wasn’t the whole reason I always felt the most like myself each time I returned.

The lake was a lot of things.

Cold. Freezing, really.

But also, full of fish that fit perfectly into a frying pan.

And almost as blue as the ocean, while having no right to be so, since it was buried all the way up in the mountains.

By Memorial Day weekend, we’d return like clockwork — all the same summer families and hordes of kids filling the town.

Surrounded in powdered sugar sand mixed with stardust from a meteor that had deepened the lakebed there a million years ago, our lake was always one part legend and one part magic. But for me? It was always about one thing and one thing only.

Him.

He was the biggest reason I missed everything about that place when we weren’t there the other nine months of the year.

I’d count down to the day we’d both arrive on the same late afternoon. Dropping our bags in our respective cabins — our two families’ summer homes sat side by side — before racing down the long, dirt paths, hungry for the type of freedom no parent ever granted us back in the city.

Our grins would stretch wide, sand still clinging to our ankles like breadcrumbs as we sprinted through the sun-soaked trees that surrounded the lake.

Bursting through meadows filled with delicate white flowers beneath big, puffy clouds that hung overhead, each of us calling out names for them as we ran.

The lake became a backdrop, the patchwork quilt of memories that focused solely on him.

And I can’t recall a single day there without remembering the way his eyes would always find mine, no matter what we were doing — crystal clear and as blue as the sky overhead.

We’d grown up sharing secrets without needing any words since the language we all used was as old as our tradition to return — just stares, glares, jokes, and laughter that echoed through the trees like the wind itself.

He was the mid-year anchor of my summers growing up, like the chorus of our favorite song breaking out halfway through.

My parents would beg me to keep the car door shut until we rolled to a stop on the long gravel drive, their words ringing out while I searched the tree line for his bike already pushed up against a tall pine, sticky with drops of sap falling down. Wondering if he’d beat me there.

I just hadn’t realized that it’d be the very same path that he would disappear down one day at the end of our final summer at the lake. Our lake. Never to come back. At least, not for me.

He had a plan to change the world once he turned eighteen. And at seventeen, I was angry that his plan and his world wouldn’t include me.

I’d refused to stand on the porch with my family, or his, to wave him goodbye when he was the first from our group of summer friends to leave for good. But at the last minute, I’d run out, just as his tires left a graveyard of pinecones snapping behind his old, ruddy car.

I was too stubborn to tell him out loud how I felt, but I tried to convey it with a look when his eyes met mine in the rearview mirror.

Just one long, lingering stare drawn out between us as he drove away.

But he’d slowly kept on driving while our eye contact grew more distant in the mirror, crackling in the heat left behind his bumper as he disappeared around the bend without a word.

The streamers of last night’s goodbye party snapped in the wind above my head, still pinned to the thick pine slats of the deck as a late summer storm blew in from across the water.

“It’s going to pour,” my dad said. As if that day was just like any other day. As if my heart wasn’t already breaking. “Let’s get you inside.”

Me? Now?

If he turned the car around, I wanted to be the first one to see it.

So I could say what I hadn’t said out loud.

But my dad was right and, after everyone else went in from the rain, I stood alone on the porch, waiting.

He didn’t stop. And somewhere inside me, I already knew . . .

That would be the last summer he and I would exist in the same world before he left, determined to change it. Just as he promised he would.

Because that was the summer my heart finally caught up with the rest of me — from the small, steady beat of a girl, into one fully capable of breaking as a woman.

Forever aching for a place that no longer exists, and a time that would become, against all odds, nothing more than a memory.