The Summer I Saved You, page 1
THE SUMMER I
SAVED YOU
ELIZABETH O’ROARK
PIATKUS
First published in Great Britain in 2023 by Piatkus
Copyright © 2023 by Elizabeth O’Roark
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
A CIP catalogue record for this book
is available from the British Library.
ISBN: 978-0-349-44070-5
Piatkus
An imprint of
Little, Brown Book Group
Carmelite House
50 Victoria Embankment
London EC4Y 0DZ
An Hachette UK Company
www.hachette.co.uk
www.littlebrown.co.uk
CONTENTS
Prologue - Lucie, 2002
1 Lucie
2 Caleb
3 Lucie
4 Caleb
5 Lucie
6 Caleb
7 Lucie
8 Caleb
9 Lucie
10 Lucie
11 Caleb
12 Lucie
13 Lucie
14 Caleb
15 Lucie
16 Caleb
17 Lucie
18 Lucie
19 Caleb
20 Lucie
21 Lucie
22 Lucie
23 Caleb
24 Lucie
25 Lucie
26 Caleb
27 Lucie
28 Lucie
29 Lucie
30 Lucie
31 Lucie
32 Caleb
33 Lucie
34 Caleb
35 Lucie
36 Caleb
37 Lucie
38 Caleb
39 Lucie
40 Lucie
Epilogue - Caleb
The Summer of buried things - Coming January 2024
Acknowledgments
Also by Elizabeth O’roark
About the Author
PROLOGUE
LUCIE, 2002
My great-aunt wasn’t happy.
I’d only met her once before, this woman who’d raised my father, but as she waited on her front porch, watching me tug a beat-up suitcase behind me, she looked no more impressed than she had the first time.
I wasn’t all that happy either. I’d seen my father before, in magazines and on TV, sitting on a yacht with other famous tech guys or showing off his mansion—his model wife and kids beside him. I’d had high hopes for his aunt Ruth’s lakeside cottage, but her house was barely any better than ours. And Elliott Springs, which sounded like the name of a resort to me, had turned out to be a crappy town far to the south of San Francisco. There weren’t even stoplights.
“Didn’t even shut the engine off,” Ruth muttered as my mother drove away. “Work emergency, my ass.”
My mom doesn’t even have a job. She’s going to Disney with her boyfriend. Somehow, I held the words in. It helped that my mother had promised to take me with them next year if I kept it to myself.
My aunt sighed, grabbing my suitcase. “Well, come on, then,” she said, walking into the house and leading me up a flight of stairs, explaining things I already knew: that it would be very dull here for a six-year-old, that I’d need to stay inside.
“No one can know you’re here,” she warned. “Having a kid around is not what I need right now.”
I nodded. I was used to both things—keeping secrets and not being wanted. My father had refused to ever meet me. My mother’s boyfriends complained about me all the time, and when they weren’t complaining, my mother was. It was a bruise I’d become so used to I barely noticed when it got poked.
Ruth led me into a room that faced the neighbor’s house, but I could see the lake to the left, with a dock jutting out onto it and a bunch of boys who looked a few years older than me standing on its edge. I walked to the window, drawn to them, barely listening as Ruth told me she had to get back to work.
They were flipping into the water, one after the other, howling and yelling and so…free. They were all tan and happy and handsome, but for some reason my gaze landed on just one of them and refused to stray.
The sight of him called to me. As if he was saying, “Lucie, find me, you belong here,” though he had no clue I existed.
I decided to watch him carefully, whenever I could. If he was drowning, I’d go save him, like Ariel saved Prince Eric.
I was weirdly certain that one day he’d need me to do it.
1
LUCIE
2023
There are logical things to think about when you call your husband to tell him your marriage is over, but the boy next door—a boy you haven’t even seen in thirteen years—is not among them.
I could blame it on the fact that I’m back in Elliott Springs… that I’m at the lake and standing on the same dock where Caleb once executed perfect flips and dives. But that would imply I ever stopped thinking about him in the first place, which I did not. Not entirely.
“How exactly do you think you’re going to leave me?” Jeremy asks. “Your only skill is being hot, and you’ve barely got that anymore.”
It’s telling that he hasn’t mentioned our twins—asleep in the house just past my shoulder—once during this conversation. He’s been too focused on his outrage—first that I’d dare to accuse him of cheating, then that I actually had proof and was doing something about it.
“No smart comeback?” Jeremy asks. “Oh, wait. You’d need to be smart in the first place for that.”
I look over my shoulder at Caleb’s old house looming dark and lifeless behind me. It sold years ago, so I’ll never get to see who he grew into—if he became a man who cheats on his wife and then blames her. If he tells the mother of his children that her only skill is being hot. I can’t imagine he does, but I bet he didn’t marry someone like me. Someone who stands here listening to it.
I hit the button to end the call and drop the phone in the pocket of my robe. Jeremy will make me pay for that—hanging up on him—but I feel like a different person here. The girl I used to be, with different fears and different desires.
I’d just wanted one person to want me, back then. Perhaps I latched onto the idea of Caleb simply because he was my opposite, surrounded by people who adored him…but it felt like more. I’d been a dirty secret my entire life, yet I was certain it would change—that I’d eventually be down here by his side, jumping off the dock, trying to balance on an inner tube.
And now I’m back, over two decades later, and I’ve still never jumped in the lake. In some ways, this is the first time in my life I’ve actually been free.
So jump, says a voice in my head. A crazy, illogical voice. I’m a grown woman with two children asleep inside. I don’t even have a towel. But already I’m shedding my robe.
I bend my knees and spring off the balls of my feet.
This will be my clean break, my fresh start, and—
Fuck, fuck, fuck.
I’m gasping as I reach the water’s surface, flailing in my frantic attempt to get to the ladder.
The water is so fucking cold, and if I’d hoped this would help, would prove to be transcendent, I could not have been more wrong. I’m an idiot who somehow forgot a lake in northern California would be cold in late March, and there’s nothing transcendent about that at all.
I scramble up the ladder in panties and a camisole that are soaking wet, wishing I’d at least considered bringing a towel for this fresh start of mine. I blot my eyes with my robe, but as I straighten to wrap it around myself…there’s movement.
Someone or some thing is standing behind the kitchen window inside Caleb’s abandoned house.
I could have imagined it, but no. There it is again, shifting shadows behind the glass doors. And whatever it is just watched me climbing semi-nude from the lake.
My new beginning was already off to a rough start. Now it’s the opening scene of a horror movie.
JEREMY
Don’t know who the hell will hire you. Turning on the TV and putting chicken nuggets in the oven seem to be your only talents.
HE’S DELIVERED a near-constant stream of insults since Saturday night. You’d think he’d be too busy sleeping with our teenage babysitter to find the time, but he’s good at multitasking.
Unlike Jeremy, I don’t have the luxury of crafting pointlessly cruel texts. I had two kindergartners to get to school one town over, before hustling fifteen minutes down the highway to Technology Solutions Group, my new employer.
The massive brick building a bit north of Santa Cruz looks a lot more impersonal than it did when I came for my interview, but I doubt I looked at it all that carefully. Back then, I was more worried about Jeremy finding out I was job hunting than anything else.
Wiping damp hands on my pencil skirt, I walk to the front doors and head into the lobby, where a receptionist actively ignores me until she’s done taking pictures of her
“Hi—I’m Lucie Monroe, the new hire. I was told to ask for Mark Spencer?” She stares at me as if I’m still speaking, still boring her, and hits a button. “Mark, someone’s here to see you.” She returns to photographing her coffee without missing a beat.
I’ve been hired to improve morale—a job I convinced myself I was perfectly suited for, because if you spend your days trying to persuade young children to bathe, eat vegetables and go to bed, you’ve got more experience enhancing morale than anyone alive.
If this girl is a typical TSG employee, it may be more of an uphill battle than I anticipated.
“Lucie, welcome,” Mark says, walking toward me. “Looks like you’ve met Kayleigh already. Let’s find you an office.”
He turns down the hall opposite the one he came from, and I follow.
“I know you’ve just arrived,” he says as we walk, “but the board is excited to hear your ideas and we happen to have a meeting tomorrow. I’d love it if you could swing by and tell them where you’ll be starting.”
My nod of agreement is weak. I came in for my interview spouting research about employee programs I’d found online, but that hardly means I’m ready to present a plan to the board.
He comes to a stop in a large room full of empty, silent cubicles. “You’ve obviously got your pick of offices.” He winces as he laughs at his own joke. “With all the staff turnover, we consolidated most of the teams and put them on the next few floors.”
“Turnover?” I repeat.
He shrugs. “I think I mentioned in the interview that a number of our employees have gone to competitors. Everyone wants to work from home since the pandemic, and the CEO is avidly against it. That’s where you come in…We’re hoping you can stem the tide.”
Mark never mentioned even once that they were losing employees. He said, ‘We want to be a place where people love their jobs,’ which is pretty different, and the insanity of what I’ve done is becoming clearer by the second.
He gestures to the nearest cubicle, and I step inside. My first office. It’s three felt walls—probably an eighth the size of the offices my half-siblings have, working for my father—but it’s mine.
Mark follows, perching on the edge of the desk. “Look, this isn’t the greatest way to kick off your first day, but I feel like I need to level with you. The CEO’s been out of town and he was never a fan of creating this position in the first place. But I only became aware this morning of how strongly he was opposed to it.”
Oh, God. Oh, God. Oh, God.
I put three grand into a new checking account before I left, but it won’t last long, and then what? Jeremy said I’d be crawling back in a week. Maybe he was right.
I sink into a chair. “So he could just…cancel this whole thing?”
Mark’s gaze flickers to mine and away. “Well, as you know… the initial contract is only for three months. I suppose if it doesn’t go well, he could conceivably decide to eliminate the position. But it won’t come to that. Why don’t we go say hi? I’m certain he’ll change his mind once you talk to him.”
I’m not certain about that at all, especially if he decides to look carefully at how much of my resume involves volunteer positions at the twins’ old preschool and realizes this is my first real job. But Mark’s already rising, already leading me back past the unfriendly receptionist and on to his boss. There was no mention of the CEO on the website, but it’s easy to imagine the sort of miserable old man who awaits us, a guy who doesn’t want to spend a dime on his employees but probably flies by private plane.
I follow Mark inside an office ten times the size of my cubicle…and stare, open-jawed, at the man sitting behind the desk.
He is, in no way, a miserable old man.
It’s Caleb, all grown up. He was in college the last time I saw him, but I’d know his face anywhere. It featured prominently in every innocent and not so innocent fantasy I had through adolescence, after all, and it’s twenty times more handsome now—all hard angles and soft mouth, a jaw in need of a shave.
I have kids to support and more shit to manage than I can possibly handle well, but something stirs to life in my chest anyway—tiny, baby butterflies whispering that perhaps this is fate. Because how else do I explain the fact that my childhood crush has reappeared in my life just as I’ve become single?
He tugs at his tie, scowling at me. “I really hope this is a joke.”
2
CALEB
The girl I watched prancing around my backyard all fucking weekend is in my office, and my buddy Liam’s got to be the one behind it.
He saw her outside yesterday afternoon babysitting someone’s kids and didn’t stop talking about her rack for a minute. I’m not sure how he convinced her to walk in here in a skirt pretending she’s the new hire, but I’m not amused.
I wait for the two of them to start laughing, for Liam to pop out from around the corner to slap Mark on the back.
“Caleb—” Mark’s voice is wary, uncertain, and if he’s acting, he’s better at it than I thought. “This is Lucie Monroe, our new director of employee programs. Lucie, Caleb Lowell, our…” He looks at each of us in turn. “Do you…know each other?”
It’s not until he says Lucie that something clicks.
It can’t be.
There was a kid named Lucie who stayed next door at the lake occasionally when I was a teen. Big, gray-green eyes, talking a million miles a minute when she got the chance. It can’t possibly be the same girl, can it?
I study her more carefully. Everything about her has changed, but not those eyes, the color of a stormy sea.
“We used to be neighbors,” she whispers to Mark. Her voice is nearly mute with surprise, which makes neighbors sound like a euphemism for something much, much worse: an ex or someone she took a restraining order against.
Holy shit. It is her, and I don’t know who I want to punch more—Liam, for what he said aloud, or myself, for silently agreeing with some of it.
Mark’s mouth falls open. “Neighbors? Where?”
“It was ages ago,” she replies, biting her lip.
“We’re still neighbors,” I correct, and she winces. Maybe she’s wondering if I saw her swimming in her fucking underwear on Saturday night.
Yeah, Lucie, I definitely saw. You grew up. Jesus, did you grow up. And I need to know why I suddenly can’t seem to get away from you.
She appears to be surprised to find me here, and I guess it’s possible—I’ve had my name scrubbed off everything online—but there’s too much overlap for this to all be a coincidence.
I glance at Mark. “Can you give us a minute?”
My tone is more a demand than a request, yet Mark hesitates, shooting me a look that asks what the hell is happening before he complies.
The door shuts, and Lucie slides into the chair on the other side of the desk. Her hair is lighter than it used to be, still dark but shot through with streaks of honey and caramel, perhaps because she’s finally allowed to go outside during the summer. Robert Underwood’s illegitimate child. I guess it’s still a secret since I’ve never heard anything about it, and he’s famous enough in my field that I would have. I’d have hoped she made the bastard pay for her silence, if nothing else, but she’s working here...so probably not.
“This is a surprise,” I begin. I clear my throat. “I didn’t even realize it was you until I heard your name. It’s been, what, fifteen years?”
“Thirteen,” she says, blushing. She blushed a lot as a kid, but it hits different now. I want to punch myself in the face again. “I thought you’d sold the house.”
“I bought it back last month. I had a place down in Santa Cruz but I needed a change of pace. I guess Miss Underwood left you her cabin?”
She nods, her eyes fixed on her lap. “I haven’t really come out much, but I’m going through a divorce, so we needed a place to stay. I’ve got twins. They turned six last week.”
“Twins? You don’t even look old enough to be married.”
She laughs. “Caleb, I’m only four years younger than you. I’m definitely old enough to be married. So are you.”
“I am married,” I reply. I’m not sure why I say it. Reflex, perhaps. Or maybe I simply sense a threat here in Lucie with her curves and her big eyes and her lip-biting.
