23. Aria
ARIA
I have told the story of that summer so many times in my own head that it stopped feeling like a memory and started feeling like a scar I could trace with my eyes closed.
Jake's letter sat folded on the kitchen table where it had been sitting for three days now, corners softening from how many times I'd picked it up and put it back down without deciding anything.
I hadn't answered it. I hadn't thrown it away either, which felt like its own kind of answer, one I wasn't ready to say out loud yet even to myself.
I was twenty that summer, one year shy of graduating, dragged along on what my mother insisted on calling our last real family trip before senior year swallowed my calendar whole.
I hadn't wanted to go. I remember standing in my dorm room arguing with her on the phone about it, certain that six weeks at a lake with my parents was going to be the longest stretch of boredom I'd survive that year.
I was wrong about that, obviously. I was wrong about almost everything that summer, which might be the actual lesson in it, if I've ever managed to find one.
My mother had opinions about everything at Millbrook, the way she has opinions about everything everywhere, and one of her opinions that first week was that the crew building the new dock two cabins down included a young man worth watching from the porch with unnecessary interest.
"That one," she said, nodding toward the water without looking up from her crossword. "He's got good shoulders and a serious face. You should go make his life difficult."
"I don't even know him."
"That's usually where it starts."
I called him dock boy in my head for two full days before I learned his name was Hart, which the rest of his crew shouted at him constantly, like it was a joke only they were in on.
I never once heard anyone call him anything else that whole summer, not the crew, not the marina office, not the old man who ran the inn and kept every guest under his roof cataloged like specimens.
I'd just come off a breakup that still stung more than I wanted to admit. A boyfriend from school had decided, halfway through spring semester, that my camera took up more of my attention than he did. He wasn't wrong, and I refused to apologize for it.
Some restless, unfinished part of me wanted a distraction badly enough that I picked a fight with a stranger about lumber spacing, purely because he looked like he needed correcting.
I don't remember every word of that first conversation anymore, not the exact shape of it, only the feeling underneath it, the particular satisfaction of watching a confident man discover he was wrong about something in front of a woman he'd clearly decided to ignore.
He was not easy to ignore back, once I'd started paying attention. That was the problem.
By the second week he was teaching me to skip stones off the end of that half-built dock, correcting my wrist angle with two fingers pressed lightly against my knuckles, patient in a way I hadn't expected from someone who spent all day hauling lumber.
"You're flicking too hard," he said. "Let the water do the work. You're not trying to win a fight with it."
"Everything's a fight if you do it right."
"Not this. This one you're supposed to lose gently." He demonstrated, the stone skipping four times before it sank, effortless, like he'd been born knowing how.
"See? Gentle."
Mine sank on the first bounce. I made him show me six more times before I got one to skip twice, and he never once made me feel foolish for needing the practice, which was rarer in a man than I understood at twenty.
I told him things that summer I hadn't told anyone, not even my mother, who generally knew everything about me whether I offered it or not.
I told him about the photography degree my father called a hobby to his golf friends, the plan everyone assumed I'd eventually trade for something with a steadier paycheck.
"You should keep doing it anyway," he said, the night I told him, both of us sitting on the dock with our feet in water gone cold with the season turning. "Whatever they call it doesn't change what it actually is to you."
"That's easy for you to say. Nobody's calling your future a hobby."
"They will, the second I want something different than what my father built. Everybody's got somebody waiting to tell them their real life is somewhere else." He said it without bitterness, just fact, the way he said most things.
"It doesn't make the thing you love any less real."
Nobody had ever put it that plainly to me before, and I sat with it long after he'd gone quiet, watching the light go orange and then gray over water I would spend years afterward comparing every other lake to and finding wanting.
We had six weeks of that, mornings on his dock, afternoons walking the shoreline until the gravel turned to sand and back again, evenings when my mother pretended not to notice how late I came in.
I fell for him slowly and then all at once, the way people warn you about and you never believe until it happens to you specifically.
My mother noticed before I admitted anything out loud. She always did.
"You're going to leave a piece of yourself here," she said, one evening near the end, watching me get ready to meet him. "I can already see it happening."
"It's six weeks, Mom. It's not that serious."
"Six weeks is exactly how long it takes, if it's the right person. Longer and you'd have talked yourselves out of it by now." She fixed my collar without asking, the way she still does.
"I'm not telling you to stop. I'm telling you to be honest with yourself about what this is before you drive home and decide it wasn't anything."
I didn't listen, not really, not in the way that would have prepared me for what came after.
The last night, I gave him my number scrawled on a torn sketchbook page, made him promise to call, and drove home two days later with my face pressed against the passenger window so my parents wouldn't see me crying over a boy I'd known six weeks.
My mother saw anyway. She has a gift for finding exactly what I'm trying to hide.
He never called.
I waited through the end of that summer telling myself phones die, numbers smear, good intentions get buried under real life faster than anyone plans for, and I believed every excuse right up until the semester started and the silence had gone on long enough that believing stopped being possible.
I found a business card once, tucked in the bottom of my camera bag, printed with nothing but a company name and a town I could still find on a map if I tried.
I wrote to that address that winter, a letter I agonized over for a week before I sent it, and heard nothing back at all, not a note, not a returned envelope, nothing.
I told myself the company had folded or moved or never once forwarded a letter meant for one man among a whole crew of them, and eventually I stopped checking the mailbox with any real hope in it.
Six weeks after that, I found out why my body had felt wrong for a month, sitting on the floor of a dorm bathroom with a plastic stick balanced on the edge of the sink, staring at a result I read maybe a dozen times before it became real.
I called my mother before I called anyone else, because some instincts don't change no matter how old you get.
"Mom." My voice came out smaller than I intended. "I need you not to panic."
"I'm already panicking. Tell me anyway."
"I'm pregnant."
The silence on the line lasted long enough that I thought the call had dropped, and then she exhaled, long and slow, the sound of a woman recalculating an entire future in real time.
"Okay," she said finally. "Is it his? The dock boy?"
"There wasn't anyone else, Mom."
"Then we're going to figure this out. All of it. You are not doing this alone, do you understand me?"
Her voice had gone fierce, protective in a way that undid me more than any comfort could have. "I mean it, Aria. Whatever this turns into, you have me."
I never tried reaching him again after that.
Pride, mostly, and a stubborn refusal to hand a man who'd already gone silent one more chance to disappoint me, this time with something that would matter far more than a phone call.
I built a whole life around not needing an answer from him, and I got good enough at it that most days I forgot I was still waiting for one underneath it all.
That was the story I'd told myself for six years, clean and settled and finished.
Jake's letter had cracked it open again, and underneath the crack was a version of that summer I hadn't let myself look at directly in a long time, the version where the silence wasn't cruelty at all, just bad luck and a ruined scrap of paper neither of us had known to grieve.
I told my mother everything two days ago, the whole truth, sitting at her kitchen table while she went pale and then furious and then, eventually, quiet in a way I'd never seen from her.
"Hart," she said, testing the word like it might still be sharp. "He was Hart. This whole time he's been living right next door to you, and I never once made the connection."
"Neither did I, Mom. I've had that man in my kitchen for months."
"I almost said his name to him myself, that morning at your table. I got right up to the edge of it and stopped." She pressed a hand over her mouth for a second, composing herself.
"I am so sorry I didn't push harder."
"You couldn't have known."
"I could have asked one more question. I usually do." She reached across and gripped my hand, hard.
"What do you need from me right now? Just tell me and I'll do it."
"I need to know for certain. Not guessing anymore. Not math done on old dates and older memories."
I'd already ordered two kits by then, simple cheek swabs and a mailing envelope, one for Lily and me, one addressed to Jake with nothing but instructions and my handwriting on the outside, no note, no explanation beyond what the paperwork already said. "I need an answer that isn't a feeling."
I swabbed Lily's cheek that same afternoon, telling her it was a game, a new kind of tickle test, and she giggled through the whole thing without asking a single question that would have required an honest answer from me.
She wanted to know if she'd win a prize for holding still the longest, and I told her yes, absolutely, the biggest prize I had, which was true in a way she wouldn't understand for years yet.
I mailed both envelopes the next morning before I could talk myself out of it, dropping them into the box at the end of the street with hands that weren't quite steady, and then I waited, the particular kind of waiting that reorganizes your whole nervous system around a mailbox and an inbox you check too many times an hour to admit to anyone.
The email arrived nine days later, an unremarkable afternoon with laundry half folded on the couch and a pot of coffee going cold on the counter, an ordinary hour I will now never think of as ordinary again for the rest of my life.
The email had one line. Confirmed match, ninety-nine point nine eight percent. I read it four times before I let myself believe it was real.