Page 21 of When Summer Returns

“So you’re saying you left a note, but I never got it.” Luke’s gaze was intense, searching her face for truth.

Jessie nodded, swallowing hard. “I knew I had to leave that night, but I couldn’t go without explaining. Without giving you a chance to come with me if you wanted.”

She hesitated, then added quietly, “I did try to make sure you got the note. I…I gave it to Reece to deliver to you. The night I left.”

Luke went completely still beside her. “Reece? You gave a note to Reece?”

“I ran into him on my way out.” She kept her eyes fixed on the horizon, deliberately vague about the circumstances. Some truths weren’t hers alone to tell. “I asked him to make sure you got it.”

“Reece never gave me any note.” His voice had hardened, a muscle working in his jaw. “Not that night. Not ever.”

The implications hung between them, another layer of betrayal neither had expected. Jessie regretted mentioning it—she hadn’t intended to create friction between Luke and his oldest friend. But the past seemed determined to unravel itself thread by thread, no matter how carefully she’d tried to contain it.

“Maybe there’s an explanation,” she offered, though she couldn’t imagine what might justify fifteen years of silence.

A thousand possibilities unfurled in her mind—alternate lives they might have lived had a simple piece of paper made it to its destination. She might never have spent fifteen years building walls around her heart. He might never have developed that wariness she sometimes caught in his gaze.

“What did it say, Jess?” His voice was gentle now, coaxing rather than demanding.

The truth hovered on her lips, the full explanation he deserved. But fifteen years of protective silence couldn’t be broken in a single moonlit moment, no matter how perfect the setting or how receptive the audience. Some wounds had to be exposed gradually, allowed to breathe a little at a time.

“That I had to leave. That I had reasons I couldn’t explain in writing.” Her voice dropped to barely above a whisper. “That I’d be waiting at Harley’s Diner on the mainland the next day at noon if you wanted to come with me.”

She didn’t add the rest—the desperate confession of love, the warning about her father, the plea for him to tell no one where he was going. Some truths were still too raw, even after all this time.

Luke absorbed her words, his face unreadable in the silver light. “And you were there? At Harley’s?”

“Until the diner closed. I sat in that corner booth for hours, watching the door every time the bell rang.” Her voice softened with the memory. “When Margie finally turned the sign to ‘Closed,’ I knew you weren’t coming.”

“And you never thought to call? To find another way to reach me?”

“I didn’t have a cell phone. And when I tried calling your house from a payphone, the line was busy for days.” She drew patterns in the sand beside her hip, avoiding his gaze. “When I finally got through a couple weeks later, your mom answered and told me you’d joined the Coast Guard and were already gone.”

“The Coast Guard?” Luke’s expression tightened. “Figured the best way to mend a broken heart was having a drill sergeant scream at me every day and run me into exhaustion so I wouldn’t dream about you at night.”

“I didn’t know that. I thought…” She hesitated. “I thought maybe you’d needed to get as far away from the island—and me—as possible. So I took the hint.”

“The phone lines.” Understanding dawned on his face. “That same storm that was rolling in when you left got worse overnight—knocked down lines all over the island. It takes forever to get repair crews from the mainland after something like that. We didn’t have working phones for at least two weeks.” He studied her profile in the moonlight. “You were lucky to make it out, navigating a boat with those winds picking up.”

Jessie shivered, remembering the terrifying journey across choppy waters. “I didn’t have a choice. I had to leave that night.”

“Why?” The question hung between them, simple but heavy with unspoken complexity.

Before Jessie could respond, a faint buzzing sound emerged from Luke’s pocket. He grimaced, pulling out his phone and checking the screen.

“It’s Miguel,” he said, regret clear in his voice. “Something about a problem with the freezer.”

“You should go.” She was surprised by her own reluctance to end the conversation, now that they’d finally begun peeling back layers of misunderstanding.

“This isn’t finished,” he said, rising in a fluid motion that spoke of muscles accustomed to physical work.

He extended a hand to help her up, and after a moment’s hesitation, she took it.

The simple contact—palm against palm, fingers curling with instinctive familiarity—sent a jolt of awareness through her that had nothing to do with their conversation and everything to do with the man before her. His hand was warm and calloused, enveloping hers completely. When she stood, the momentum brought her closer than she’d intended, near enough to catch the scent of him—salt and sunshine and something spiced and distinctly male.

For a breathless moment, they stood too close in the moonlight, hands still joined, the tide swirling around their ankles. Jessie was acutely aware of how easy it would be to close the remaining distance, to learn if his lips still fit against hers as perfectly as she remembered.

His phone buzzed again, breaking the spell.

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