Salt and Vinegar Summers

The gravel crunched beneath her tires as the car rolled to a stop beneath the familiar canopy of pine. The air smelled of sap and sun-warmed wood, with just a trace of last night's rain lingering in the ferns. Sylvie sat for a moment with the engine off, her fingers curled loosely around the wheel. The silence settled around her like a held breath.

The cabin hadn't changed. The porch still sagged slightly to the left, leaning into the weight of its years. The screen door hung stubbornly on one good hinge, ready to moan when she opened it. A wind chime rattled softly, the sound too sharp against the hush that pressed in all around her.

Across the narrow inlet, the Reyes cabin stood still and untouched. No towels flung over the railing to dry. No guitar resting on the porch swing. No orange flicker of a citronella candle burning against dusk mosquitoes. The dock was bare. Even the welcome mat looked like it hadn't been stepped on in months. Maybe she was just late.

Sylvie opened the trunk and pulled out her bag, her books, and the blanket Juniper always stole for morning coffee on the steps. And the chips: salt and vinegar, the kind that made her tongue sting. She carried them all inside.

The cabin welcomed her with its usual creaks and sighs. She set the chips down on the kitchen table and didn't open them. Outside, the lake was glass. Completely still, waiting.

She told herself Juniper might show up tomorrow. Maybe Sunday, and she just hadn't sent the text. The knot in her chest tightened.

By the second morning, the silence had stretched into something heavier. Not absence exactly. Not yet. Just space. Sylvie moved through the rhythms anyway.

She brought a book to the dock. Jane Eyre, the old, dog-eared copy they used to trade back and forth. The pages were swollen slightly from years of damp fingers and lake air, the spine cracked in two places. Juniper's notes lined the margins in faded blue pen, all loops and arrows and underlines that made no academic sense but felt holy just the same.

This line? Me @ 1 a.m. with zero dignity.

Syl, tell me this doesn't sound like your middle school crush??

Ugh, Rochester can choke, but the DRAMA!

And then, near the end, in smaller script:

Why doesn't anyone in books just SAY it? Life's too short for this slow-burn nonsense.

Sylvie ran her thumb under the scribbled words, her mouth twitching at the memory. She could still hear Juniper's voice: bright, too loud, and unapologetically alive. The ghost of it skimmed across the water like a skipped stone.

Later, she walked their trail. The one that looped around the east side of the inlet, through blackberry thickets and a patch of birch trees where they used to carve initials into the bark with broken twigs. Age twelve: Juniper dared her to jump into the lake fully clothed. Sylvie did, then shivered the whole walk back. Age seventeen: their hands brushed in the canoe and stayed there, tentative, lingering. No words. Just warmth and the sound of the oars slicing water.

She hadn't told anyone about that.

The memory sat in her chest like a stone she'd swallowed whole. She'd replayed that moment a thousand times. The way Juniper's pinky finger had hooked around hers, so slight it could've been an accident. Except it wasn't. Except they both knew. And still, neither of them said a word.

By dusk, the dragonflies skimmed low across the water, and the lake mirrored a watercolor sky: pale lavender edged in gold. Sylvie sat on the porch steps, hoodie sleeves pulled down past her wrists. It was Juniper's, of course. Left behind last August and never reclaimed. Oversized, worn thin at the elbows. Still smelled like coconut shampoo and the citronella oil Junie always overdid.

She didn't notice she was crying until a tear landed on her thumb.

That night, after she'd turned off the lights but couldn't sleep, she pulled her phone from under her pillow. She scrolled to Juniper's name and stared at the screen. Three texts she'd sent over the past two weeks. All unread. She tried calling. It rang twice, then went to voicemail.

Her throat tightened.

She tapped the saved messages and hit play on the one from early June.

"Hey, Lennox…"

Faint music in the background.

"Okay, I'm probably running late. Surprise, surprise. Don't eat all the marshmallows before I get there… I'll be there just after you, okay? Don't wait up."

A long pause, and her voice softer: "I miss you already. That's gross. Don't tell anyone."

Sylvie pressed the phone to her chest and lay still, the sound of Juniper's voice echoing into the dark. She replayed it. And again. Searching for something beneath the words. Some clue, some tenderness she might've missed the first dozen times.

I miss you already.

Milo appeared on the third morning, just like he always had: silent, sudden, and half-wild. He stood at the edge of the Lennox cabin porch, tail twitching low, his golden eyes fixed on her like she might vanish if he blinked. Sylvie froze mid-step, a half-drunk cup of coffee cooling in her hand.

For years, Milo had treated her like an intrusion. He'd belonged to no one and everyone, but mainly to Juniper. He only ever came near when Junie called him, her voice pitched in that mock-stern way that made animals and people alike obey. With Sylvie, he hissed. Or disappeared entirely. But now, he stayed.

She knelt slowly. "Hey, old man," she murmured. "You forget to hate me this year?"

Milo blinked, then padded closer. Not touching, but near enough that his fur caught the breeze from her hoodie. He sniffed the air, gave a low, rasping meow, then turned away. Leading her. She followed.

The rowboat was still tied to the dock, the oars bleached from too many summers. Sylvie untied the line, stepped in, and pushed off. The lake rippled under her, silent and silver. Milo watched from the dock as she crossed the narrow inlet, then, impossibly, sprang into the boat when it approached the Reyes side.

The cabin looked smaller than it had from across the water. Its yellow paint was sun-faded, its porch overgrown with creeping vines. The chairs that once faced the lake now turned inward, their backs to the view. The house had curled up into itself.

Sylvie didn't try the door. She already knew it was locked. Instead, she crouched by the steps and placed a smooth, round stone at the edge of the top stair. One she'd found on the trail earlier that morning: striped with gray and pale blue, like lake light.

The kind of thing you left for someone you loved. She wished she'd left a hundred of them while Juniper could still find them.

When she climbed back into the boat, Milo circled once, then settled beside her feet. He pressed his flank against her ankle as she rowed back, deliberately, heavy with something she didn't have words for.

He stayed close the whole way home.

The rain started just after noon. Not a storm, not really. Just a steady, whispering drizzle that softened the world like someone laying a blanket over the lake. The kind of weather that wrapped around the cabin and told her to stay still.

She lit a small fire in the woodstove, more out of ritual than need, pulled on a pair of socks she didn't remember packing, and began thumbing through the shelves. Most of the books were ones they'd brought up over the years. Their names scrawled inside the covers, page corners folded like maps of memory. Juniper had hated bookmarks. Said they interrupted the soul of a story.

Near the bottom of the stack by the hearth, she found it.

The journal. Tan leather, soft and worn at the edges. Their shared record. Each summer, they took turns writing inside: snippets of conversations, doodles of lake fish and trees, terrible poems, even worse song lyrics. It had become their own mythology.

She hadn't opened the journal since last year. It felt like cracking open a sealed room. Dusty, sacred, full of air that hadn't been breathed in months.

Sylvie opened it carefully. Pages flipped past like ghosts.

"Syl said she saw a shooting star. I say it was a plane. She's wrong, but let her have it."

"Tried to make s'mores with pretzels instead of graham crackers. Invented a war crime."

"Today, we swam across the whole damn lake. Tomorrow, we nap until noon. Priorities."

She smiled. And then she saw it.

A folded page tucked deep in the binding, hidden near the back. Paper thinner than the journal's stock, with worn edges. Her name was written on the outside in Juniper's uneven print.

Syl.

Her chest tightened as she opened it.

Hey Syl,

If you're reading this, I guess I didn't make it back this year. I didn't know how to say it out loud, so I didn't. That's on me.

The thing is, I've been tired. The kind of tired that sleep doesn't fix. I didn't want to bring that into the cabin with me. It's too full of good things. Of you.

I didn't tell you about the appointments, the treatments, or how my hands sometimes shake when I try to light the stove. You would've worried. You would've started counting the bad days. I wanted one more summer where I got to be Juniper Reyes, chaos queen of Reyes Cabin, not a countdown in someone else's calendar.

There's so much I meant to say. I started to write, "I wanted to tell you I lo—" (the ink blurred here, water-smudged and crossed out with a single clean line)

I hope you know anyway. You were my favorite part of every summer. You were the reason I believed in coming back, even if I couldn't stay.

I hope you still swim at night. I hope you burn something on the last night and mean it. I hope the lake calls to you the way it always called to us.

Take care of the cat, if he lets you. His name's Milo. I just never told you.

Be kind to yourself, Sylvie. You were the softest place I ever landed.

Always,

—J

Sylvie read it once. And then again. And then a third time, waiting for the words to rearrange themselves into something else. Something that didn't mean what she knew they meant.

Her hands started shaking.

She set the letter down carefully. Then she stood, crossed to the kitchen, and gripped the edge of the counter. Her breath came shallow and fast. The room tilted.

No.

She pulled out her phone with trembling fingers and scrolled to Juniper's mother's number. She hadn't called in years. Hadn't needed to. But now she pressed dial and waited, her heart hammering so hard she could hear it in her ears.

It rang. And rang.

Then: "Hello?"

Mrs. Reyes' voice. Quiet. Careful.

"Hi—it's Sylvie. Sylvie Lennox. I'm—I'm at the lake, and I—" Her voice cracked. "Is Juniper coming? I haven't heard from her, and I just—"

The silence on the other end was too long.

"Oh, sweetheart." Mrs. Reyes' voice broke. "I thought you knew. I thought someone—"

"Knew what?" Sylvie whispered, even though she already knew. Even though the letter was still sitting on the floor by the fire.

"Juniper passed in May, honey. I'm so sorry. I thought—her friends from school, they were all told, I assumed—"

The rest of the words blurred together. Sylvie heard herself say something. Thank you, maybe, or I'm sorry, she wasn't sure. She ended the call and sank to the floor, the phone slipping from her hand.

And when the tears came, they didn't break her. They just opened something. Wide and real and hollowed out. She cried with the quiet violence of someone who had been holding her breath for too long. One hand pressed to the letter, the other to her chest, trying to keep herself from splintering completely.

Outside, the rain blurred the world to watercolor. Inside, the fire burned low. Milo curled near her feet, unmoving. The silence had changed. Now, it knew her name.

The last night always came too fast. Even when they were kids, sunburned and sticky from Popsicles, too full of firepit hot dogs and laughter, Juniper would sigh and say, "Can't we stretch it just one more day?" And Sylvie would pretend to check an imaginary calendar and shake her head, deadpan. "Summer says no."

But they always got that final fire.

It had been their tradition since they were sixteen: write down one thing that no longer served them, fold it, burn it, and let the lake wind take the ash. They never read each other's notes. It was the only part that stayed private.

This year, Sylvie lit the fire alone.

The air was cool, damp from the rain, the logs stubborn at first. She crouched close, shielding the flame as it flickered to life, then stepped back and let it grow. The smoke curled upward, faintly sweet. The stars blinked through a canopy of cloud.

Milo settled beside her in the grass, his bulk warm against her thigh. When she held out a marshmallow, he sniffed it, then bit it with surprising delicacy. Juniper would've laughed so hard she choked.

In her lap, the journal sat open. Beside it, the letter. Juniper's letter. She'd copied each line into the journal in her own handwriting. Slowly. Carefully. Not changing a word. The ink smeared where her thumb pressed too hard over "I hope you know anyway."

But she didn't burn the letter.

Instead, she pulled a folded scrap of paper from her pocket. One she'd written earlier that afternoon, sitting on the dock with her feet in the water. It had taken her an hour to write four words.

She unfolded it now, read it one last time in the firelight.

Waiting for the right time.

She held it over the flames and let go.

The paper curled, caught, and was gone in seconds. Just smoke and embers and memory. The fire hissed as a breeze rolled in from the lake.

Sylvie leaned back on her palms, eyes fixed across the inlet where the Reyes cabin stood dark, still, and watching.

"I love you," she whispered to the smoke, the stars, the dark cabin across the water. "I loved you. I should have said it."

Her voice broke, but she didn't stop.

"I thought we had more time."

Then, just for a moment, the porch light flickered on.

Sylvie's breath caught. She pressed her hand to her mouth, then let it drop, her eyes fixed on that small square of yellow light cutting through the dark.

It stayed on for three heartbeats. Four.

Then it went dark again.

Sylvie exhaled, slow and shaking. "I know," she whispered across the water. "I know."

She looked down at Milo, now curled against her hip. She stroked his fur, the hoodie sleeves pushed back just enough to feel the scratch of grass against her skin.

"You should've let me carry it with you," she said softly, as the flames danced on.

But even as she said it, she understood. Juniper had been protecting her. Protecting this place, these summers, the bright uncomplicated love they'd built in the margins of their lives. She'd kept the darkness away so Sylvie could keep the light.

It wasn't fair. But it was so achingly, perfectly Juniper that Sylvie almost smiled through her tears.

The sun was just beginning to rise when she closed the cabin door behind her. The morning air was cool, tinged with dew and the sharp scent of pine needles. Mist hovered low over the lake like breath not yet exhaled. Sylvie stood still for a moment, keys in hand, letting the quiet wrap around her one last time.

Inside, everything was as she'd found it. Except the fire had gone out. And she'd hung the hoodie on the hook beside the door, where Juniper used to toss it without thinking. The sleeves still smelled faintly of citronella and coconut shampoo. Sylvie had pressed her face into it one last time before leaving it behind.

She didn't need to carry it anymore.

She turned the lock with steady fingers.

Milo was already waiting by the car, tail flicking against the gravel. When she opened the passenger door, he jumped in without hesitation and settled into the seat. Sylvie smiled, faint and tired.

She didn't question it.

The engine started on the second turn. She backed down the drive, the tires crunching through old pine cones and the passage of time. At the end of the road, just before it curved out of view, she looked back.

The cabin stood still. The lake beyond it shimmered with gold. And the silence, for once, didn't feel like grief. It felt like reverence.

She would carry it now. The love she never got to speak, the summers that built a whole world between them. Not as a wound, but as proof that she had been loved in return, even in silence.

I came here for her. I'm leaving for both of us.