The Summer We Fell (The Summer, #1)(61)

I emerge from my room just before the ceremony in a beige Dries Van Noten sheath and matching heels. It’s the most prim, conservative clothing I own, but Luke’s gaze still feeds on me like I’m wearing nothing at all.

The board members arrive and come inside to escape the heat while seats begin to fill. When it’s finally time for all of us to file outside to the reserved rows in front, I follow them out…and come to a stumbling halt.

Why the fuck is the reporter from the Times here? I expected local press, but an event like this would only merit a line or two in her article at most—so she must be here for something else.

Is she hoping someone will break?

It’s a gathering of the people who knew Danny best, many of whom were with him when he died, and perhaps she’s hoping one of them will say something about it, that they’ll peel back another layer from the mystery of what really happened to him.

There were thirty of us in the house that weekend. Thirty people drinking and chatting and having conversations with Danny that I wasn’t privy to. Thirty people who might have overheard my final moments with him and kept it to themselves all this time, who had suspicions about me and Luke they finally want to voice.

Luke’s sitting at one end of the first row, so I head toward Libby, sitting at the other, and he watches me. There’s something warm in his gaze, even after what I said this morning, even after the

way I’ve behaved since I got here. As if he knows I’d give anything in the world to be able to sit by his side during this. That I’d give anything for us to be able to hold hands, just like Grady and Libby are, and not have anyone find it troubling.

Libby smiles at me as I sit. “How are you, hon?”

I force a smile. “Fine. You guys did a great job.”

“You did a great job. It’s your money and fame that made this what it is.”

I shake my head, unwilling to take the credit. This wasn’t charity on my part. It was penance.

Grady says a prayer and then Donna steps up to the microphone, looking tiny and worn in the bright sun. Her blue eyes swim with tears before she’s said a word.

“Just before we left for Nicaragua,” she begins, then her voice gets rough and she has to stop to clear her throat. “Just before we left for Nicaragua when Danny was five, we stopped to pick up fast food. He had a bit of a tantrum because I wouldn’t let him get a soda.”

I smile. Anyone who’s ever seen a kid in a restaurant knows there’s usually a tantrum thrown about soda.

“When we left, there was a man huddled outside the restaurant asking for help. Danny wanted to give him our food, so we did.” She stops again, her hands gripping the podium so hard they’re nearly bloodless. “Our stomachs were growling later, and his father said he hoped Danny had learned a lesson from it. And Danny said…Danny said , ‘I can do a bad thing and still do good things.’”

Donna brushes at the tears running down her face. “So, when you remember my son, when you think of this house, just know that you, too, can make mistakes, but as long as you can still find a little bit of love inside yourself, it isn’t too late.” She smiles at me. “That’s what this house is for. For all the children who are certain they are bad and unlovable. So that they can find the good that’s been in them all along.”

Tears stream down Donna’s cheeks, and the ache in my chest can no longer be held in. I press my face to my hands as I start to cry. She just used this moment, her moment and Danny’s, to tell me to forgive myself.

Libby squeezes my knee before she walks to the stage, and then someone takes her seat and an arm wraps around me, too heavy and too perfect to be any arm but Luke’s. I press my face into the stiff fabric of his jacket and cry like a kid against his chest. I thought it was best that we stay apart here, today, when people are watching. When someone might put it together.

I’m glad he didn’t listen to me.





28

THEN

JANUARY-MARCH, 2015

I don’t know what the pastor’s bypass surgery was supposed to accomplish, but it didn’t work. He comes home less mobile than he was, and far crankier. Donna rents a hospital bed for him and puts it in the family room—it’s supposed to be temporary, but he makes no effort to get himself back upstairs. Slowly, she moves more and more of his things down to the first floor until we’ve all accepted that this is the way it’s going to stay. Danny learned about the surgery after the fact, but he has no clue how bad things still are.

The pastor shuffles out of the house a few times a week—to speak at church on Sunday, to perform the odd funeral or wedding—and Donna does everything else: she supervises Grady, manages Sunday School, the church women’s group, the charitable outreach and Bible study. She pays the bills, oversees the Sunday bulletin and refreshments, and all the church correspondence.

She’s good at it, tirelessly checking her lists, making her calls, and running back and forth from the church to the house. She’s come into her own, at last, but I am wilting: stuck with the awful Miss Johnson by day, stuck with the pastor bitching about gratitude at night while he treats me like a servant. I haven’t worked at the diner in nearly two months, and I’m wondering if they’ll even take me back when this ends. If this ends.

In the middle of February, Danny calls to say that Ryan’s aunt has a house in Malibu available for spring break.