16. Summer
Summer
The Porsche pulls away behind me. I don’t turn around. The silence that follows is the best part of my night.
The night air is soft, heavy with the dull sound of the waves below. I breathe in. Ryan’s aftershave still clings to my skin—woody, sweet, too much. I want a shower.
I climb the last step up to the lodge. My right foot protests. Every step is a reminder that these heels were a stupid idea—that this whole night was a stupid idea.
I push the door open. The lobby is quiet. Orange light from the deck string lights filters through the big window. From the bar, muffled bass, hushed voices, a laugh.
Yumi’s behind the counter, bent over a ledger, her reading glasses perched at the end of her nose. She looks up when I come in.
“Evening, Yumi,” I say, brightly.
My voice rings false.
“Evening, Summer.”
Her eyes drop to my dress, my heels, then climb back to my face.
“You got any Advil? I think I pushed it a little too hard today…”
She opens a drawer under the counter and pulls out a bottle, then grabs me a glass of water and sets it in front of me. I take two tablets and swallow them.
“You okay?” she asks.
“Yeah. It’s just my foot hurting and—”
“That’s not what I meant.”
Her voice is gentle, not pushy. She watches me with that look I’m starting to recognize. She won’t press, but she stays there.
I don’t answer. My dress sticks to my skin. I wish I were in bed. I wish this whole day had never happened.
I wish I’d never come back to Coral Bay.
“Yeah. Night, Yumi.”
“Night, Summer.”
I head for the hallway that runs through the main building. Shell-shaped sconces cast a yellow glow over the tile. I pass the lodge’s utility area—the storeroom, the maintenance room—and the shared bathrooms for the long-term cabins. At the end, the back door opens onto the path to the bungalows.
I limp.
No point pretending anymore. There’s no one in this hallway to watch me hobble along in a cocktail dress.
The door to the second shared bathroom is open. A pale fluorescent light buzzes on the ceiling, and the sharp tang of bleach spills into the hallway.
A man backs out of it, a toilet plunger in one hand, a trash bag in the other.
He’s wearing coveralls stained at the knees and elbows, and olive-green Crocs.
His brown hair is a mess, sweat-plastered to one side of his forehead.
A foul smell leaks from the bag—stagnant water and something acrid, organic, that the bleach doesn’t quite cover.
My eyes go wide.
“Noah?” I breathe.
He turns toward me. He hasn’t shaved. Not the deliberate three-day scruff—just uneven, dark stubble, too grown-up on a face I knew when he was a teenager.
And he’s put on weight.
Noah Walker, so thin he was all angles at sixteen, has a rounder face now, broader shoulders, a belly.
We study each other in silence. Him with his plunger and an unlit cigarette wedged between his lips. Me frozen in the hallway, in a dress and high heels, my foot on fire.
His eyes, dark brown and deep, are the same. But the look in them has changed—closed-off, tired.
He takes the cigarette from his mouth, slow, and tucks it behind his ear.
“Summer.”
No surprise in his voice—someone must have told him I was back.
Noah. The boy who’d wanted to be a doctor since he was eight. Who read anatomy textbooks in a hammock while Jace and the others surfed. The gentlest of the group, the most serious. My best friend. With a toilet plunger and a stinking trash bag in his hand.
He catches the look on my face, and his face closes a little more.
“Your foot hurt?”
It’s so abrupt it takes me a second to get it. His eyes have landed on my shoes, on the way I’m carrying my weight on my left leg.
Of course he saw it right away.
“Metatarsal fracture,” I murmur.
Why I answer him with a medical term, I have no idea. Or rather, I do: because it’s Noah, and Noah understood words like that.
He doesn’t ask for details: when, how, whether it’s bad. He nods.
“Heels are a bad idea. Put ice on it if it swells,” he says, flat, like he’s reciting instructions.
He sets the trash bag at his feet and pulls a blue plastic lighter from his pocket, turning it over between his fingers.
Despite the belly, the dark circles, the neglected stubble, he’s still good-looking. Not like his brother. His beauty is quieter, almost damaged.
I hesitate, then ask the question I’ve been dying to ask.
“I thought you went off to med school…”
Noah’s fingers tighten on the lighter.
“Sometimes life decides otherwise,” he says, his voice even, no anger or regret.
The gold medal missed by a hair. The foot giving out on a jump landing. The student loan. The career you swap for another, then another, each time a little further from what you wanted. Everything that was supposed to happen and never will.
“Tell me about it,” I mutter.
Noah really looks at me. No warmth, just a dry clarity. Then he slips the lighter back in his pocket, snatches up the trash bag.
“Night,” he says, without turning around.
He walks off down the hallway, shoulders the door open, and disappears into the night.
Noah Walker. Handyman.
My fingers find my pendant, the little gold wave warm against my skin.
I limp down the empty hall. The gravel on the path crunches under my heels all the way to Bungalow 17.
I let myself in. The bedside lamp is still on—a yellow halo over the rumpled sheets, over the Dani Heart book closed around Ryan’s business card.
I sit on the bed to take off my pumps. The right one first. The leather sticks to my skin; the strap has left a red mark on my ankle.
I pull, I wince, my foot comes free. Of course it’s swollen.
A faint puffiness across the top of the foot, where the bone broke three years ago.
It reminds me it’s there every time I do something stupid—like wearing three-and-a-half-inch heels to grab a drink with a handsy real estate agent.
I massage the arch with my thumbs. The skin is hot, tight. The pain eases bit by bit.
“Sometimes life decides otherwise.”
I slip off the other shoe and my dress, pull on an oversized T-shirt. Then I grab the Dani Heart book and start reading. The fan stirs the hot air. Outside, the waves roll out their white noise, steady, indifferent.
Tell me about it, Noah.
I’m on chapter sixteen when three knocks ring out.
I sit up. My phone reads 9:42 p.m. No one should be knocking at this hour.
I get up and cross the bungalow barefoot. The floorboards creak under my feet. I hesitate, hand on the doorknob, then open it. No one.
The path is empty. The solar lanterns throw pale circles of light on the gravel. Just the waves, the rustle of the palms, nothing else.
I look down.
A knotted freezer bag full of ice cubes sits in front of the door, on a folded dish towel laid right on the boards. The towel is clean—white, a little rough. It must be from the lodge kitchen.
I bend down, pick up the bag and the towel. The cold bites my fingers.
“Put ice on it if it swells.”
I look down the path one more time: no one. I go back in and lock the door. I sit back down on the bed, wrap the bag in the towel, and set it on my foot.
The cold is brutal for the first few seconds, almost painful. Then it settles in, numbs the throbbing. The pain ebbs.
The towel was folded with care. My throat tightens.
Noah was supposed to leave. Go to med school. Become someone else, somewhere else. He’s here, in coveralls, with a plunger and olive-green Crocs.
Jace was supposed to leave too. Pro surfing, the circuit, the sponsors. He’s here, in a trailer, in the surf school yard.
What happened to this family?