said.
“No, I want a fish fry down on the beach, just like old times.” Those were some of her very best memories. She’d purposely not thought of them for years. “We’ll invite everyone who loves you.”
“Short list,” Maggie quipped.
“Stop it. You know that’s not true.” Louisa felt suddenly weary, in spite of the adrenaline rush of a new idea.
“I know I’m not going to be able to change your mind,” Maggie said. “But like I said, don’t get your hopes up.”
She shrugged. “Like Ally said, what have you got to lose?”
But even as she uttered the words, she thought of at least ten things that could go wrong. Knowing she was the reason for all of them made her stomach somersault like an Olympic gymnast with a killer floor routine, and that left her feeling woozy.
CHAPTER FOUR
JULY 30, TWELVE YEARS EARLIER
Louisa didn’t remember a birthday without Cody. In fact, she was fairly certain she’d never had one. But this one felt different. They were eighteen. They were legal adults. They could get married if they wanted to.
They didn’t, of course, because that would be ridiculous, and Louisa was headed to Boston University that fall on a substantial academic scholarship, whereas Cody still hadn’t decided what he was going to do now that high school was over.
Maybe to the rest of the world, they were mismatched, but now, finally alone together after a day at the beach, Louisa looked at him, and she couldn’t imagine spending a single day without him.
“What are you thinking about?” he asked her, his voice quiet.
She was rarely quiet, so when she was, he noticed. She forced herself to smile, in spite of the fact that she left for school in two weeks and her head had turned into a pile of mush. What-if questions raced through her mind, accompanied by the overwhelming need to cling to him, to protect what they had.
“You and me,” she finally said.
“How great we are together?” His words nearly stole her breath away.
How would she survive without this—without him? How would she concentrate on school when her mind and heart were so wholly rooted wherever he happened to be?
He frowned. “What’s wrong?”
A tear escaped, and she instantly wiped it away.
He wrapped an arm around her. He didn’t need to ask her why she was crying. He knew. It was as if a shadow had followed them around all summer, and now here they were, nearing the end—it was all too real.
“I don’t want to hold you back, Lou,” he said. “You’re going to meet a lot of people out there.”
She pulled away. “What are you talking about?”
“Don’t freak out—I’m just saying. I don’t want you sitting in your dorm room thinking about me instead of making new friends and going out and having fun.”
She relaxed a little. “But I want you sitting in a room thinking about me.”
He laughed. “Louisa, we’re always going to have this—us, Nantucket. We’re always going to share a birthday and have endless stories of growing up together. And I hope we make it—I really do.”
“But?”
“But I don’t want to stand in your way. You’ve got huge plans, and I don’t even know where I’ll be in two weeks.”
She did have big plans. At the moment, she hated that she did. She’d always respected the fact that Cody wasn’t in a hurry to figure things out. When he told her he’d be taking a gap year, she hardly even protested—she didn’t want him to think she didn’t approve. She was his girlfriend, after all, not his mom.
But secretly it bothered her. Didn’t he have any ambition? Wasn’t there something he was passionate about? Was this going to be the thing that finally broke them up?
“What if next summer we come here and everything is different?” she asked after a pensive pause.
He turned toward her and took her hands. “We’ll figure it out. And we’ve still got a couple of weeks, right?”
She nodded, sniffed, and wiped another tear all at the same time.
“How about this.” He opened the picnic basket they’d brought to the beach and took out an unused napkin. “Do you have a pen?”
She reached in her purse and found a pen, then handed it to him, watching closely as he scribbled on the uncooperative napkin.
“What are you doing?”
He shushed her gently and went back to writing. “I have a proposal for you,” he finally said.
“Cody.”
“Not that kind of proposal.” He handed her the napkin, and she read his words to herself.
We, Cody Boggs and