He paused for a moment before answering. “Maybe they can. I don’t think everyone has to actually leave their life in the rearview mirror like I did,” he said with a crooked smile. “What gets left behind doesn’t even have to be a place. It could be anything. A mind-set, a bad decision, a person—anything at all. I think the point is that I had to get out of my comfort zone.”

Levi’s words tugged at me. What he was saying could have described me over the past few weeks. The push and pull between everything I thought I wanted and everything I wanted now. The before and the after. No matter what happened this summer, I knew that I would never be the same. He was right. Sometimes you just had to leave behind what didn’t fit.

The corners of his eyes crinkled as he smiled, leaning a little closer toward me. “Like coming here. It was a good decision.”

He didn’t have to say it, but I heard what was left unsaid: If he’d never come here, we would never have met.

Levi used his pointer finger to trace doodles in the sand. “I wanted to get away, become someone new.” He tilted his head, looking sweet and boyish and a million other things I couldn’t put into words.

I slipped my fingers through his. It seemed like the right thing to do. “I think you’ve done a pretty good job of finding yourself,” I murmured. “It’s like you told Elodie. You’re pushing the reset button. You’re losing yourself in order to find yourself.”

He looked startled for an instant, lips parting like he was going to say something. I’d never seen him look taken aback before, even though I knew other things about him: His eyelashes went still when he was being serious, and his blinks would grow slow and measured with every answer. The side of his palm was almost always silvery with graphite. The higher up his wrist the smudge traveled, the more lost in his sketching he had been.

How had I noticed all the little things about him and ignored the big one? He was a summer boy, which meant that no matter how eloquent and handsome he was, there was one thing he would do at the end of his residency … and that was leave.

“What are you doing?” he asked as I began to dig in the sand with one hand.

“Putting the book back.”

He laughed. “You should keep it. No one is going to come back for it. It’ll just get waterlogged and someone will throw it away.”