The cottage had to be emptied by Sunday, which is the only reason I hadn't cried yet — grief defers nicely to a deadline. I'd driven up to a lake town that closes in October, everything boarded, the one gas station running on a single pump and a handful of the year-rounders who don't leave.
Kellan was one of them. Of course he was.
He was behind the counter at the hardware store, older in the way that suited him and annoyed me, and he looked up from a clipboard and said my name like it was a date on a calendar he'd been half-watching for. We were seventeen the last time — one dock, one August, one kiss I'd spent a decade downgrading in my memory so it would stop meaning anything.
"You need boxes," he said. Not a question. Everyone in town knew about my mother.
"I need everything," I said, and heard how it came out.
He closed early. He didn't ask, just turned the sign and carried flat-packed boxes to my car in the rain, and then followed me out to the cottage because the tape gun was seized and he "had one in the truck." Which is how I ended up on the floor of my dead mother's living room at nine at night, taping boxes with a man I'd manufactured an entire adulthood specifically to avoid becoming the kind of person who'd need.
We worked without talking. Then he found the tin — the shortbread tin where my mother kept photographs, and near the top, us. The dock. Someone's flash. Two kids who didn't know yet how much of it they'd waste.
"You kept coming up," he said, "for years. And you never once came in."
"I know."
"Why now?"
I meant to say because she's gone. What I said was, "Because there's no summer left to hide inside."
He reached over and tucked my hair back — the smallest, most ordinary thing, a gesture from a boy who no longer existed made by a man who apparently still did — and I felt the whole boarded-up town go quiet inside my chest. I didn't kiss him. I put my forehead against his jaw and stayed there, breathing, while the rain did the crying I'd been deferring.
I left Sunday, like I said I would. But I left the cottage on the market instead of sold.
