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Two flashlights cut across the park. Darkness has long since swept over the island, but there’s never truly darkness under the constellations.

Long after our late-night diner banana split turned to soup, I told him I had a surprise for him.

I wanted to keep it a secret, but none of the forces of Piper Island could keep it down.

It didn’t matter that I blindfolded him with two takeout bags tied together.

It didn’t matter that the car filled with noisy static when he rolled his window down and stuck his hand out to ride the choppy air.

It didn’t matter that the water was its own dark secret all around, hidden in plain sight inside the distant lights of Piper Island.

With our free hands linked over the gear shift, the secret still managed to spill from my lips.

“We’re going to the park. There’s something I need to show you. Something I want you to do, if you want.”

In our flashlight beams, the wooden castle comes into view. Muscle memory takes me to the spot where the walls swap love stories in secret.

When I was eleven, I knew love was something you could play hide and seek with and never win.

At eighteen, in the watchful eye of a summer night Sagittarius, I know love hides in plain sight.

Love lives in black and white kisses.

In Everett’s palm, I press a pocket knife I swiped from Holden’s tackle box.

He nods in silent understanding.

The cicadas, katydids, and locusts have rehearsed their whole life to sing the soundtrack of this moment. They nail the bridge, pirouette into an encore.

Everett stands, brushes sand off his knees, kisses love into my temple.

We will move on—this moment a mere sentence in the book of the park—rolling like beach thunder to the next adventure.

We will move on, but somewhere on an island named Piper, at a park with a wooden castle playground, forever lives two names etched into wood:

Quinn + Everett.