PROLOGUE
My mom always said, there are two kinds of love in this world: the steady breeze, and the hurricane.
The steady breeze is slow and patient. It fills the sails of the boats in the harbor, and lifts laundry on the line. It cools you on a hot summer’s day; brings the leaves of fall, like clockwork every year. You can count on a breeze, steady and sure and true.
But there’s nothing steady about a hurricane. It rips through town, reckless, sending the ocean foaming up the shore, felling trees and power lines and anyone dumb or f**ked-up enough to stand in its path. Sure, it’s a thrill like nothing you’ve ever known: your pulse kicks, your body calls to it, like a spirit possessed. It’s wild and breathless and all-consuming.
But what comes next?
“You see a hurricane coming, you run.” My mom told me, the summer I turned eighteen. “You shut the doors, and you bar the windows. Because come morning, there’ll be nothing but the wreckage left behind.”
Emerson Ray was my hurricane.
Looking back, I wonder if mom saw it in my eyes: the storm clouds gathering, the dry crackle of electricity in the air. But it was already too late. No warning sirens were going to save me. I guess you never really know the danger, not until you’re the one left, huddled on the ground, surrounded by the pieces of your broken heart.
It’s been four years now since that summer. Since Emerson. It took everything I had to pull myself back together, to crawl out of the empty wreckage of my life and build something new in its place. This time, I made it storm-proof. Strong. I barred shutters over my heart, and found myself a steady breeze to love. I swore, nothing would ever destroy me like that summer again.
I was wrong.
That’s the thing about hurricanes. Once the storm touches down, all you can do is pray.
CHAPTER ONE
I’m doing eighty on the highway with all the windows down, my dirty blonde hair whipping like crazy in the wind. I’ve got my Ray-Ban sunglasses on, and the radio playing country classics as loud as my beat-up old Camaro will go, trying to drown out the whispers of memory that started, the minute I took the freeway exit onto the familiar coastal road.
45 miles to Cedar Cove.
45 miles to Emerson.
I shake it off. We were coming here for years before I met him, I remind myself sternly. Every summer when I was a kid. Months filled with playing in the surf and reading out on our shady back porch. I should have other, better memories of this place without him.
But you haven’t been back here since.
I block out the treacherous voice in my head, yelling along with the radio instead.
“Gone like a freight train, gone like yesterday…”
The song is right, I decide. It’s gone. That summer is so far behind me, I couldn’t see it in my rearview mirror if I tried. I’m a different person to the screwed-up, headstrong girl I was the last time I drove down this sandy road. I’m twenty-two now, just a month away from graduating college and starting out a whole new life. I’ve got a perfect boyfriend back in the city, and a great career all lined up. Despite everything that happened here that summer, I made it out—made myself into the person I wanted to be—and even though coming back to Cedar Cove makes me feel sick and dizzy, like I’m about to jump out of a plane in total freefall, this weekend won’t change any of that.
It can’t.
Besides, I tell myself, trying to calm the shiver of nerves in my stomach, I don’t even know if he’s still here. I don’t know anything about Emerson anymore. My idle midnight searches online always come up blank. He could be half-way around the world by now, trekking in the African jungle, or knocking back beers on some beach in Australia with a tall, stacked bikini model at his side.
Tucked under his arm, the place I used to be…
I crank the radio even louder, the country twang ringing so hard I don’t even hear my cellphone, I just see the screen light up from where I tucked it in the cup-holder on my dashboard. Lacey. My best friend. I answer, struggling to turn the volume down and keep a hand on the steering wheel. I know I shouldn’t talk and drive, but way out of the city out here, I won’t see a cop for miles.
“Hey Lacey, what’s up?”
“Are you there yet?” She demands.
“Close.” I check the clock again, “About a half-hour away.”
“I still can’t believe Danny boy didn’t go with you.” There’s a muffled noise as she gets comfy, and when she speaks again. I can just picture her, curled up in our student apartment in Charlotte, looking out of the window over the bustle of downtown. “Isn’t this the kind of thing future fiancés are legally obligated to do?” she asks, “Packing up the summer house you haven’t stepped foot in since… Well, you know.” she trails off.
The silence sits in the air between us, heavy with grief. Emerson isn’t the only ghost lurking in this town. The pain he caused me was only half my broken heart.
I gulp a lungful of fresh, salty air and force the demons out of my mind. “First of all, we don’t know he’s planning to propose.” I shift the phone to a more comfortable position under my ear.
“Please.” Lacey snorts. “His parents love you, you’re moving in together after graduation, and he’s been dropping not-so-subtle hints about your taste in jewelry for months now.”
“You didn’t tell me that!” My stomach kicks, but this time, it’s with a whole different kind of nerves.