The Summer I Saved You (The Summer #2)(74)

CALEB

We need to talk.



I glance up at the stage to find him watching me again. It’s the text he might send before telling me we can’t keep working together. What it definitely is not is the text he’d send if he wanted to work things out.

My fingers hover over the screen, but instead of replying, I lock the phone and slip out of the room to go get the twins. Today is hard enough without hearing Caleb deliver the final blow.

I get home and pull up beside Molly’s BMW, my gaze on Caleb’s house instead of my own. There’s a car in the driveway. I can’t imagine Caleb having visitors, given the current state of his home and the fact that he’s about to leave for Maui.

We need to talk, he’d said. Was it about this? This mysterious visitor he was worried I might run into?

When I get inside, the twins are still not in their uniforms and Molly’s got way more makeup on her face than normal.

I send Henry and Sophie upstairs to change and turn to Molly. “Have you looked in the mirror, hon?”

Her eyes widen. “No. Is it that bad?”

I hitch a shoulder. “That depends on your taste. You’ve got a circle of lipstick on each cheek, however.”

She rubs at her cheek and stares in dismay at the lipstick on her fingertips. “Fucking kids,” she says. “Are you in a rush? I need to fix this.”

“No, we’ve got plenty of time. There’s makeup remover in my medicine cabinet.”

She heads upstairs, and I wander, as always, to the back window where I’ve spent my entire life hoping to find Caleb on the dock, though I know he won’t be there today.

Someone is there, however—a woman, stretched out and basking in the sun. She’s long and lean, her red hair fanned out around her.

Kate.

Kate is here.

I don’t realize I’m walking toward her until the door closes behind me.

The noise rouses her, and she pushes up on her forearms, watching me approach. Kate, in person, is a thousand times more beautiful than any picture of her led me to believe. Even the way she assesses me is cool, sultry—the way a girl in a rock video might, as if she’s never experienced a moment of self-doubt, as if she already knows she’s won.

I reach the dock and I still have no excuse for why I’m down here.

“Hi,” she says. Her voice is a purr, slightly smoky. A bedroom voice. I do not have a bedroom voice—I sound like I’m six when I’m excited about something—and it’s a minor thing, but it speaks to the infinite differences between us. That I’m someone who’d rather stay in and bake cookies than go out to a bar, while this girl probably shoots straight whiskey, doesn’t blink twice at threesomes, and is game for things I don’t even know exist—things she probably did with Caleb.

Standing five feet away from her, it’s hard to imagine how he wouldn’t choose her over me. And it sort of seems as if that’s exactly what he’s already done.

“Hi.” I want to retreat without explaining myself. Say sorry, wrong dock, and make a run for it. “I’m Lucie. I, uh, live next door.”

There’s a hint of sympathy in her gaze. She’s clearly accustomed to women with a crush on her husband. “I’m Kate. Caleb’s wife.”

His wife. Not his ex-wife. And she certainly doesn’t give any impression that this is merely a visit.

I blink, thinking of his face as I sat at that meeting today. His serious, worried face. He couldn’t take me on a business trip to Maui, but I bet he could take a brilliant, beautiful MBA.

We need to talk, he said.

Oh, God. Was it this? Of course it was this.

I was so certain he was mine when I was small, and I assumed, because the feeling never went away, that it meant something. That I was meant to save him and he would save me at the same time.

But no one is going to save me.

And Caleb never wanted that from me in the first place. He just wanted his wife to return, and now she has.





38



CALEB


My chest aches when I reach my desk. I have a thousand things to do before I go home to pack, and I don’t give a shit about a single one of them.

This was supposed to be the most important weekend of my life, but it’ll be entirely meaningless without Lucie there at the end—without her laugh, her smell, that soft skin at the base of her wrist, the arch of her foot, and her head resting on my chest. It’s meaningless without the kids too. Without Henry’s slow smiles, without Sophie’s crazy vocabulary and sentences spoken in code.

I miss all of those things and I’ve been missing them, but it wasn’t until I saw her in the auditorium this morning that I wondered how I’d survive without getting them back.

Beck calls and I answer reluctantly. He’s probably going to yell at me again. At least now we’re on the same page.

“You gonna see Lucie before you leave town?” he asks.

I sigh. “I told her we needed to talk at the meeting today, but she didn’t wait.”

His laugh is short and unhappy. “Let me guess. You said you needed to talk without ever suggesting you were sorry, but you’re shocked that she wasn’t waiting with bated breath to hear from you.”

His words grate. In part because he’s being an asshole and in part because he’s right. I didn’t apologize. I didn’t tell her I haven’t been able to eat or sleep or function since I saw her last. That I forgot my laptop as I walked through airport security and then tried to board the wrong plane because I’m so out of it. That when I got home, I stayed awake for hours, staring at her house and trying to figure out how to fix this.