The Summer We Fell (The Summer, #1)(7)

Danny isn’t like that. He doesn’t want more. He’s happy with exactly what he already has. I wish I was a little more like Danny in that regard. I’m trying.

When they finally return to the shore, two hours later, they are sandy and salty, beyond exhausted, but it’s a different kind of exhaustion than the kind I feel after a shift at the diner. It’s giddy and ecstatic. Despite their size, they remind me of little boys.

“Babe, did you see that?” Danny asks, exultant at finally pulling off a small aerial. “I think I finally get what I was doing wrong before.”

“Surfing badly?” jokes Luke. “Is that what you were doing wrong?” And then he laughs—the sound low and husky and so unquestionably male that I feel a spark streak through me, snapping almost painfully inside my gut.

Danny kicks him and laughs, collapsing beside me in the sand. “Asshole.”

Luke closes his eyes and turns his face toward the sun. “I never want to surf in San Diego again.”

“So, I guess that means I’ve convinced you to stay for the summer?” Danny asks.

Luke glances at me before he looks away. “Yeah. I guess you did.”

But his happiness has ebbed a bit. And I suspect what he is unhappy about is me.





3





NOW


M ost people talk about going home with fondness. But for me, even the good memories of home are now tinged with pain, with a reminder of what I’ve lost. That’s one reason I’ve waited seven years to come back, but not the most important one.

The freeway skirts around Haverford, which looks just as shitty as it ever did. Cash would laugh his ass off if he was here now. He’d bring up my “white trash roots” again, after a couple of drinks.

He’d never stop bringing it up, most likely.

Donna pats my shoulder as her gaze follows mine. “I check on her occasionally,” she says of my mother. “Not much has changed.”

Meaning my mother is still a woman who will take her husband’s side in any argument. A woman who hates me, though she has no problem asking me for money, time and again.

I pay it simply to buy her silence.

We continue on to Rhodes, exiting the freeway to a two-lane road that heads toward the coast, where the houses are polite and uniform with neatly trimmed lawns and mailboxes that no one has taken a bat to, as different from where I grew up as they could possibly be.

When we finally stop in front of Donna’s yellow clapboard house, my stomach lurches. The new addition out back is so large that it dwarfs the main house, making it look minuscule and quaint by contrast, but I still remember how fine and brightly lit it seemed the night I first came here, symbolizing everything Danny had that I did not: parents who loved him and a place where he’d be safe. He had everything, back then.

They shouldn’t have let me in the front door.

“Wow,” I whisper as I climb from the car. “It’s…like a different place.”

Donna’s fingers link with mine and she squeezes my hand. “Entirely thanks to you kids.”

All we did was write checks. The real work occurs a few weeks from now when Danny’s House officially opens.

Lots of places—some good, some terrible—offer emergency and long-term foster care, but Danny’s House will have a highly trained staff with psychologists, lawyers, and educational

consultants on retainer. When Donna first suggested the idea, it seemed too ambitious to ever come to fruition. It’s why I agreed I’d come for the opening if she ever pulled it off—because I never thought I’d actually have to.

I didn’t realize she’d extracted the same promise from Luke.

Stepping into the foyer is like stepping into the past—I half expect Danny to come ambling out of the kitchen, his skin glowing from a day spent in the water, his hair still damp—but the rest of the house has changed. The family room is enlarged, the dining room now seats thirty, and the kitchen has doubled in size.

Donna proudly shows me the massive, new, walk-in pantry, already stocked with snacks.

“Are you hungry?” she asks.

I shake my head.

Luke snorts. “Gonna be an interesting three weeks for you. No Patron, no lobster.”

The excesses of my lifestyle sound ridiculous off his lips, especially given where he and I both came from, and they aren’t even my excesses. I didn’t create that tour rider, and I’m not the one who released it to the press, but I’ve been paying the price for it ever since.

“That was my manager, not me,” I say wearily. “You really think I’m going to eat lobster before a show?”

He glances at me, the look deadly. “How would I have any idea what you do before a show?”

Touché, Luke. I guess you wouldn’t.

Donna glances at us, quickly covering her worry with a forced smile. “I’m going to put you and Luke in the addition. We’ve got two kids arriving early, so this way when they get here, they can sleep in the main house and you won’t have to move. Is that all right?”

“Of course,” I say, my eyes flickering to Luke and away just as fast. He doesn’t want to be anywhere near me. I don’t want to be anywhere near him. This visit is just getting better and better.

Donna steers us toward the addition, opening a door to her left. There’s a bed, a nightstand, and nothing else. The walls are bare, but the window looks out into the spacious backyard. We had to tear down the house behind Donna’s to make it possible.