Conrad was a shadow. He moved through the rooms with a quiet, devastating efficiency, packing away pieces of a life he wasn't ready to let go of. He looked at Belly with eyes that promised forever but lips that remained sealed, anchored by a duty to his brother and a grief he refused to share. Every time their hands brushed in the kitchen, the air thrummed with the electricity of "almost," a tension so thick it felt like the humidity before a tropical storm.
Then there was Jeremiah. Jeremiah was the sunshine that refused to dim, even when the clouds rolled in. He was the easy laugh, the steady hand on Belly’s waist, and the promise of a future that didn't hurt. But when he looked at the house—and then at Conrad—the cracks showed. He was tired of being the second choice, the backup plan for a heart that had belonged to his brother since they were children. Summer HouseThe Summer I Turned Pretty : Season...
The summer was a countdown. Each sunset was a tick of the clock toward the moment they would have to lock the front door and drive away, leaving the memories to settle like dust. Belly stood on the deck, watching the tide pull the sand out from under her feet. She realized then that you can’t go back to the way things were. The house remained, but the people who lived in it had been reshaped by the salt and the sorrow. Conrad was a shadow
For Belly Conklin, the summer house had always been a sanctuary—a place where time stalled, and the only thing that mattered was the temperature of the pool and the boy standing at the edge of it. But this summer, the house felt heavy. The cedar shingles, silvered by decades of Atlantic gales, seemed to groan under the weight of secrets that weren’t meant to be kept. Every time their hands brushed in the kitchen,
The air in Cousins Beach didn’t just smell like salt and sun anymore; it smelled like the end of something.