8. Jake
JAKE
Her name was Aria and I knew it the way I know my own hands. Before I let myself think it, I already knew.
I was twenty-four that summer, three years into working for my father's crew, sent up to Millbrook alone to finish a dock and a boathouse before the season peaked.
My father trusted me with a whole job by myself for the first time, and right then, that mattered more to me than almost anything else in my life. I had not gone up looking for anyone.
I had gone to prove I could handle it without burning down somebody's lake house.
She was renting the cabin two doors down with her parents, back for what her mother kept calling one last family trip before Aria's senior year of college swallowed the whole calendar.
I did not know any of that the first afternoon.
I only knew there was a girl standing at the end of my half-built dock, barefoot, holding a coffee mug like a weapon, watching me measure boards with the kind of expression that said she had opinions and intended to share every one of them.
"You're doing that wrong," she said.
"I've built forty of these."
"Then you've been doing it wrong forty times." She stepped onto the dock without asking, which should have annoyed me and somehow did not.
"The boards closest to shore need a wider gap. Water runs low here by the end of summer. Wood swells differently depending on how wet it stays."
"And you know that how?"
"I grew up coming here. I know things." She said it with the kind of certainty that dared me to argue, and something about the dare made me want to keep talking to her longer than the conversation strictly required.
I told her the gap was fine. She told me it was not. We argued about dock spacing for twenty minutes before I noticed I had stopped measuring anything at all and was just standing there, letting a stranger win a fight about lumber because I liked the sound of her voice doing it.
"You're smiling," she said, like she had caught me at something.
"I'm not."
"You are. It's small, but it's there."
I made myself stop. She laughed like she had won that too, and maybe she had.
That was the whole beginning of it. No fireworks, no single moment I could point to later and say that was where it started. Just a girl who thought she knew more about docks than a man who built them, and turned out to be right about the gap.
She came back the next morning with two coffees, set one on the sawhorse without asking if I wanted it, and sat on an overturned bucket to watch me work like it was the most natural thing in the world. She kept doing that. Some days she brought a book she never opened.
Some days she brought her camera, an old thing with a strap worn soft from use, and photographed my hands instead of my face. Hands, she said, were more honest.
"Hands don't know how to lie," she told me once, lens still up, not looking at me while she said it. "Faces do it all the time."
"What are my hands saying right now?"
"That you'd rather be doing almost anything than standing still for a picture."
She was not wrong about that either.
A storm caught us both off guard one afternoon, the kind that rolls in fast off open water with no warning at all, and we ended up crowded into the half-finished boathouse waiting it out, close enough that I could feel her shivering through her shirt.
"You built a roof that leaks," she said, wringing out the hem of her shirt, not particularly upset about it.
"I built half a roof. The other half is next week's problem."
"That's not very reassuring for someone standing under it right now."
"You're the one who followed me in here."
"I followed the only dry-ish square footage within running distance. That's not the same as following you." She said it fast, the way people talk when they are trying to win an argument they already know they have lost.
"Sure it isn't."
She jabbed a finger into my chest to make her point, rain still dripping off both of us in the cramped half-finished boathouse.
"It isn't."
Lightning cracked somewhere out over the water and she flinched hard enough to grab my arm without meaning to, and neither of us mentioned it afterward, though she did not let go for a long while either.
"Tell me something true," she said, once the thunder had rolled far enough off that we could hear each other without shouting. "Something you haven't told anyone else."
"That's a big ask for a man you've known nine days."
"Ten. And you've been telling me things all week, you just haven't noticed you're doing it."
She was right, and I hated how easily she was right about most things concerning me.
I told her about the fence I had built the summer my mother left, how I had checked and rechecked the measurements long after they were already square, because getting it exactly right felt like the one thing that whole year I could actually control.
She did not say anything for a while after that, just watched the rain, and then she leaned her head against my shoulder like it was the most natural place for it to be, and I let it stay there until the storm finally wore itself out.
We spent six weeks like that. Mornings on the dock, her heckling my measurements. Afternoons when the job let up, walking the shoreline until the gravel turned to sand and back again, arguing about nothing that mattered and everything that did.
She had a way of asking questions that felt like she actually wanted the answer, not the version people usually gave, and I found myself telling her things I had not told anyone, about my father, about the crew, about a life I had mapped out so carefully I had never once asked myself if I wanted it.
"You've got the whole thing planned," she said one evening, feet in the shallows, watching the light go orange over the water. "Your father's business, the next ten years, all of it."
"Somebody has to plan it."
"That's not what I asked. I asked if you wanted it."
Nobody had asked me that before. I remember sitting with the question longer than was probably normal, watching a heron work the shallows farther down the shore, before I gave her an answer that surprised me more than it should have.
"I don't know," I said. "I never thought there was another option."
"There's always another option. People just get scared of the ones that don't have a map yet."
I laughed at that, because it sounded like something out of a book, and she shoved my shoulder hard enough that I nearly went into the lake, and I decided right then that I liked her a great deal more than a summer job was supposed to allow.
We were careful about it at first, both of us pretending this was a small thing, easy to set down at the end of the season.
Neither of us was very good at the pretending.
By the third week I had stopped bothering with it altogether, and so had she, and we spent the last of the daylight most evenings on that dock like the rest of the world had agreed to leave us alone for a while.
The night before she left, we sat on the end of that same dock with our feet in water that had gone cold with the season turning, and she wrote her number on a scrap torn from the back of her sketchbook because neither of our phones would hold a charge that far from an outlet.
"Call me," she said. "I mean it. Don't be one of those guys who says he will and doesn't."
"I'm not one of those guys."
"Prove it."
I folded the paper twice and put it in my shirt pocket, the same pocket I kept my pencil in, which turned out to be the mistake that ended everything.
Two days later, working on a roof in a storm that rolled in without warning, that pocket took enough rain to turn the ink into a gray smear I could not read no matter how long I stared at it, holding it up to the light like staring harder would bring the numbers back.
I tried anyway. I called what I thought were the last four digits with every combination I could reconstruct from memory, and got a dry cleaner, a disconnected line, and a very confused man named Gary who informed me, more than once, that he did not know any Aria and would appreciate me not calling again.
I wrote to the only address I had, the rental cabin, hoping the family who owned it might pass it along.
I never heard back, and I told myself that meant she had moved on, found the whole thing exactly as easy to set down as we had both pretended it would be.
I did not let myself consider the other explanation, that the letter had simply gone nowhere, because that explanation had no ending I could do anything about.
I drove back to Millbrook myself the following summer, told myself it was for a supply run, and found her family's cabin rented out to strangers who had never heard the name Aria in their life.
The owner did not remember which family had stayed there the year before.
I stood on that same dock for a long time, looking at boards I had built with my own hands, and told myself that was the last time I would waste an afternoon on something that had already ended.
I mostly kept that promise. Emily came along before that same year was even out, and building a life with her took up the kind of space that does not leave much room for a summer you cannot even prove happened the way you remember it.
I told Emily some of it once, the shape of it anyway, not the specifics, and she had looked at me with more patience than I deserved and said, "Everybody carries one summer like that. Yours just happened to have a name attached."
I had picked Noah up from Aria's a few hours earlier, found him on her kitchen floor with half a puzzle and a girl narrating his afternoon back to him without pause, and I had stood in that doorway a second too long just watching the three of them exist together like it cost them nothing at all.
"Everything okay?" Aria had asked, catching me staring.
"Better than fine. You caught me somewhere good."
"That's a dangerous look for a man holding a toolbox."
"I'll try to think less."
She had laughed, easy, and I had driven home with that laugh still doing something to my chest I had not asked it to do. Noah's sketchbook was open on the seat beside me to the page he had shown Aria, the three of them and me under a tree that belonged to both our houses at once.
I had not thought about that dock in longer than I wanted to admit, not really, not until tonight, standing in my own kitchen with that drawing still stuck in my head, the three of us under the apple tree like it was already a fact instead of a hope.
Lily is five. I knew that the way I know most things about her, secondhand, gathered from a dozen small moments, never once asked outright because it had never seemed to matter before tonight.
Six years since Millbrook. Five years since whatever happened after it, if anything happened at all, if I was not just building a story out of a torn scrap of paper and a coincidence that a man my age had no business believing in.
I did the math three times, hoping I would get a different number. I did not. Not yet, I told myself.
Not until I am sure. Coward's math, if I am honest.