Page 1 of Summer Love

CHAPTER 1

Summer

SUNDAY

The road bends, and the ocean opens up on my right, vast and copper-colored, through a gap in the cypress trees and the wind-twisted pines. Beyond the salt-eaten guardrail, the Pacific stretches toward a horizon so hazy that water and light blur into one.

The opening notes of Phoebe Bridgers’s “Motion Sickness” fill the car. A soft song, almost casual, with acid underneath. Loving someone who destroyed you. Resenting him for it. Knowing better. Going back anyway.

I should change the song. I turn it up.

My eyes are locked on the cracked asphalt, my hands clenched on the wheel since Monterey.

Hairpin turns come one after another along the cliff edge. The rental car is too light, smells like fake vanilla, and shudders under the gusts coming off the Pacific.

Highway 1 is postcard-beautiful. But at every curve the pavement narrows and the mountain presses in, as if it wants to take back what people stole from it.

Sell. Sign. Leave.

Three words, three actions. My whole plan fits in that one line—and that’s exactly how I want it.

The house belonged to my dad’s parents. I spent every summer there from five to seventeen, in this small California town half an hour south of Monterey, between Carmel and Big Sur, right before the coast turns wild. Grandma left it to me seven years ago. Dad handled it until I turned eighteen. Since then, it’s my name on the deed—and my problem. I’ve never had the nerve to deal with it or the money to keep it up. According to the real estate agency, the yard has vanished under weeds, the paint is peeling, the gutters leak… and worst of all, nobody wants to buy because of “noise disturbances incompatible with a residential setting”—I’ll find out soon enough what that means.

A single, lowball offer in six months.

That’s why I’m here. Not for the memories—to make up for the agency’s incompetence. Selling is my job—brands, images, stories. A house shouldn’t be any harder.

By now the sun is almost level with the water. The light has taken on that golden shade I know by heart—the one the California coast wears in July, the one that makes you believe everything’s simple: a sky on fire, a calm sea, and nothing else.

Don’t fall for it, Summer.

My fingers find the pendant at my throat, a little gold wave Grandma gave me the summer I turned thirteen, so you’ll think of us when you’re far away. I never take it off. Not in New York, not in the air-conditioned hallways of the agency, even when nothing in my life looks anything like an ocean.

I let go of the pendant and put my hand back on the wheel.

A dark green sign, faded a little by the sun and the sea spray, appears on the shoulder, in white letters:

Welcome to Coral Bay

Welcome… or not. My foot hits the gas—a stupid reflex, as if I could drive through town without seeing it.

Then a sharp crack rings out, like a muffled gunshot.

The wheel shakes, the car pulls to the right and starts to vibrate. Something feels wrong under the tires—nothing to do with the road surface.

I slow down. The vibration gets worse, with a dull, rhythmic sound—flap, flap, flap—that leaves no doubt.

Flat tire.

I pull onto the shoulder, where the road widens before a curve. The engine’s still running, the headlights lighting up a wall of cypress trees and a stretch of rusted guardrail. I cut the music and kill the engine.

The silence is brutal. All that’s left is the hiss of wind in the branches and the rumble of the ocean against the rocks below.

I get out.

The air is cooler than I expected, thick with salt and that dampness I’d forgotten, the kind that clings to your skin. The sky has shifted from copper to mauve, and the first ribbons of fog slip between the pines.

The front right tire is flat, slumped on the rim. I crouch down. A nail is barely visible in the dim light.