Page 86 of If the Summer Lasted Forever
I nod and shove my hand in my back pocket, feeling for the postcard. The Tillmans are far away, enjoying the coast. They’re not coming back anytime soon.
And that’s okay.
It has to be.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
“You have mail,”Mom says the minute I walk into the office. She waves a plain white envelope in the air. “It looks just like the last one. Who are they from?”
My heart starts beating faster, and I snatch the envelope from her.
“Landon?” she guesses.
I mumble incoherent words and leave the office, heading for the house. As soon as I’m in my room, I sit on my bed and stare at the envelope.
Slowly, I tear it open and pull out another postcard. Landon’s at another beach, this one rocky. Again, we’re together.
He’s using pictures he took of me and purposely posing himself just to make them fit together with a few tweaks.
That’s insane.
That’s…
So Landon.
This time, the back reads, “Still wish you were actually here. All my love, Landon.”
“Another one,”Mom says, motioning to the stack of mail. She’s at the kitchen table, drinking coffee, waiting for me to come home from school. Big, fat snowflakes fall just outside the window, and our Christmas tree stands in the corner, all dressed in red and gold.
“This one’s red,” she says conversationally. “He must have been feeling festive.”
I slide open the card and smile as soon as I see his name.
I finally worked up the courage to call Landon not long after he began sending the cards. We talk almost every day now, but that doesn’t keep him from writing. His messages have gotten longer and longer, and now he usually sends several sheets of paper along with his postcards.
There’s something very personal and sweet about hand-written letters, especially when Landon is so enamored with technology.
“So where are you now?” Mom asks.
“Louisiana,” I tell her.
She takes another sip of her coffee. “I bet it’s warmer there than here.”
I smile. “It looks like it.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
The best thingabout graduating high school is that my afternoons are now free to stalk the mailman. I wait until he’s gone, and then I hurry to the box.
I’ve become obsessed with checking the mail. You wouldn’t believe the places I’ve been to in Landon’s cards—the California coast, the Balloon Fiesta in Albuquerque, and state parks in Texas where trees drip with Spanish moss and alligators sun themselves on walking trails.
Every week like clockwork, a new card shows up. Every week, I fall a little more in love.
I have forty cards, and right there on top of a stack of bills and credit card applications sits number forty-one. I open it eagerly, hoping with all my heart the Tillmans have changed their course and are coming back this way.
Before I pull out the card, something else slips out. I read it, wondering what in the world Landon’s sent me.
And then I brace myself with a hand on the mailbox. It’s a plane ticket to Florida.
