For a long second, he just sat there, hands on the wheel, listening to the tick of the cooling engine and the faint sounds drifting up from the water.
Then muscle memory took over.
He reached for his camera, stepped out of the car, and turned back toward the Hideaway.
The building golden against the deepening sky, windows warm, string lights casting soft halos over the picnic tables. Someone laughed on the patio. A figure moved in the doorway—just a blur from this distance, more suggestion than detail—but the tilt of the shoulders, the way she leaned against the frame, made his chest squeeze.
He lifted the camera and framed the shot. Not just the building. Not just the lights. But all of it. He didn’t want to forget a single second of any of it, or most importantly, the woman who made this place feel like the only home he’d ever had.
THIRTY-NINE
KRISTA
Thursday, Two Weeks Later
It had been two weeks since Joe left Maple Falls.
Staying busy wasn’t hard. Krista never lacked work between the campground and the Hideaway, especially now that late summer had settled in and more than one offer had rolled in.
She was still negotiating the sale and feeling broken-hearted while regulars checked in at the campground with their RVs and tents; cousins arrived for family reunions; someone was always grilling or organizing a fishing tournament on the lake. On paper, the place was as full as ever. But to Krista, it felt empty.
She told herself that the busier she stayed, the less room there would be for thoughts of Joe. That was the theory, anyway.
In reality, he had a way of slipping into everything from the way she paused in the morning to watch the sunrise, to the way she studied the afternoon light, the way it framed the shops and the couples as they sat on the deck surrounding the Hideaway, sipping their coffees, looking like a picture of summer perfection.She snapped a photo in her mind, filing it into the album titledThe Summer I’ll Never Forget.
Robyn’s presence helped. Her sister split her time between her grandparents’ cabin and the little Maple Falls bookshop she’d all but moved into, helping Alice with her exercises, medication reminders, and the kind of light housework Krista never quite got to.
As much as Krista was still annoyed that Robyn had told their parents about selling the Hideaway, she understood why she’d done it. Robyn worried too. This was just how it came out.
The days flew by. The nights stretched.
When the Hideaway was finally closed down for the night, Krista was too wound up to go home. So she sat around the fire, surrounded by the flickering flames, tucked into a soft wool throw, and looked to Isabel for answers.
The diary’s leather cover was soft now from weeks of handling. Tonight she flipped past the familiar pages, past the early entries about bees and lake water and a boy named Jonah, to find out what happened next.
Krista smoothed her thumb over the margin and drew in a slow breath.
“Okay, Isabel,” she murmured. “Why did you cut your time in the cave short?”
Then she started to translate.
She worked through it slowly, pencil scratching on a scrap piece of paper.
As she read, Krista could almost see the cave, lit by a small fire; Isabel curled into a man she’d risked everything for.
The next entry jumped forward; the date at the top was smudged.
Krista swallowed, translating under her breath.
“Today, my sister, who alone knows our secret and has been bringing us food and water, came at dawn, crying. Saying Mamais truly ill this time. Fever, cough, the doctor whispering in the sitting room.”
The next paragraph was shorter. The ink here pressed deeper into the page.
“Jonah said my mother had always been strong,” she murmured, translating as she went. “He asked me to stay with him. ‘We can go farther,’ he said. ‘Somewhere your last name doesn’t matter more than mine.’”
Krista didn’t need Isabel to spell it out: Jonah wasn’t from a family her parents approved of. A worker? An outsider? Maybe both.
A small blot of ink stained the next line, like a teardrop.
