Page 39 of The Summer I Destroyed You

“It’s the weirdest conversation I’ve ever had with a patient’s daughter,” he says, catching my eye. “But it was a good weird.”

It’s only when I think about the conversation much later that I realize my mother’s beloved Harold was flirting with me.

Man, that would chap my mom’s ass if she knew.

21

LIAM

I see a lot more of Emmy now that I’m in the grocery store. I have no clue what it is she does all day, but there are way too many meetings and phone calls for it to be solely about three stores and Lucas Hall. My guess is that they’re buying places under different names just so no one worries they’ll hold a monopoly on the town.

“Off saving the world again?” I ask when she walks briskly into the store, tucking her phone in her purse.

She arches one elegant brow. “Yes, it’s just a future world that looks nothing like the one you currently reside in. I have no idea why you want to preserve it so much anyway. This town sucks. The most exotic food you can get here is pasta.”

“You can get some exotic food without tearing Lucas Hall down, you know.”

She rolls her eyes. “Why the hell do you even care? It’s a disaster, and it’s barely even used.”

I nod toward the front door. “Come on. I’ll show you why.”

She gives me a one-eyed, doubting squint before she walks out to the sidewalk and lets me steer her in the direction of Lucas Hall, the late afternoon light casting a golden light across its roof.

“You associate Cupertino with Apple, right?” I ask as we walk. “You associate Palo Alto with Stanford and Mountain View with Google and surfing with Santa Cruz. But what do you associate with Elliott Springs?”

“Assholes.”

I laugh. Of course she does. “Okay, you were supposed to say nothing. Because no one even knows it exists, but it’s actually this amazing town with this old architecture and really cool history. It should be known.” We’ve reached the steps to Lucas Hall. I start up them and she follows. “So anyway, once upon a time, I thought I was going to put it on the map.”

“With…how good you are at remodeling?”

“No.” Inside the building’s lobby, I open a door to the left and pull her in beside me. “Baseball.” I nod at the biggest trophy in the room, which has my name on it.

She grins at me. “Why does the fact that you were an athlete make you suddenly seem hot to me?”

“You already think I’m hot.”

Our eyes hold for a moment. She hitches a shoulder. “You’re okay.”

I laugh again. It’s better than the flat-out denial I’d expected. “Anyway, everyone was sure I was going to play pro, and I had this dream of being on ESPN and talking about Elliott Springs…This is dumb, so bear with me. But you know how they do those retrospective things about an athlete? Well, I thought that we’d get all this coverage and suddenly everyone would realize what an amazing town this is. That while shit goes wrong all over the world, we’ve maintained our way of life, and it’s working.”

I shove my hands in my back pockets, waiting for her derision. I can’t even blame her—none of those small-town values I want to preserve did much for her when she lived here.

“But you don’t want more people in town,” she argues. “You’re always bitching about what I’m doing.”

“I didn’t want Elliott Springs to turn into some big generic city full of apartment complexes and chain stores. I wanted it to be an example of what a town could be. And I know it was a shitty place for you to grow up and this will fall on deaf ears, but I loved being a kid here. I want the childhood I had for every kid alive, including my own. And I thought I might be the one to make it happen.”

I’d suggest that I’m going to find another way, but honestly…once they’ve torn down Lucas Hall and made all our old stores into juice bars, I think the jig will be up.

“Well, there was no guarantee your kids were going to get your childhood anyway. Maybe they wouldn’t be athletes. Now instead of getting bullied, they’ll at least have interesting restaurants and expensive yoga pants to remember childhood by.”

“You sound like the villain in a Christmas movie.”

She grins. “Not the villain. The hero. Swooping into town to bring you all designer athleisure. And making myself a fortune in the process.”

I lean against the wall, my arms folded. “So that’s what it’s about for you—the money plus the revenge?”

“They’re both powerful motivators, yes.” She shrugs after a long moment of hesitation. “There’s also this guy, Damien Ellis. He…”

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