There's something about places like this—places where you grew up, where your history lives in every street corner and storefront—that never quite let you go. They hold your memories like photographs, perfectly preserved, waiting for you to return and remember who you used to be.
LA never felt like that. It always felt too big, too transient, too full of people passing through. Nothing there holds memory the way Eden does. Nothing there knows my name without me having to introduce myself first.
Maybe that's why I stayed away so long.
Because coming back means feeling everything I've spent years trying to outrun. It means walking through a place that remembers every version of me—the girl who lost her father, the teenager who fell in love, the young woman who left and never looked back.
Places don't forget the way people do.
They just wait, patient and unchanging, for you to come home and face what you left behind.
Here's the addition with the water balloon memory at the beginning:
I pull into the driveway and the car barely stops before the memory hits.
Vivid. Unrelenting. So real I can almost hear it.
I must have been twelve, maybe thirteen. The four of us—me, Ollie, Jake, Nate—running wild across the front lawn in our bathing suits, armed with water balloons we'd spent an hour filling from the garden hose.
Jake's laugh, loud and unrestrained, echoing off the trees as he nailed Ollie square in the chest with a perfect throw.
The way the sun felt on our shoulders. The way the coldwater shocked our skin. The way everything felt possible and permanent and like summer would last forever.
I blink and the memory dissolves.
The lawn is empty now. Perfectly manicured. No kids running through sprinklers or shrieking with laughter or leaving wet footprints across the porch.
I kill the engine and sit there for a moment, hands still on the wheel, throat tight before finally grabbing my bag from the passenger seat, then heading up the porch steps.
My feet know exactly which boards creak.
The spare key is still under the ceramic horse statue by the door—the same hiding spot we've used since I was a kid.
Some things, at least, don't change.
The door swings open with a familiar groan.
Inside, the lake house smells like pine and lemon polish and something deeper—time, maybe, or just the accumulated weight of summers past.
The open floor plan spreads out before me: living room flowing into the kitchen, floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the lake, late afternoon light streaming across the hardwood floors.
There's a fresh coat of paint on the walls—soft grey instead of the cream I remember—but everything else feels untouched.
The same stone fireplace with its mantle covered in framed photos. The same dining table where we played cards until two in the morning, arguing about rules none of us actually knew.
I move closer to the photos, drawn like I always am.
There we are. Frozen in frames.
Nate, Jake, Ollie, and me. Various summers, various ages, always together.
One where I'm maybe eight and the boys older, covered in mud from the quarry, grinning like idiots. Another from the summer I turned thirteen—Jake's arm slung around Lydia, Ollie making bunny ears behind Nate's head while I tried not to laugh.
My chest tightens.
The photos are still here. After everything—after Jake, after Nate going off to rehab, after all those years—Lydia kept them up. Like we're still that version of ourselves. Like those kids still exist somewhere, frozen in time, before everything got so messed up.
I tear myself away and head upstairs, bag slung over my shoulder.
