Page 43 of When Summer Returns

She moved through Luke’s kitchen without really seeing it, pouring coffee into a travel mug with trembling hands. A note on the counter confirmed her earlier guess:Early inventory for storm prep. Back by 10.—L

The formal initial hit her with unexpected force. Had their kiss and her subsequent flight damaged even the fragile friendship they’d begun rebuilding? She pushed the thought aside, focusing instead on the practical problem before her.

The keys to the golf cart hung on a hook by the door, but Jessie bypassed them. Walking would delay the inevitable confrontation with her father’s house, and perhaps help settle the storm brewing inside her chest.

The morning held that particular pre-hurricane stillness unique to coastal communities—the quiet between recognition and response, anticipation hovering in the thickening air. Birds had gone unusually silent, seeking shelter rather than serenading the dawn. Boats that normally bobbed in the small harbor were already secured or had departed for mainland moorings. A few residents nailed plywood over windows or loaded vehicles with emergency supplies, but most serious preparations would begin after the midday meeting.

Jessie’s feet carried her along the shoreline, toes digging into cool sand still damp from the morning tide. She avoided the road that would have offered a more direct route, instead taking the longer path that hugged the ocean. Every step away from Luke’s comfortable home and toward her father’s house felt like moving backward in time, retreating into shadows she’d spent fifteen years trying to escape.

As distance stretched between her and Luke’s house, her body grew heavier, as if gravity itself intensified with proximity to her childhood prison. The beach narrowed, then gave way to a rocky stretch that forced her onto the gravel path connecting to the final approach to End Point.

Her father’s house sat alone on its rise above the beach, the last structure on the northern curve of the island, deliberately removed from prying eyes and potential witnesses. This isolated cove of Seeker’s Island had always belonged to the James family—no neighbors within shouting distance, a fact her father had exploited countless times.

When the house finally came into view, Jessie stopped so abruptly she nearly lost her balance. The structure seemed smaller than in her memories, diminished by time and neglect. Paint peeled in long strips down the clapboard siding, exposing wood grayed by salt and sun. One window shutter hung askew, while others had disappeared entirely. The front porch sagged like a tired mouth, screens torn and flapping in the fitful breeze. Tall weeds had colonized what once passed for a yard, and sand had drifted against the stilts that raised the house above potential flood waters.

Nature was slowly erasing Jesse James from the landscape, and Jessie found herself silently cheering its progress.

“Should have let it rot,” she whispered, her voice harsh in the quiet morning. “Should have burned it to the ground years ago.”

She stood frozen at the edge of the property, unable to force herself up the warped steps to the porch. The key had arrived with other estate documents weeks earlier, but she’d buried it in a drawer, unwilling to acknowledge its existence. Now it burned in her pocket, unused and unnecessary. She wouldn’t need a key to do what she’d come for.

From this vantage point, she could see every flaw in the structure’s façade—peeling paint revealing rotted wood beneath, a sagging gutter sending a constant drip to the sand below, broken railings that had never been repaired. The windows stared back at her like dead eyes, reflecting the gathering storm clouds overhead.

Her chest tightened, breath coming in shallow gasps. This had been a mistake. She should have hired someone, anyone, to board the windows and secure the property. Being here was like willingly stepping into quicksand, feeling it pull her down into darkness.

A flash of memory hit her with physical force—her teenaged self washing dishes at the kitchen sink visible through that side window, her father’s raised hand coming down across her back, the sound of breaking ceramic as the plate slipped from her grasp. How many nights had she stood at that sink, washing dishes while her father drank himself into a rage behind her? How many mornings had she quietly prepared her own lunch for school, careful not to wake him after his late-night binges?

A sound escaped her throat, not quite a moan but something primal and wounded.

“Get it together,” she whispered to herself, forcing her breathing to slow. “You’re not that helpless child anymore. This is just wood and nails. Just things.”

But the house wasn’t just things. It was a repository of nightmares, a physical manifestation of everything she’d fled. And now it belonged to her, a poisoned inheritance from the man who’d broken her over and over.

Her gaze dropped to the sandy ground at her feet, where the remnants of her father’s abandoned projects littered the area—broken bricks from a pathway never completed, beach rocks he’d collected to build a retaining wall, pieces of driftwood he’d planned to turn into something but never had. Jesse James had started many things, finished few, except for his systematic destruction of his daughter’s sense of safety.

Without conscious thought, Jessie bent and picked up a brick fragment, testing its weight in her palm. Solid. Substantial. A weapon, had she ever been brave enough to use one.

She never had been. Until now.

The first window shattered with a satisfying explosion of glass, shards raining onto the porch below. The noise pierced the heavy silence of the house, releasing something inside her that had been coiled tight for decades. The second window went next, her aim stronger, more certain. She moved methodically around the exterior of the house, brick fragments and beach rocks becoming projectiles, each one carrying years of suppressed rage.

“You don’t own me anymore,” she snarled as glass cascaded from the kitchen window.

When no more windows remained on the ground floor, Jessie gathered larger rocks and pieces of driftwood, hurling them at upstairs windows with desperate precision. Each impact produced a percussive release, each shatter a rejection of the past’s hold.

“I was a child!” The scream tore from her throat as another window exploded. “I was a child and you were supposed to protect me!”

Her voice broke on the last word, strength suddenly deserting her legs. She crumpled to her knees in the sand-strewn yard, palms braced against the ground as sobs wracked her body. Years of carefully maintained control disintegrated, leaving her trembling and exposed, animal sounds of grief escaping lips that could no longer contain them.

* * *

Luke had returned to the house earlier than expected, inventory completed faster with the extra help Miguel had brought along. Finding the place empty but Jessie’s coffee mug still warm, he’d checked outside to see the golf cart still parked beneath the house. She must have set out on foot.

A sense of unease had propelled him down to the beach, where her footprints were clearly visible in the damp sand—a trail heading north, toward the isolated cove that housed her childhood home. Given their encounter in the beach shed last night and her hasty retreat, Luke had debated whether to follow. She might need space. But something about those footprints, pressed deep and determined into the sand, had seemed like a trail to trouble.

He’d followed at a distance, his concern growing with each step that took them closer to old Jesse’s property. When the first crash of breaking glass echoed across the morning stillness, Luke had broken into a run, rounding the final bend of shoreline just in time to see Jessie hurling what looked like a brick through an upstairs window of the house. Even from fifty yards away, he could make out the rigid line of her body, the controlled fury in each throw. The white sundress she wore stood out against the weathered gray of the house like a flag of surrender that had somehow become a battle standard.

Something tightened in his chest as he watched her. This wasn’t random destruction or childish vandalism. This was something primal—a reckoning long overdue.

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