Cody had never understood the point of those tents. The reason you went to the beach was to be in the sun, wasn’t it? He and Louisa were tired and quiet, and they could overhear their parents’ conversation, reminiscing about a summer years before when they’d all first met.

It wasn’t uncommon for them to retell this story. They told it to Cody and Lou. They told it to each other. They loved to think about—and romanticize—the way they’d become “the Fab Four.”

“You all have me to thank,” Louisa’s mom said, her Southern drawl so lazy he thought it might put him to sleep. “If I hadn’t dumped Danny, none of us would be here.”

Cody’s dad let out a hearty laugh. “That’s not how I remember it, Joey.”

Louisa squinted at him. “Why does she call him Danny?”

“Why does he call her Joey?”

They both rolled their eyes then at the silliness of their parents, who were all good-natured about the way their friendship had begun.

Daniel and JoEllen met in a business class at Boston University. They were assigned to work together on a group project and hit it off right away.

“He was smitten with me,” JoEllen said.

Cody didn’t say so, but he thought it was rude of her to talk like that in front of his mom.

Louisa groaned. “She’s so full of herself.”

“Not too smitten, or he wouldn’t have set you up with me.” Warren laughed.

JoEllen swatted her husband on the shoulder, and Cody noticed his mom stayed quiet. She didn’t like thinking or talking about Daniel and other women. His father must’ve sensed it because he wound his arm around his wife and squeezed.

“Everything worked out just as it was supposed to,” he said, placing a tender kiss on Marissa’s temple.

JoEllen smiled at Marissa. “I knew you two would be perfect together.”

Daniel and JoEllen had apparently realized they were better off as friends, and they stayed that way for months. And then they set each other up with their now spouses, Warren and Marissa.

Marissa had been a roommate of JoEllen’s, though she confided in Cody once that they were great roommates because they had so little in common. Warren and Daniel were fraternity brothers. The rest was, as they say, history.

They weren’t the normal kind of family friends, however. They were so much closer. Cody was positive that Daniel would’ve jumped in the ocean to save every single one of them if they were being overpowered by the waves.

Why couldn’t it have been someone else he’d been saving that night? Why did it have to be Cody?

He shook aside the memories, the sound of his father’s laughter dancing on the waves, and turned his attention back to the cross in front of him, the note in his hand.