Chapter One
It’s quiet. The kind of quiet I haven’t heard in years. The kind that we never get in the city.
They. That they never get in the city. I take the last swig of my fancy coffee and savor it, letting it roll over my tongue and down my throat like it actually still tastes good after my two-hour drive. Like it isn’t just my last tie to the life I’m leaving behind.
I slam the driver’s side door closed and a couple of birds fly out of a tree. One of them chirps as they circle each other before disappearing into the greenery of the old cedar that towers over the rec hall.
“Hey, old friend,” I say. As though the tree can hear me. As though a bunch of trees and cabins actually thought about me as much as I once thought about them. As if they’d been wondering what had happened to the girl who used to joke that she’d sneak into the trees and build a home from nothing more than the forest itself whenever the bus showed up to take us home.
But trees don’t think. Not about me. Not about any of us. If they did, they’d know where I’d gone. Why I’d left. Why even after more than a decade away, I’m only here because I needed out, camp needed a new director, and my life in the city finally turned my stomach more than my memories of this place.
Old habit leads me around the side of the rec hall. I have the critter-proof garbage can open before I stop to think about which latch goes where. The remnants of milk froth and syrup splatter a brand-new garbage bag, already in place and waiting for the first wave of kids to arrive in a week, all hopped up on their summer vacation adrenaline.
I’d always heard that the first camp of the year was the worst. Kids running in circles after sitting at desks for ten months. Kids stumbling across—and into—wasps’ nests. Kids everywhere. Doing everything. Making messes and memories.
Which actually doesn’t sound very different from the drunken wedding parties I’ve spent the last five years corralling. I’m even hopeful that there’ll be less vomit. Maybe even fewer tears.
I pull my car keys from the back pocket of my jean shorts and press the button to lock the doors. The alarm beeps and my breath hitches. I didn’t even register that noise in the city. It was just one more blip in a land of horns, buses, and yelling people. But here, it’s out of place. Like me. Who has turned into such a city girl that I set the alarm on my hatchback when I’m a half hour up a one-way logging road, with only the soon-to-be-departing camp director anywhere in the vicinity.
I raise a hand to shield my eyes and look across the playing field, toward the camp director’s year-round residence. But my palm is no match for a sun unfiltered by high-rises and awnings. “God dammit.” I blink away the burning. Move the sunglasses I’d been using as a headband onto my face, and slip a hair tie off my wrist to gather my hair into a messy ponytail.
I avoid looking at the cabins as I force my feet forward, down the stairs that separate the upper camp’s bunks and rec hall from the lower camp’s dining hall, playing field, and small mountain lake. There’s no need to look behind me. I know they’re there. Cabin 5, where I spent some of the best summers of my life. Cabin 7, where I’d smiled into the darkness. Wished my dreams true. And cried so hard I threw up.
My stomach turns when my feet hit the gravel at the bottom of the wide stairs. I’ve sat here so many times. Listening to announcements. Finding out what the camp director had planned for us that day. I turn to face the stairs and try to picture a hundred sets of eyes looking back at me. Waiting for me to tell them what’s on the docket. Trusting me to give them the best weeks of their summer. I scuff my feet in the dust to hide the fact that I bought my hiking boots yesterday.
I take a deep breath and let it out slowly, forcing my shoulders down from around my ears. When I’m no longer wearing my shoulders like some kind of football padding, I lock my gaze on the camp director’s house. My house. I order my feet to move and don’t let them stop until I’m at the door. A lazy woof greets my knock and I step off the front stoop to wait.
The camp director from my days here was a man clinging to middle age and clothes he’d outgrown a decade earlier. I back away farther and turn toward the lake in case this guy shares a similar penchant for patchouli and chest hair. Hell, it could still be Bobcat behind that door, wearing the same incense-scented camp regalia for all I know. I was too focused on clearing out my apartment and getting the heck out of Dodge to ask for anything more than the vital information, which amounted to how soon could I get there, and how long could I stay.
The front door opens with a groan and a cold nose hits my inner thigh. I jump and a German Shepherd–looking dog runs a circle around me. He pauses at my feet and reels me in with his decidedly un-shepherd-like floppy ears. I reach down to ruffle them. “Hi, boy. Nice to meet you.”
“Hey,” a gruff voice says from behind me. “You must be Amelia.”
I give the dog one last scratch and turn to the current camp director with the easy smile that can only follow the complete stress relief of petting a dog. But I can’t make it stick when I see him.
Years have chiseled out his cheekbones and grown his hair. He’s barefoot and jeans hang low on his hips, a vintage camp shirt is pulled tight across his chest and arms, showing off the muscles I’d seen hints of when we were sixteen.
Paul fucking Harding.
And he’s as gorgeous as I always thought he was, standing there being all manlike.
But I’m ten, and he’s sharing his cookies with me at campfire after I refused my own.
I’m twelve and he’s sitting with his back pressed against mine so the assholes can’t snap my bra.
I’m sixteen and sprinting from my cabin, not making it to the bathroom before I retch through my brokenhearted sobs.
I roll my shoulders and crack my knuckles, banishing a memory with each pop of cartilage until I’m none of those things. Until I’m twenty-eight and a pro at pretending I have my shit together. I pluck my oversized sunglasses from my face and hook them on the scoop neck of my tank top.
“Actually,” I say, “it’s Amy.”