Page 94 of The Summers of Us

“Quinn?” Her voice stops me before I make it to the door.

I turn around, suddenly aware of how I must look to her. No bra, last night’s messy bun spilling down my back, sleep still stuck to my face.

“Good morning.” My smile is guilty, but it makes Blair chuckle, so I’ll take feeling guilty for the rest of my life.

“Good morning. What are you doing up so early?”

I don’t tell her it’s almost noon. “I made you breakfast in bed.”

She sits up while I set the tray on her lap, sit at the foot of her bed.

“Oh my God, you used a cookie sheet.” She laughs, rubbing her eyes and brushing brown hair behind her ears.

“I didn’t know what else to use.”

“I love it.” Her fingers graze the yellow dandelion petals—former white, puffy wishes that made it to adulthood, but never got to be wished on. “I never understood why you two loved weeds so much.” She looks at me. “But I get it now.”

“Very windowsill-esque.” I smile and start in on my egg.

Blair follows suit. We sit in a silence only broken by the clink of metal on glass, the whir of the box fan in the window, some car doors slamming down the street.

“I’m going to see her today,” I say, then regret takes over.

Blair looks at me with a stale piece of toast in her hand. She stops chewing. Her face falls and leaves behind a look so grief-stricken that you’d think she’d only just heard the news of her daughter’s passing.

“Sorry. I shouldn’t have said anything.”

“No, you need to.” Her smile is so forced, so good at hiding pain that it might as well have been painted on a porcelain doll. A long pause follows, filled with a year of unspoken conversation. Blairfinally speaks it. “The first year is the hardest, but we made it.”

When I look at her this time, I reallyseeher. She survived a year without her daughter. She has a lifetime more to weather, but she’s stronger now. She’s proven it’s possible—that life rolls on after a fall that feels so much like the end.

I’ve been so focused on all the little things that have changed—the beat-down siding, cluttered living spaces, how little Blair existed this summer—but the same number of things were eerily untouched. We still ignore her room, walk past the dead flowers on the porch, pretend she’s not in the stars above us.

But my aunt is still here. She’s the same woman I hugged on the porch eight summers ago, who welcomed me into her beach house and has given me the best nine skies of my life. She’s the woman I’ve spent my life aspiring to be, the one I would do anything to see happy again.

“I’m so proud of you.”

She cocks her head, wrinkles her eyebrows. A special kind of shock overcomes her, like she can’t believe a single soul could be proud of her. She doesn’t see what I see, how strong she continues to be in a world that tried its hardest to break her.

I squeeze her hand. “You’ll always be her mom.”

She squeezes back. “I know.”

We look at each other over a forgotten breakfast. The glint in her brown eyes gives me a piece of her strength. Hadley is no longer a physical part of our lives. Since not one horoscope or fortune cookie or wish on a shooting star has changed that, I need to accept it as something more than a bad dream, something more than a year-old memory.

I need to stand on the shoreline, face the tsunami while it swallows me whole.

In the pier shop,I make a beeline for the baskets of shells that greet my fingertips every time I come. I find the dusty basket on the floor with the large purple cowries. Scorpio rests on top, but I dig to find Sagittarius. I buy both and head into the sunlight.

The drive to the cemetery on the mainland is slow. Scorpio and Sagittarius sit in the passenger seat, reeling over each crack in the road. My hands are firm around the steering wheel. My shoulders roll all the way back. My gulps land heavier past each rung on the causeway. The water glimmers on both sides of me, stretching for miles and stirring with the horizon in a hazy fog. I pretend the water below didn’t do this.

I rub Hadley’s blue heart pendant around my neck. Causeways and necklaces carry memories no matter how you swing it.

I park under a tree as old as the weathered headstones hiding in its shadows. I sit there for a bit, my forehead against my steering wheel, my thumb still reading Hadley’s necklace like a crystal ball. It decides it’s too late to back down now.

I need to do this.

I bring Sagittarius with me. My sandals scuff against the asphalt in defiance, but they soldier on, padding against the grass still wet in the shade. I slink around a lawn of phantom memories, almost step over some weeds growing in front of a bright marble headstone. Only touched by a year of beach weather, the engraving reads:

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