Second Summer

The certified letter was the last stop of the day, and of course it was for the B&B, because the universe has a sense of humor and mine runs specifically toward humiliation. Saltshore in late October is a ghost town with a zip code. The boardwalk shutters were down, the beach was empty except for gulls with bad attitudes, and the only lights on the whole strip were the window of the Harmon Bed and Breakfast and the 24-hour laundromat, which stays open out of what I can only assume is spite. The air smelled like salt and wet wood. Every sound I made on the porch felt like a secret I was telling someone.

I'm Steph, I'm twenty-four, and I run a seasonal mail route down the coast because it keeps me outdoors and keeps me away from people who knew me in college. Five years ago, in the summer after I turned nineteen, I stood on this exact porch with a dress in a garment bag and lost my nerve so completely that I practically left tread marks on the driveway getting out of there. I hadn't been back since. Then the route opened up this fall, needed the money, and I told myself five years was long enough for a town to forget a boy who ran from a porch. Towns don't forget. Neither do the girls who live in them, apparently.

I knocked. Footsteps, then the door opened, and there was Judy Harmon in bare feet on the floorboards, drowning in a gray sweater two sizes too big, hair in a loose knot, twenty-five years old and exactly the same and completely different. She finished community college a couple years back and came home to help her mother run the place in the off-season. I knew that because small towns run on gossip the way the laundromat runs on quarters.

"Well, hell," she said. "The mailman."

"Certified letter. Need a signature."

"You couldn't have just left it?"

"It's certified." I held up the little gray case like that explained anything. It explained nothing. We both knew it explained nothing.

She signed with the pen chained to my bag, glanced at the return address, and made a face about the county tax assessor, and then instead of taking the letter and closing the door as a normal person would in a normal transaction, she stepped back and said, "You want coffee? I've got a pot going and nobody to drink it."

And here is where I should tell you I said no. I had a route to finish and a dignity to pretend I still owned. What I actually said was, "Sure, okay," and followed her into a kitchen that smelled like coffee and old paint, and sat down at a table with a wobble in it like it remembered me.

We did the small talk first. Weather, the route, whether the seafood place on the corner was ever coming back. Then she wrapped both hands around her mug, looked at the table, and said, "You know I've thought about that night about a thousand times."

I did not pretend I didn't know which night. There was only the one night, and it had a gravitational pull in both our histories.

"I had the dress picked out for you," she went on. "The sequined one, my mom's, from some benefit she went to in the nineties. I'd cleared a whole evening. I'd even looked up how to do a smoky eye on my laptop like a lunatic. And then you showed up, stood on that porch holding the bag like it was going to bite you, and I swear you made a noise like a kettle, and then you were gone."

"I made a plan to run," I said. "The noise was incidental."

"It was not a good plan."

"No. It was a terrible plan. I drove around for two hours afterward and then went home and felt like an idiot for about a year." Longer than a year, if I'm being honest, but a guy can only confess so much over a wobbly table. The truth is the whole reason I took this route, the whole reason I didn't argue when dispatch assigned the coastal loop, was some dumb spiteful hope I never said out loud. Spite at myself, mostly. I'd had one shot at something I actually wanted and I'd dropped it on the porch and fled, and some part of me had been carrying that bag around ever since, metaphorically, since the literal bag I definitely did not keep in the back of my closet for five years.

Judy studied me over her mug. "Why now?"

"Route assignment. It's not like I planned it."

"Sure." She said it the way people say sure when they don't believe a word. "Okay, but here is the thing though. I'm not letting you leave this house again with that unfinished. I'm twenty-five now, I run half this place, and I have learned that off-season regret is the worst kind, because there's nothing to distract you from it. No tourists, no noise. Just you and the thing you didn't do."

"That's very philosophical for a Tuesday."

"I bartender three nights a week. I have a whole backlog." She got up, still talking, and disappeared into the back hall, and I heard boxes being shifted around and a curse when something fell. I should have used that window to leave. I finished my coffee instead, which tells you everything about where my head was.

She came back carrying a garment bag, older and dustier than I remembered, and unzipped it right there in the kitchen. The sequined cocktail dress. Emerald green, or whatever shade of green sequins turn in bad kitchen lighting, which is a magical shade. It caught the overhead light and threw little coins of it around the room, and my throat did something involuntary.

"Still fits, I'd bet," she said, holding it up against the air between us. "You owe yourself this, Steph. Five years is long enough to owe yourself anything."

My hands were doing something embarrassing, some hovering business near the mug. "And then what?"

"And then whatever you want. That is the point of the exercise. Last time I got ahead of the moment and scared you off. This time we go at your pace. You put it on, you look in the mirror, and if you want to walk out that door afterward and never come back, that's your right as a taxpayer." She shrugged, and the sweater shifted off one shoulder and she pulled it back without seeming to notice. "But I don't think you'll want to."

I sat there for what felt like an impossibly long time. The laundromat sign buzzed faintly through the wall. Somewhere outside a gull made its opinion known.

"The guest room's free," she said, and pointed with the dress still hanging off its hanger. "Door locks if you need it to. There's a full mirror and everything, because I planned for this five years ago and I have been waiting to be smug about it."

I took the bag. It was lighter than I remembered, which made no sense, since I was the thing that had gotten heavier. I walked down the hall to the guest room with the sequins whispering against the plastic, and I heard Judy in the kitchen rinsing the mugs, deliberately loud, deliberately giving me the room.

I locked the door. Not because I needed to. Because five years ago I hadn't even gotten that far, and it felt like closing a loop. The dress came out of the bag shimmering and cold, and the mirror in the corner waited with the patience of a thing that had been waiting since before I was born.

I got changed.

The zipper took three tries, which felt fair given the stakes. Sequins are not forgiving fabric. They catch on everything, including your own dignity, and the dress itself fit the way Judy said it would, which was exactly, like it had been waiting in a box doing math all this time.

The heels were my own, because yes, I owned heels. I had bought them two years ago at a thrift shop in Markham Harbor and worn them exactly once around my apartment, and they still fit too. I sat on the edge of the guest bed and rolled the nylons up my legs and my hands were shaking enough that I put a run in the first pair and had to start over, and even that felt like part of the ceremony somehow.

The makeup was the hard part. Judy had looked up how to do a smoky eye five years ago and I had looked up how to do a smoky eye about forty times since, in tabs I always closed too fast, so in theory I was prepared. In practice I did one eye, panicked, wiped it off, did it again slower, and by the time both eyes matched I was sweating in a way no amount of October chill could fix. Lipstick. Blush. A little powder. I looked at the mirror and the mirror looked back and there she was, more or less, this woman I had been drafting in my head since I was nineteen.

I stood there a while. The laundromat buzzed through the wall. A car went by on the strip, the only car in the world apparently, and its headlights swept the ceiling and left.

Then I unlocked the door.

Walking down that hallway in heels is a skill I did not have, so it took a while, and the sequins made a sound with every step, this dry whispering, like the dress was clearing its throat. The kitchen light was on. Judy was leaning against the counter with a