Epilogue Noah
JUNE
Seven months later…
The golden evening light falls over the lodge pool. Two tourists, drinks in hand, talk in the water. Farther off, another dozes on a lounge chair.
On the deck, two tables have been pushed together.
Glasses, notebooks, a pitcher of lemon water, tortilla chips, guacamole, and a bowl of olives fight for space with Summer’s laptop.
It’s a meeting that looks like happy hour, or happy hour that looks like a meeting.
At Walker Surf School, that line’s never been very clear.
Like always, I took the seat farthest away.
For seven months now, I’ve made a point of coming to every meeting.
I run in the mornings with Summer, I hang around the lodge gym almost every night.
My gut’s gone, and I’ve even put on some muscle.
I surf with Jace once or twice a week—no particular joy in it, but it’s less of a chore than I remembered.
Seven months since Summer came back. She runs this little tribe without seeming to. It impresses me despite myself.
She’s sitting at the other end of the table, next to Jace—or rather, glued to Jace. Her hand rests on my brother’s left thigh. Neither of them pays it any mind.
Before, Jace would never have let anyone near that leg—not even Mom. Now he wears shorter shorts. When he’s sitting, the fabric stops mid-thigh. The scar’s right there, wide, ragged, paler than the rest of his tanned skin. And Summer’s palm covers half of it.
I’m not in love with her anymore. That’s been settled for a long time.
But seeing them like that, so close, so in love—there’s still a pang in my chest.
Since my depression, there’s been a pane of glass between me and the world. Not for everything. Anger still comes through just fine.
I saw Jace’s therapist a few times this winter. She helped me put words to the hole I’d sunk into. That doesn’t mean I’ve climbed out of it.
So love, honestly…
Whatever. It’s not the most important thing. The only thing that counts is figuring out what I want—or can—do with my life. As plans go, that’s already plenty.
Mom grabs the pitcher and tops everyone off. Maya snags an olive from the bowl in the middle of the table. Kai listens, still, arms crossed. I play with my lighter.
My coveralls gape at the hips; a grease stain still streaks my thigh. I rub at it with my thumb and just smear it.
Lost in her phone, Avery twists one of her blue strands around her finger. Since her last competition, she hasn’t said two sentences to me. Seven years ago she watched Jace fall apart for months. She hasn’t forgotten, and she hasn’t forgiven me. Neither have I, for that matter.
Summer sets a canvas bag I hadn’t noticed on the table and pulls out a stack of folded T-shirts. Deep blue, white logo—the stylized wave she’d drawn for the fundraiser, but reworked, cleaner, and underneath it:
Walker Surf School
Coral Bay, CA
“The new T-shirts came in yesterday!” she announces, beaming.
She starts handing them out. Maya unfolds hers and whistles.
“?Mira! That’s sick.”
Summer slides one over to me.
“He doesn’t work for the school,” Avery says flatly, not looking up from her screen.
I don’t answer.
“The whole family gets one,” Summer says, right back.
Avery lifts one shoulder.
“Okay, back to it,” Summer says, opening her notebook. “Instagram, 200 more followers last month. TikTok, 8,000 followers since we launched it. And Avery’s video, landing a kickflip on a skateboard balanced on a surfboard, has passed 200,000 views.”
“Cool,” my sister says.
It started as one of Luke’s dumb ideas. He’d tried it, swallowed a bunch of saltwater, and then Avery wanted a shot. She landed it on her second try.
“The site’s been live since April. For the summer sessions, we’re full all of July for the kids and teens; there are a few spots left in August. On the adult side, we’ve got fifteen sign-ups this summer. That’s three times last year’s numbers.”
She talks fast, no arrogance. And she says we. It just happened that way. Nobody handed her a job, she didn’t ask for one. She just started helping, and now she runs the whole business side of the school, without asking for a dime. For Jace and Mom, it’s been a huge relief.
“And the cash flow?” Kai asks.
“Up $7,200 in the checking account. Real breathing room. For the first time since—”
Summer searches for the word, looks at Jace.
“In a long time,” he finishes quietly.
Since Dad died.
I see the pride in my brother’s eyes. He puts his hand over Summer’s.
Mom lets herself half-smile and takes a sip of lemon water.
“It’s not a fortune,” Summer says. “We’re playing it safe, but we can breathe.”
Maya raises her glass.
“Salud. To the school. To all of us.”
We clink glasses, no ceremony.
I set my folded T-shirt on my knees. I’ll never wear it. I won’t throw it out either.
Summer turns a page in her notebook.
“Okay, the fundraiser. It’s June, we’ve got time. For the date, I was thinking the second Saturday in July, the—”
“Maybe we don’t need it this year, right?” I cut in. “We’ll manage without it.”
I close my hand around the lighter. I hadn’t planned on saying anything.
Summer trades a look with Jace. He gives a small nod, just his chin. I raise an eyebrow.
“No, we do need it,” Summer says. “We want to set aside $3,000 by September.”
“For what?”
“So you can go to college.”
I didn’t hear that right…
Maya plays with her glass, smiling. Kai watches me, very calm. Mom’s eyes are shining. Avery has lowered her phone. Jace holds my gaze.
Everyone knew. Except me.
“I… College?”
“The community college in Monterey,” Summer says. “I ran the numbers—tuition, books, gas for the drive, everything. With three thousand, you can do your first year without working full-time on the side. You can actually study.”
“We all thought about it together this winter,” Mom says gently. “It was Summer’s idea. We worked it into the budget.”
This winter. While I was shutting myself away, they were looking for a solution… for me.
“Without telling me,” I murmur.
“We didn’t want to promise you something we couldn’t deliver,” Summer says.
They forgive me. I still don’t know how to forgive myself.
It feels like I can’t get enough air. I reach for an argument, any argument.
“It’s too late,” I say.
“Too late for what?”
“To start now. I’m twenty-three.”
Summer stares at me like I just told her the earth is flat.
“Noah, community colleges exist for exactly this. For people who start later, who switch tracks, who work on the side, who get back on their feet. You’re twenty-three, not ninety.”
“What if I can’t?”
There it is. The only real question.
“Why wouldn’t you? You’re as smart as you were at eighteen, and a lot less of an idiot than you were at sixteen. Well… I hope.”
Maya smothers a laugh. I look down at my lighter.
“I… I don’t have my license,” I mutter.
“More excuses,” Summer shoots back. “You’ve got two months to get it. Jace and I will help you with the driving.”
“But the car—”
“We have one. I need it four days a month to drive to San Francisco. The rest of the time we can do without it. Sierra will lend you hers. I already checked with her.”
She has an answer for every objection. Of course she’d thought them all through. Summer never starts anything without locking down the next steps.
I want to tell them I don’t deserve it, that I hurt them enough seven years ago, and that I don’t know how you make up for something like that. I don’t say anything.
“Noah… you don’t decide anything tonight,” Jace says. “Think about it. Talk to whoever you want. Classes start in September. Let us know.”
I turn the lighter over between my fingers.
“Thanks,” I finally say.
The word barely makes it out.
Jace watches me, then clears his throat.
“While we’re making announcements, I’ve got one.”
“Is Summer pregnant?” Avery blurts, setting her phone down on the table a little too hard.
Maya bursts out laughing. Summer smiles and shakes her head.
“Not yet.”
“So what, then?” Maya presses.
Jace lays both hands flat on the wood.
“Last week I took Avery to a photo shoot, for her sponsor. I was in shorts. The bottom of the scar was showing. The art director came over to me. She asked about the attack, the rehab, getting back in the water.”
Nobody says anything.
“They called me back yesterday. They want to put me in a campaign about inclusivity and getting back into sports after an accident. There’d be photos, an interview for their magazine… and a fee that’s not nothing.”
“I’m guessing you said no,” I say.
“I said yes.”
Maya sets down her glass. Kai, who’d been leaning back, leans forward. Mom opens her mouth, closes it.
“For the money, first off,” Jace says. “The school needs it, and it’s more than we bring in from six months of adult sessions. But also—”
He takes a breath before he goes on.
“It’s nothing to be ashamed of. It’s what happened to me, that’s all.”
Mom puts her hand on his forearm. Maya, for once, doesn’t crack a joke. Avery looks at Jace with pride. Summer strokes his thigh with her thumb.
I just watch my brother.
A year ago, Jace would never have said that. For years he hid that leg. Even from us. Tonight he just told six people he’s going to stand in front of a camera, in shorts, and tell a journalist how it happened. And he didn’t flinch.
Maya stretches, half-yawns.
“A ver, to recap: Noah’s going to college, Jace is becoming a model, Summer’s running a multinational. Me? I’m grabbing a beer.”
Laughter around the table. Summer closes her laptop and says:
“Okay. If nobody else has an existential announcement—”
“Sorry to interrupt,” a woman’s voice cuts in.
I turn around. Yumi crosses the deck, her kitchen apron tied around her waist. A few feet behind her, a young woman follows.
Small, very pale, platinum-blonde hair, dark roots starting to show.
She’s wearing a fitted white blouse, high-waisted pants, thin heels that click on the wood.
Her phone hangs against her hip by a gold strap, in a faux-marble case.
Her eyes take in the pool, then the table, like it’s a problem to solve.
“This is my granddaughter,” Yumi says, stopping next to Mom.
I narrow my eyes. Despite the corporate outfit and the bleached hair, I recognize her. As a kid, she spent her vacations at the lodge. A year younger than me. Not a surfer. She was always around, without ever really joining the group.
“Hana?” I say.
“No. It’s Anna. A-N-N-A.”
“She’s the one taking over the lodge,” Yumi goes on.
“And you?” Mom asks.
“For me, it’s time to stop,” Yumi says, smiling. “A childhood friend’s waiting for me in Florida. We decided we’d grow old together.”
Mom nods and puts a hand on Yumi’s arm. Two widows who never needed many words to help each other out. Two places kept afloat for years: the lodge and the surf school.
Yumi turns to me.
“Noah, would you show her to her bungalow? The big one, number 1.”
It’s a rhetorical question. Yumi asks me for something, I do it. That’s how it’s been since I was eighteen.
“Sure.”
I stand, grab my lighter and my pack of cigarettes. I leave the folded T-shirt on my chair. Hana doesn’t say goodbye to the table, just a vague nod.
“This way.”
We go around the pool, off the deck, and onto the bungalow path, lined with solar lanterns.
The big one’s all the way at the end, the only one with a porch on three sides.
I take out my lighter and a cigarette, light it. Hana passes me, spins, and rips it out of my mouth. She throws it on the ground and crushes it into the gravel with her heel.
I stare at her. She really just did that.
From Summer, sure—she’s family. But this girl I haven’t seen in seven years, showing up tonight with that attitude… No. Not her. She doesn’t get to.
“Since when is this a no-smoking area?” I say, irritated.
“Since now. And you can’t hang around with the guests like that.”
“Like what?”
“In Crocs. Unshaven. With a cigarette hanging out of your mouth, a stained pair of coveralls. You give a terrible impression of the place.”
Touché. And the worst part is, she knows it.
“The guests… You mean my family?”
“The guests in the lobby, or having a drink at the bar, don’t know that’s your family. They just see a sloppy employee sitting with people at the pool. And that changes how they see what they’re paying for when they come here.”
She rattles off her arguments like she’s checking boxes.
“You learn that in your hospitality management classes at UCLA?”
Her eyes harden. She opens her mouth; I don’t give her the chance.
“Note for later: ripping a cigarette out of some guy’s mouth isn’t in the manual.”
I move past her and head back up the path in long strides. Gravel flies under my Crocs. Her heels click faster, then skid on the stones. Good.
I climb the three steps of the big bungalow and punch the code into the keypad. Green beep. I push the door open, step aside.
“The code’s one-two-three-four. You can change it whenever you want. The instructions are on the nightstand.”
She walks in without looking at me and glances around the room.
“More dated than in the photos,” she says, her tone condescending. “And less refined.”
I turn on my heel and go back down the steps without answering.
A little farther down, on my right, my cabin. Number 9. No keypad—an old lock I never got around to changing. I sit down on the wooden deck, right on the boards. I take out a cigarette, light it, and pull on it hard—this time, no one to crush it out.
The music from the bar reaches all the way here, warped by the distance. The opening notes of “Where Is My Mind?” by the Pixies drift over.
Even the lodge playlist is screwing with me.
Captain emerges from the shadows, big, unbothered, like my deck belongs to him. He rubs against my knee, leaves fur on my coveralls, and settles against my thigh.
“Go bother someone else. Not today.”
He closes his eyes and starts to purr.
I’m angry. Really angry. Not that gray anger that’s been in me for months.
I take another drag. The cigarette burns fast.
This girl, I haven’t seen her in years. And she shows up out of nowhere, rips the cigarette out of my mouth, and has the nerve to call me a sloppy employee?
I exhale the smoke.
Can’t wait to get the hell out of here in September.
Thank you for reading Summer Love, Book 1!