The alarm went off at 5:00 a.m.
And for once in my life, I didn’t hit snooze.
I reached over and turned it off before it could beep a second time. Daniel was asleep beside me, flat on his back, one arm thrown over his eyes, snoring softly. He didn’t move.
I slipped out of bed. I pulled on yesterday’s sweatshirt from the chair in the corner. Gray, with a coffee stain on the cuff. I tiptoed across the old wooden floor, avoiding the board by the door that creaks, and I crept downstairs.
The house was still dark.
Outside the big kitchen window, the lake was a flat sheet of black glass. No wind. No birds yet. The only sound was the old refrigerator humming in the corner of my mother’s kitchen.
My mother’s kitchen.
That mattered to me a lot more that morning than it had a week before.
My mom has a little place by the lake.
It’s not fancy. It’s a two-story cedar cabin with a green metal roof and a screened porch and a wooden deck that looks out over the water. It has three bedrooms upstairs and one bathroom that everybody fights over. The kitchen still has the orange countertops from 1978. The couch in the living room is older than I am.
My dad bought it the year I was born. He paid for it with money he saved from twenty years of working overtime at the paper mill. He used to say it was the only thing he ever bought that was worth more than he paid for it.
He died when I was nineteen. A heart attack. On the dock, actually. Fishing for bass.
Mom almost sold the cabin after that. She couldn’t stand to be there. For two summers, she didn’t even go up. Then one day in June, she called me and said, “I think I’m going to go open up the lake house.” And she did. And she’s gone every summer since.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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