Romance · Second chances · Slow burn
The Second Summer
He reads the letter twice, then folds it along the old crease.
A Fernlit original
- Where it starts
- The Avery boathouse, with a sealed envelope you promised to deliver by hand.
- You will meet Jonah
- He runs the boathouse alone now. Few words, a dry joke when something hurts, kind without making a show of it.
Jonah is a fictional character. In the story, a language model writes his replies as you read; they can be wrong or inconsistent, and they are not advice.
How chapter one begins
The boathouse smells exactly the same: cedar shavings, varnish, lake water moving under the boards. It's the smell that nearly turns you round in the doorway, not the man.
He is bent over the hull of a small sailing dinghy, sanding along the grain in long, patient strokes, and he doesn't look up until your shadow crosses the wood. Then he does, and stops, and for a moment neither of you does anything at all.
Jonah Avery. Broader through the shoulders. Lines at the corners of his eyes that weren't there before. The same way of going very still when he's surprised, as if moving might make it worse.
“Hi,” he says. Then, after a while, “I heard about Rosalind. I'm sorry. She bought cherries from Maddie every Saturday and told her they weren't as good as last year's. Every year.”
You hold out the envelope. Your grandmother's handwriting across the front: For Jonah Avery. By hand. It's the only thing she asked of you.
He wipes his palms on his jeans before he takes it. He opens it with his thumb, carefully, the way he always opened anything that mattered, and unfolds a single sheet that has plainly been folded for a long time.
He reads it once. Then again, slower.
Then he folds it along the old crease, and you see the paper properly, and the boathouse floor seems to tilt under you. Blue lines. A coffee ring in one corner. You bought a pad of it at the general store on Main Street, the last week of that August.
“This is your handwriting,” Jonah says. He isn't looking at you. He's looking at the letter as if it might still change its mind. “It's dated the day you left.”
Out on the lake a motor starts, coughs and dies.
“She never sent it,” he says quietly. “Did she.”
Your first choice
Pick one and see how Jonah answers. In the story you can also say anything in your own words.
He laughs, once, the way he does when something hurts.
“I thought you'd gone and not written.”
He runs his thumb along the grain of the workbench, down and back, the way he used to run it along the gunwale of a boat he was deciding about. “Three years I've been not answering a letter I never got.”
He looks at you then, properly, for the first time since you came in.
“Rosalind,” he says, and shakes his head, and you can't tell whether it is a curse or a blessing. “She must have had a reason. She always had a reason.”
From the dock outside, Walt's voice, pitched to carry: “Is that who I think it is?”
“Now?”
The envelope is already open in his hands. He reads it standing, leaning against the bench, and it takes longer than it should, because he reads it twice.
You remember what it says. You wrote it at Rosalind's kitchen table with the lake in the window and your bags by the door.
When he is done he folds it along the old crease, carefully, like something that is going back in a drawer for another three years.
“Okay,” he says. His voice is not steady. “Okay.”
And then, because he is Jonah: “You spelled definitely wrong.”
“Sure.” He says it easily, and folds the letter, and that is worse.
He slides it into his shirt pocket, over the heart, the way you'd put away a receipt. “The cottage will need the water turned on. Valve's under the porch, left side. It sticks.”
He picks up the chisel he put down when you came in.
You are at the door when he says, to the boat and not to you, “Maddie's at the cherry stand till six. She'll want to know you're here.” A pause, and the chisel stops. “So will I.”
Then he starts to whistle, the same song as always, and stops as soon as he hears it.
What you do next is up to you.
Choose from the story’s suggestions or say something to Jonah in your own words. Jonah answers as himself, and every later chapter remembers what you said to him.
Make the first choiceOther ways in
Chapter one can also begin here. Each opening is a different first meeting; the story remembers which one you chose.
Maddie Avery sees you from the cherry stand before you see her, and her face does three things at once.
The dance pavilion is shut for the night, chairs stacked against the rail, but the side door never did lock properly.
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