Chapter 1
HARRIET
"Honey, I'm so sorry, but you're gonna have to stay in the attic loft."
I set my duffle bag down next to the kitchen island and turn to look at Gram, who's standing at the stove stirring something that smells like butter and garlic and everything good about being back in this house. She doesn't look sorry.
"Yeah, sure, Gram. No problem."
"Okay, maybe a slight problem."
The wooden spoon pauses mid-stir, and I mentally brace myself. With Gram, there's always a second shoe, and it's always a steel-toed boot aimed directly at your comfort zone.
The thing about Gram is that she lies for the love of the game. She doesn't do it maliciously. She just enjoys the craft of it, the way some people enjoy crossword puzzles or sudoku.
"What is it?"
"You're sharing the loft with Heath, but no worries, I've placed the beds on opposite sides. You still have plenty of privacy."
Gram did not just say Heath, did she? Heath, as in Heath Donovan? The Heath Donovan? My Heath Donovan?
No. No way. Absolutely no way.
It's just a name, but I might as well have received the most devastating news. Well, not to be dramatic, but it is devastating—to my heart, my mind, and my entire person.
The Heath who was always next door every single summer since we were in primary school.
The Heath who went to high school with me.
The Heath I haven't spoken to in a decade.
The Heath I've spent years trying very hard not to think about, which is difficult when his face shows up on sports websites and his name gets dropped in casual conversation by people who have no idea they're stepping on a landmine.
My parents are somewhere behind me unpacking groceries, and my twin cousins are thundering down the hall like a pair of seventeen-year-old rhinoceroses.
Gram keeps watching me with those sharp brown eyes that miss absolutely nothing, waiting for my response, so I arrange my face into something that hopefully reads as normal surprise instead of internal catastrophe.
"Right. Of course."
But inside, every alarm bell I own is screaming at maximum volume.
Three nights. Three nights in a room the size of a closet with the one person on earth I cannot be trapped in a room with.
The one person who could unravel years of careful distance with one look, one word, one flash of that ridiculous grin that used to make me forget my own name.
I'm twenty-eight years old and a well-respected academic researcher to boot, but here I am, acting like a lovesick teenager all over again.
All that from just hearing his name.
"What if I just sleep on the floor of Mom and Dad's room?" I give Gram my fakest genuine smile. "Or … listen. I could take your floor, Gram. I don't mind the floor. I love a floor. Besides, I really, really missed you, and we could spend the whole night just, you know, bonding with each other."
Gram's eyebrows climb toward her hairline, and her mouth curves into a fake genuine smile that eerily mirrors my own.
"Is it your birthday? Are YOU turning eighty?
Are you about to celebrate what might be your very last birthday?
Because if the answer is yes, I will gladly step back and let you make all the decisions. "
There's no answer to this. There's never an answer when Gram plays the mortality card. We both know I'm going to fold like a lawn chair in a hurricane.
"Oh, it's fine, sweetheart," Mom calls from somewhere behind the refrigerator door. "We've known Heath since he was in diapers. Remember how he used to follow you around like a puppy?"
My face goes hot. No, actually, I remember being the one doing the following, trailing after him and his little sister like a stray they'd taken pity on, grateful for any scraps of attention he threw my way.
"Wait." My cousin, Jake, pokes his head around the corner. "Heath Donovan? Like, the actual Heath Donovan? The wide receiver? He's here?"
"He got in two days ago to help me get ready," Gram says, stirring her mysterious concoction with renewed vigor.
She's always had such a soft spot for Heath.
"Such a good boy. Moved all the furniture, fixed the screen door, cleaned the gutters.
Not like some people who show up expecting to be waited on hand and foot. "
Ouch.
I've been here exactly twelve minutes and I'm already getting guilt-tripped for not arriving early enough to perform manual labor.
"Where is he?" Jake's eyes have gone wide.
"Down at the dock with your uncle, checking the boat motor."
Jake and his twin, James, exchange a look, and I just know they're about to bolt for the door and spend the next three days following Heath around like he's the Pied Piper of professional athletics.
I need air. Or a time machine. Or both.
How I got here starts with a phone call a month ago, though if I'm being absolutely honest with myself, it really starts earlier than that.
It starts with the fact that I've never successfully said no to Gram in my entire life, and she knows it, even that knitted cardigan she wears to town knows it.
The call came while I was grading papers in my office at the university, surrounded by stacks of undergraduate attempts at understanding nineteenth-century literature. My phone lit up with Gram's name, and I answered without thinking, which was my first mistake.
Gram doesn't believe in pleasantries, so she got straight to the point.
"Harriet, honey. I'm calling to let you know you'll be here the weekend of the fifteenth for my birthday party."
That's Gram for you. She doesn't ask. She informs, and she sounds like she's reading a subpoena while she's at it.
I had a polite decline loaded and ready. Work obligations, a conference, the department's annual review coming up, maybe some students need my help. Just responsible adult things that should have been more than sufficient to excuse me from a weekend at the lake.
Gram has never met an excuse she couldn't steamroll, but I figured I'd try anyway.
But no.
"Gram, I'd love to, but—"
"I won't be around forever, you know."
I'd like to put it on record that this has always been her trump card, even when I was still a child. The nuclear option. Delivered in the same tone she might use to mention the weather or ask me to pass the salt.
Gram's been threatening to die for as long as I've known her, and she's still here making everyone else's lives more complicated. Unfortunately for me and fortunately for her, the threat always works because someday it won't be a threat anymore.
So I folded, the way I always fold, and marked the weekend on my calendar.
I should have asked more questions. I should have specifically asked who else would be there, who else she'd invited, whether any childhood neighbors might be making appearances. I didn't. I never do.
Gram runs her house and her family exactly how she wants to, and she doesn't believe in over-explaining her decisions to the people who are going to follow them anyway.
The thing is, Heath and I grew up together in the way kids do when their every summer vacation gets spent in the same place.
His family had the house on the east side of Gram's place until they all moved when he graduated high school. Before that, we were in and out of each other's houses, sharing the dock and the fire pit and the big kitchen table where Gram fed anyone who showed up at mealtime.
He had a little sister named Emma who was three years younger and always trying to keep up with whatever we were doing.
I was an only child, so the noise and chaos of his family was like a glimpse into some other way of existing—louder, messier, full of people talking over each other and laughing at nothing and making the kind of memories that stick to you for decades after.
At school, however, we were from completely different planets. Heath played football and baseball and ran with the popular group. Those people you see in movies. When they arrive, the crowd parts like the sea to let them through. Yep, those people.
And Heath was the hottest guy in high school. Everyone either wanted him or wanted to be him, including little ole me.
I was a glasses-and-braces girl who ate lunch outside the library and lived for honor roll certificates and early acceptance letters. In the hallways, we'd nod, maybe say hey if we passed close enough, but we never once hung out during the school year.
Summer was the only time the social ecosystem that ruled our days didn't matter.
Two months of eating ice cream every day, helping Gram out, swimming in the lake, and just talking.
That was one of the things I liked about Heath.
I could talk to him about anything and everything, and he never diminished my opinions, thought I was crazy, or even laughed at me.
He listened, and that mattered way more than he probably thought.
The summer before we left for college, I let myself believe something between us was finally shifting. That all those years of growing up side by side had built something that might turn into something else, something worth the risk of reaching for.
I was wrong. It was all in my head, which is usually where these things happen for a girl nobody looked at twice. I couldn't blame him. He was on his way to bigger, better things.
Everyone knew he would make it to the NFL. I was just not … his match.
The last summer lives in my memory like a sore tooth I can't stop tonguing, even though I know it's going to hurt. I try not to think about it directly—just let myself skim over the surface, collecting impressions instead of diving into the whole humiliating truth.
The dock by the lake, salty fingers from the chips, the two of us talking about where we were headed in the fall—him to State on a football scholarship, me to what everyone kept calling "a very good school.
" The way his eyes kept dropping to my mouth when I talked.
The certainty, sudden and bright, that he was going to kiss me.
So I leaned in.