“We’ll figure it out,” I said.
And for the first time, I believed him—not because it was easy, but because we had finally stopped pretending that a thing worth having could be kept in a box marked July Only .
Ten summers ago, we were nineteen and stupid, lying on this same dock with our ankles in the water. He’d said, What if we never tried to make this anything? What if we just… came back here? And I’d said, That’s the dumbest smart thing I’ve ever heard. And we’d shaken on it, like children sealing a pact with bloody thumbs.
The plums fell that week. The first storm came. And I stayed.
“We’ll always have summer,” he said.
We never said I love you . We said See you in June. We never fought about the future. We fought about who finished the good coffee, who left the screen door unlatched, whether the tide was high enough for swimming. We kept it small. We kept it safe.