Page 25 of The Book of Summer

“Listen, do you have anywhere to be?”

“Me?” Bess spins back around to face him. “Right now? This morning?”

“This very minute.”

“Aside from dragging my mother from her home? The answer is no, I have exactly nowhere else to be.”

Well, she has somewhere to be, but it would involve a flight to California.

“Wanna come to my jobsite?” He tilts his head toward the door. “I have a construction gig down the way.”

“You want me to visit your work?” Bess scrunches her forehead. “Doesn’t that seem a little…?”

“Calm down, Danielle Steele. I’m not going to put the moves on you. I may be dense about a lot of things, but I never make the same mistake twice.”

“Gosh thanks,” Bess mumbles. “You’ve made me positively weak-kneed.”

“Do you want to go or not? I think it’s a place you’d like to see.”

“Sure. Like I said, I don’t have anything else to do, other than stare off a cliff and reflect on my own mortality.”

“Perfect.” Evan claps a hand on her shoulder. “Trust me, you’ll get a kick out of this. And it should stir up a few memories.”

“Oh Lord. Memories. Well, make sure they’re only the good ones. The bad ones I plan to leave out on the bluff.”

13

Monday Morning

They stand on a concrete slab beneath the outline of a not-quite-a-house.

“Thisplace is supposed to ring a bell?” Bess says, and knocks on a frame. “A house so new it’s not even built yet?”

Though Bess pretends otherwise, she understands exactly where they are.

This plot of land once contained a fishing shack called Hussey House, a chunk of abandoned heaven that served as center stage for all manner of teen naughtiness. Hussey was one of Nantucket’s original founders, but whether the family ever owned the property or the name simply seemed fitting for the stuff kids got up to there, Bess never knew.

“Elisabeth Codman,” Evan says. “You don’t recognize it? Damn. That hurts. I thought I’d left at least some kind of mark on your formative years.”

Some kind of mark.That’s one way to put it.

“Fine,” Bess says, and walks to the edge of the foundation. “I remembered it on sight. How could I not? Codfish Park. You bastardized my last name as a result. Lizzy Codfish. What a gal.”

She grips the sides of a doorway and leans out over a twelve-foot retaining wall.

“Be careful,” Evan says. “You’re a couple stories off the ground. We built up the pad to keep the house out of the flood zone. Can’t screw with Mother Nature on an island outpost like this.”

“Ha! You don’t say.”

Bess pushes herself back into the home, gaze still fixed on the beach across the road. With that view, and Evan’s voice behind her, the years crash back onto her with the force of a nor’easter. Bess closes her eyes and pictures the people and the parties. She can smell the driftwood bonfires; see their flames dancing in purple and in gold. And Bess can still feel Evan, his arms wrapped around her waist.

Bess’s eyes begin to sting.

“Are you okay…?”

“It’s so sad,” she says, quickly. “That Hussey House is gone like all the other shacks. Soon there won’t be any left. I hate seeing the new places scattered around, like pockmarks, so overt with their cedar shingles not yet turned to gray.”

Evan nods.