The rooms inside the lighthouse were circular, small. The ground floor kitchen was narrow and the stovetop sticky with the remnants of week-old oil spatter. Above the sink I had a plate rack stacked with colorful dishes. The rest of the wall had open cabinets with bowls, glasses, coffee mugs, and a gargantuan spice rack. It was a present from Penny that she’d picked up at an artisan gift shop two years ago because the crushed oregano, basil, and sage leaves reminded her of weed.

Elodie moved toward the kitchen table and sat down, hands clasped primly in front of her. The table was just big enough for two, and even though I had the space for something a little bigger, the table served as the perfect nail-polish station, laptop dock, and grub hub. Each fleck of paint told a story. Some splotches were canary yellow: the day I’d gotten my first paycheck, Penny and I drunkenly painted our nails in celebration. A swipe of peach was where Chad had insisted on painting my nails when we were both high out of our minds and it took three swipes before he realized he was painting the table instead.

The last splotch was my favorite, and even reliving the memory now brought a smile to my face. A flamingo pink, one of El’s polish colors. It had been an accident—she was distracted by me singing along, badly, to her then-favorite boy band. That was when she’d first started to fall for me, she told me later. When I was comfortable enough to be a complete idiot around her.

The memory brought a smile to my face. As I sat down opposite her, I traced my fingertips over the paint streaks, remembering laughter and sweet kisses and badly painted nails—all courtesy of the three most important people in my life.

Elodie was looking at the paint streaks as well. A half smile had tweaked her lips upward, but the moment she saw me looking, she let it drop. “We haven’t missed our summer, have we?”

There was no right answer. Knowing exactly what to say when someone threw you for a loop was a myth. It didn’t exist. The right words were never there when you wanted them, only hours later when you had time to drive yourself crazy going over and over what you should have said. Words eluded me now as I stared back at her, at the face I knew so well. The pert, slightly upturned nose. The slant of her cheekbones, the stretch of collarbone I’d once peppered kisses across. The thickness of her lashes, the fullness of her lower lip.

She stretched her hand across the table as if she expected me to reach for it. I was too knotted up, too held in place. What was she doing? I wanted to recoil. Looking at her too long was like staring into the sun.