The Summer I Saved You (The Summer #2)
Elizabeth O'Roark
PROLOGUE
LUCIE, 2002
My great-aunt wasn’t happy.
I’d only met her once before, this woman who’d raised my father, but as she waited on her front porch, watching me tug a beat-up suitcase behind me, she looked no more impressed than she had the first time.
I wasn’t all that happy either. I’d seen my father before, in magazines and on TV, sitting on a yacht with other famous tech guys or showing off his mansion—his model wife and kids beside him. I’d had high hopes for his aunt Ruth’s lakeside cottage, but her house was barely any better than ours. And Elliott Springs, which sounded like the name of a resort to me, had turned out to be a crappy town far to the south of San Francisco. There weren’t even stoplights.
“Didn’t even shut the engine off,” Ruth muttered as my mother drove away. “Work emergency, my ass.”
My mom doesn’t even have a job. She’s going to Disney with her boyfriend. Somehow, I held the words in. It helped that my mother had promised to take me with them next year if I kept it to myself.
My aunt sighed, grabbing my suitcase. “Well, come on, then,” she said, walking into the house and leading me up a flight of stairs, explaining things I already knew: that it would be very dull here for a six-year-old, that I’d need to stay inside.
“No one can know you’re here,” she warned. “Having a kid around is not what I need right now.”
I nodded. I was used to both things—keeping secrets and not being wanted. My father had refused to ever meet me. My mother’s boyfriends complained about me all the time, and when they weren’t complaining, my mother was. It was a bruise I’d become so used to I barely noticed when it got poked.
Ruth led me into a room that faced the neighbor’s house, but I could see the lake to the left, with a dock jutting out onto it and a bunch of boys who looked a few years older than me standing on its edge. I walked to the window, drawn to them, barely listening as Ruth told me she had to get back to work.
They were flipping into the water, one after the other, howling and yelling and so…free. They were all tan and happy and handsome, but for some reason my gaze landed on just one of them and refused to stray.
The sight of him called to me. As if he was saying, “Lucie, find me, you belong here,” though he had no clue I existed.
I decided to watch him carefully, whenever I could. If he was drowning, I’d go save him, like Ariel saved Prince Eric.
I was weirdly certain that one day he’d need me to do it.
1
LUCIE
2023
There are logical things to think about when you call your husband to tell him your marriage is over, but the boy next door—a boy you haven’t even seen in thirteen years—is not among them.
I could blame it on the fact that I’m back in Elliott Springs… that I’m at the lake and standing on the same dock where Caleb once executed perfect flips and dives. But that would imply I ever stopped thinking about him in the first place, which I did not. Not entirely.
“How exactly do you think you’re going to leave me?” Jeremy asks. “Your only skill is being hot, and you’ve barely got that anymore.”
It’s telling that he hasn’t mentioned our twins—asleep in the house just past my shoulder—once during this conversation. He’s been too focused on his outrage—first that I’d dare to accuse him of cheating, then that I actually had proof and was doing something about it.
“No smart comeback?” Jeremy asks. “Oh, wait. You’d need to be smart in the first place for that.”
I look over my shoulder at Caleb’s old house looming dark and lifeless behind me. It sold years ago, so I’ll never get to see who he grew into—if he became a man who cheats on his wife and then blames her. If he tells the mother of his children that her only skill is being hot. I can’t imagine he does, but I bet he didn’t marry someone like me. Someone who stands here listening to it.
I hit the button to end the call and drop the phone in the pocket of my robe. Jeremy will make me pay for that—hanging up on him—but I feel like a different person here. The girl I used to be, with different fears and different desires.
I’d just wanted one person to want me, back then. Perhaps I latched onto the idea of Caleb simply because he was my opposite, surrounded by people who adored him…but it felt like more. I’d been a dirty secret my entire life, yet I was certain it would change—that I’d eventually be down here by his side, jumping off the dock, trying to balance on an inner tube.
And now I’m back, over two decades later, and I’ve still never jumped in the lake. In some ways, this is the first time in my life I’ve actually been free.
So jump, says a voice in my head. A crazy, illogical voice. I’m a grown woman with two children asleep inside. I don’t even have a towel. But already I’m shedding my robe.
I bend my knees and spring off the balls of my feet.
This will be my clean break, my fresh start, and—
Fuck, fuck, fuck.
I’m gasping as I reach the water’s surface, flailing in my frantic attempt to get to the ladder.
The water is so fucking cold, and if I’d hoped this would help, would prove to be transcendent, I could not have been more wrong. I’m an idiot who somehow forgot a lake in northern California would be cold in late March, and there’s nothing transcendent about that at all.
I scramble up the ladder in panties and a camisole that are soaking wet, wishing I’d at least considered bringing a towel for this fresh start of mine. I blot my eyes with my robe, but as I straighten to wrap it around myself…there’s movement.
Someone or some thing is standing behind the kitchen window inside Caleb’s abandoned house.
I could have imagined it, but no. There it is again, shifting shadows behind the glass doors. And whatever it is just watched me climbing semi-nude from the lake.
My new beginning was already off to a rough start. Now it’s the opening scene of a horror movie.
JEREMY
Don’t know who the hell will hire you. Turning on the TV and putting chicken nuggets in the oven seem to be your only talents.
HE’S DELIVERED a near-constant stream of insults since Saturday night. You’d think he’d be too busy sleeping with our teenage babysitter to find the time, but he’s good at multitasking.
Unlike Jeremy, I don’t have the luxury of crafting pointlessly cruel texts. I had two kindergartners to get to school one town over, before hustling fifteen minutes down the highway to Technology Solutions Group, my new employer.
The massive brick building a bit north of Santa Cruz looks a lot more impersonal than it did when I came for my interview, but I doubt I looked at it all that carefully. Back then, I was more worried about Jeremy finding out I was job hunting than anything else.
Wiping damp hands on my pencil skirt, I walk to the front doors and head into the lobby, where a receptionist actively ignores me until she’s done taking pictures of her coffee.
“Hi—I’m Lucie Monroe, the new hire. I was told to ask for Mark Spencer?” She stares at me as if I’m still speaking, still boring her, and hits a button. “Mark, someone’s here to see you.” She returns to photographing her coffee without missing a beat.
I’ve been hired to improve morale—a job I convinced myself I was perfectly suited for, because if you spend your days trying to persuade young children to bathe, eat vegetables and go to bed, you’ve got more experience enhancing morale than anyone alive.
If this girl is a typical TSG employee, it may be more of an uphill battle than I anticipated.
“Lucie, welcome,” Mark says, walking toward me. “Looks like you’ve met Kayleigh already. Let’s find you an office.”
He turns down the hall opposite the one he came from, and I follow.