53. Summer
Summer
The night swallows the road. The headlights open a white corridor ahead of me, and beyond it, everything’s black: the coast, the ocean invisible to my left under the cliffs, the moonless sky. My hands have been clenched on the wheel since I pulled out.
I’m still wearing the jeans and top from this afternoon. I didn’t change before I left, didn’t even fix my hair. I think I already knew when I got dressed, long before book club: I put them on like travel clothes.
Out of habit, I start my playlist. A guitar comes in, a few plucked notes, then the voice. “Funeral,” by Phoebe Bridgers. The same voice that carried me to Coral Bay eighteen days ago, in this same rental car, another night.
I can’t listen to it tonight.
I cut it off after ten seconds. All that’s left is the engine, low and steady.
Yumi took the envelope without asking questions. She nodded and slipped it under the counter. She didn’t wish me a safe drive. She knew it would have rung false.
Noah doesn’t know.
I didn’t knock on his door, didn’t say goodbye. I know it’s cowardly, but he’d have asked questions, tried to stop me. Tonight, I didn’t have it in me for that conversation.
Jace will get to the lodge in an hour, maybe less. Flip will be at his heels, warm nose against his thigh. Yumi will hand him the envelope.
I wrote the letter in one go, at the desk in Bungalow 17, on the lodge’s letterhead. No draft, no cross-outs. I read it over once before sliding the page into the envelope.
Jace,
I’m leaving Coral Bay tonight. I’m going back to New York, and I won’t be coming back.
I love you. I loved you at seventeen, I still love you at twenty-three, and I don’t know if I’ll ever fully stop. It wasn’t enough then, and it isn’t enough now.
The problem was never love. The problem is trust—when it comes to what really matters, to what we could build beyond a few weeks of summer. I don’t think we have the same values, you and me. We don’t give the same weight to what’s serious, to what can be forgiven. And I can’t build a life on that.
I’d rather leave tonight than keep pretending. I don’t want to spend the next few months waiting for it to hit me all over again. And I don’t want to put you through that either.
Please don’t contact me. Not to convince me, not to explain yourself, not to say a proper goodbye. We’ve said enough these past few days. There’s nothing left to add.
Summer
Highway 1 runs between the low hills and the Pacific. A truck passes the other way, its headlights burning my eyes for a second, then nothing.
A sign catches in the beams, dark green, white letters, a little faded by the sun and the salt spray. I recognize it before I even read the words.
Now leaving Coral Bay
I ease off the gas. The car slows. My hand goes to my pendant—the little gold wave Grandma gave me the summer I turned thirteen, so you’ll think of us when you’re far away.
The braided bracelet slides on my wrist. I still don’t know where it came from. I’ve worn it since I found it under the bed in my teenage bedroom.
I could turn around.
I let go of the pendant, put my hand back on the wheel, press the gas. The engine growls louder, the sign passes on my left, then disappears in the rearview mirror.
It’s over.
The tears come all at once. All they needed was a stupid border, painted on green sheet metal.
My vision blurs, the oncoming lights doubling in the windshield. I blink, wipe one cheek with the back of my hand, then the other. I don’t slow down.
It’s the second time I’ve passed this sign crying.
The first time, I was seventeen. I was sitting in the passenger seat. Dad was driving, there was a helicopter overhead, sirens I wouldn’t understand until years later. I hadn’t chosen it. I’d cried anyway, my forehead against the window, blocking Jace’s number and Noah’s.
This time, I’m the one driving. I’m the one who chose. And it doesn’t make things any easier. Just the opposite.
I’m crying because I love him. Because it isn’t enough.
I made the right decision. The pain isn’t doubt. It’ll follow me to New York, into air-conditioned hallways, into meetings where no one will know there was once a boy on a beach who thought the yellow board was the color of my hair. It’ll take up less room eventually. Someday, maybe.
Coral Bay falls away behind me, a little more every second. San Francisco is almost three hours away—I’m driving straight to the airport, no stops. The red-eye takes off just before midnight. I land in New York in the morning.
I don’t turn around.