Chapter One: A History Written in Grass Stains
Elizabeth
The air smelled like summer endings and second chances.
Oak’s truck rumbled to a stop beside the curb, the engine ticking in the quiet between us. I could feel his gaze on me, even though he hadn’t spoken in the last five minutes. We sat there, outside my parents’ house, the same one with the peeling green shutters and the mailbox we’d spray-painted when we were fourteen because I’d decided it needed “personality.”
Oak had helped. He always helped, back then.
Now, silence wrapped tight between us. Not angry, not tense and just too full of things neither of us wanted to say.
“I can take your bag in,” he finally offered, his voice low, familiar. Steady. Too steady, maybe.
“I’ve got it,” I said. My fingers clutched the strap, knuckles pale. I didn’t move.
We’d just gotten back from our last trip of the summer. A two-day escape before reality pressed its weight back down on us. Before job interviews and adult things we weren’t quite sure how to navigate. Before the soft space between “us” began to feel like it was full of landmines.
His hand brushed the back of his neck, a nervous habit he probably didn’t realize he still had. The motion tugged his T-shirt up slightly, revealing a slice of his lower back. Tanned, broad, familiar. I looked away.
“Thanks for driving,” I said. It felt stupid the moment it left my mouth. We always drove together. He was the one with the truck.
“Yeah,” he replied, voice unreadable. “Anytime.”
The keys jingled as I slid out and shut the door gently behind me. Oak stayed in the driver’s seat, watching. I didn’t look back until I reached the porch.
That’s when I heard it - his voice, soft, like he hadn’t meant to say it out loud.
“Still feels like home when you smile at me like that.”
I froze, one foot on the first step. Then I opened the door, walked inside, and closed it quietly behind me.
It didn’t always feel like this.
It used to feel like flying.
Age 6
I met Oak Montgomery when I was six years old and wearing my favorite dinosaur overalls. I had two missing teeth and a habit of making declarations I had no intention of backing up. That day, I declared I would find a best friend within the hour. Preferably one with a trampoline.
I didn’t find a trampoline, but I found Oak.
We’d just moved into the house next door, and while my parents were arguing over whether the couch fit the “flow of the room,” I wandered into the backyard. The chain-link fence that separated our house from the Montgomerys’ had a wide enough gap to squeeze through if you were small and determined, which I was.
There they were. Two boys, one ball.
The wilder one was laughing, shirtless, already sticky with summer. But it was the quieter one, with dark hair and serious eyes who caught my attention. He held the ball like it was important. Reverent.
“I want to play,” I announced, stepping onto their lawn like it belonged to me.
The wild twin - Alex, I’d learn later - snorted. “You’re not from here.”
“You’re not my mom,” I countered. “Let me play.”
It was Oak who tossed me the ball.
That was it. That was the beginning.
Age 10
“You’re gonna get married, you know,” Alex teased as we sprinted toward the ice cream truck.
Oak didn’t say anything, but he didn’t deny it either. He was focused on getting there before the line formed, always a man with a goal.
He bought me a Rocket Pop and handed it over without meeting my eyes.
“You owe me,” he said.
“For a popsicle?”
“For a memory,” he replied. And I swear to God, my heart skipped like a scratched CD.
Skylar was with us that summer, my cousin, her dad recently passed and her mom trying to put her life back together. Sky was quiet then, quieter than she’d ever be again. But she watched Oak and me the way someone watches the start of a storm-not scared, but waiting.
“You two are like magnets,” she said once, laying upside down on my bed, her diary balanced on her knees.
I didn’t know what that meant at ten. I just liked how it sounded.
Age 14
The dance was stupid.
Decorations that looked like rejected birthday streamers, punch that tasted like sugar water, boys who smelled like Axe and insecurity.
But when Oak walked in wearing that navy-blue shirt and a shy kind of confidence that made my stomach tumble, I forgot to breathe.
He didn’t ask me in front of anyone. He handed me a folded note by my locker that said:
Dance with me tonight, Liz?
It was the only paper I ever kept taped to my mirror.
We danced slow, too slow for how fast my heart was going. At the end of the night, he kissed me behind the bleachers. Soft, uncertain, a little awkward.
Still the best first kiss I could’ve asked for.
Age 18
Oak built me a bench.
I don’t know what kind of teenage boy builds a bench for his girlfriend, but he did. Hands callused from early shop classes, a mind full of blueprints and angles. He carved our initials into the corner and added a line:
Where Liz lives in the world, so do I.
We sat there for hours the day he gave it to me, watching the sun dip behind the trees. He had photos in a shoebox-old ones from school dances, amusement park trips, that awful family picnic where I got stung by a wasp and he nearly tackled a bush trying to save me.
He held one up. We were ten, grinning, ice cream, sticky and sunburned.
“You always smiled like you knew a secret,” he said.
“I do.”
He leaned in and kissed me. Not like fourteen year-old Oak. Like someone who meant it.
That night, in the back of his truck under a blanket of stars, he told me:
“One day, when I can afford to build us a house, I’m putting a damn ring on your finger. You hear me?”
I heard him.
And I believed every word.
Present
The thing about growing up with someone is that you forget where you end and they begin.
Until something cracks.
Until you look in the mirror and see yourself... and wonder if they ever saw you at all.
Authors note
Thank you for reading my book :) I hope you enjoy!
