Page 174 of Summer Love

Summer’s gone for good.

CHAPTER 55

Jace

THURSDAY

One week later…

Grinning ear to ear, Mateo hands me his wetsuit and his foam board.

“See you tomorrow, Coach!”

“See you tomorrow, Mateo.”

I take his stuff and give him back the smile—the one I’ve been plastering on my face for seven days.

The kid heads up the path toward the parking lot where his dad’s waiting. My smile drops.

I turn back to the yard. Boards lie in the sand near the rack, wetsuits turned inside out beside them. I grab the first board, prop it against the wall. I turn on the spigot, uncoil the hose. Fresh water washes the sand away. I flip the board, rinse it down, slide it into the rack. I grab the next one.

I could do it with my eyes closed. Same motions for fifteen years.

One week.

One week since I’ve slept more than three hours straight. One week of typing Summer’s name into every search engine, plus anything that might lead me to her. Columbia. New York. Economics. Marketing. Restaurant. I combed social media. I looked for internships. I tried to track down her old friends from high school or college, without even knowing their names.

What I found: a private Instagram account with a profile picture that looks old. A LinkedIn with no current job listed.

And videos of her on the ice.

Competitions, galas—dozens of them. She spins, she jumps, she lands. She’s brilliant. Until she turned seventeen, I’d watched everything I could. After that summer, I stopped watching. I never saw her skate again.

The other day, I came across the accident.

Twenty years old. Red sequined dress on the ice. She’s stunning. A missed jump, landing on the blade at a bad angle—I don’t know the sport, but I can tell it’s bad. She’s laid out, one hand clamped around her right skate, dead still. She stares at the ceiling, her face tight with pain. Tears run silently down her temples. A stretcher comes. Hands lift her. Her career’s over.

I watched that video three times.

For six years, I never looked. Yumi mentioned once that she’d ended her career after an injury. I let it go. Miles told me about the fracture two weeks ago, and I didn’t dig. I didn’t want to.

I don’t know where she lives or where she works. I don’t even know the name of her subway stop.

I didn’t ask questions. Not one. I thought we had time. I thought she’d tell me. I thought so many things.

I set the last board in the rack and turn off the spigot. The water finishes draining into the sand, and then nothing.

I head up to the trailer and sit on the steps, elbows on my knees, head in my hands. I let out a breath. I hear voices somewhere on the beach, carried off by the wind.

I lift my head.

Elena.

Summer’s half-sister. She came to Coral Bay for a few days one summer, when she was still a kid. We saw each other two or three times, but not enough to really know each other.

I rush into the trailer and grab my phone off the counter.

I open Instagram and type “Elena Novak.”