Chapter 1
The lake house came into view through the trees and she thought: this was the mistake part.
Same faded porch. Same swing, still hanging crooked from when Nora broke it off jumping too fast. She parked but didn’t get out right away. She sat behind the wheel and let herself have exactly one moment of feeling sorry for herself.
She turned off the ignition and stepped out onto the gravel.
Three years and the house hadn’t forgotten anything. Not the dock. Not the fireplace. Not the spot Theo used to stand, waving at her and smiling from afar. Twenty-six years old and so certain of them that certainty had practically been a personality trait.
Pine and lake water. Unchanged. The familiar air filled her lungs like an old argument she hadn’t resolved.
She stood there a second longer than necessary, feeling fifteen different ages at once, and then made herself walk up the porch steps like a functioning adult who had agreed to this weekend of her own free will, which, technically, she had. Nobody had held a gun to her head. Bunny had just cried on the phone about wanting “one more real summer with all my girls together,” and Josie had never once in her life successfully said no to her grandmother crying.
The screen door was propped open with the same brick it had been propped open with for the last thirty years. Josie stepped inside, already bracing for the smell of Bunny’s cooking, the too-loud radio, the general sensory assault of a house that had never once in its history been described as “calm.”
What she wasn’t braced for was the guest list.
It was taped to the fridge, in Bunny’s determined all-caps handwriting, exactly where the grocery list usually went, as if seating charts and produce had equal claim to refrigerator real estate. Josie scanned it out of habit — Aunt Deb, the twins, Uncle Marcus and whichever girlfriend he was currently pretending was serious — and then her eyes snagged on a name near the bottom and would not move.
Theo
Just that. First name only. Like he was still family, like three years ago and one public wedding that never happened at all.
Josie read it repeatedly like it would change.
Her phone buzzed in her pocket. A text from her mother, sent with the casual devastation of someone who had absolutely no idea what she was about to detonate:
**Mom:** He’s already on his way, by the way. Should be there before dinner. Play nice, sweetheart. Bunny’s very excited about “everyone” being together.🩷
Josie stood very still in the kitchen doorway, listening to the screen door bang shut behind her in the breeze, and thought, with the specific clarity of a woman recalculating an entire weekend in real time:
Right . This is exactly why I stayed away.
