All Chapters of THINGS WE LOST IN SUMMER.: Chapter 11
- Chapter 20
53 chapters
CHAPTER 11 -THE HEAVY TRUTH.
Fog draped the lake like a shroud. Water slopped against the wooden pilings, pulling at Casey’s drifting body. The red in the water mixed with silver, a bleeding reflection of the sky. Bill and Danner were gone Bill’s form vanished into the trees, Danner limping, cursing, retreating into the shadows. Noah stood alone on the dock. Crowbar dangling loosely in his hands, blood dried and crusted on his skin, his sleeve torn. Heart pounding, ribs screaming from the fights. He had survived. Barely. Elia’s voice whispered in his skull. Don’t let them bury me. He bent, grabbed the crowbar, and turned back to the boathouse. The crates waited, stacked like monuments of greed. Luxport stamped on each one, black and unyielding, accusing. Noah pried one open. White dust rose, chemical, bitter, bitter like betrayal itself. Enough to drown the town in evidence. Enough to burn the shadows hiding in every corner. He shoved the tape into the old player. Elia’s voice, warped by time, filled th
AUTHOR’S REFLECTION.
REFLECTION ON “THINGS WE LOST IN SUMMER”. When I first stepped into Noah’s story in The Things We Lost in Summer, I didn’t expect it to follow me the way it did. It is one of those novels that doesn’t just tell a story but leaves you carrying the echoes of its characters, its landscapes, and its heavy silences long after you’ve closed the final page. What struck me most wasn’t only the mystery of Elia’s disappearance or Noah’s violent reckoning with Casey and the men who destroyed his childhood it was the way grief, memory, and truth wove themselves into every corner of the narrative. At its heart, this is a novel about return, a man coming back to the small town he once fled, forced to face the ghosts of a summer that never truly ended. The box in the attic, the old photographs, the map, and the cassette tape all of these are physical objects, yes, but they are also metaphors for what Noah has been carrying inside himself. Every step on that map is another excavation of memory, a
Chapter 12 - The morning after
Dawn came slow and gray, as if the night hadn’t finished what it started.From the ridge above town, Noah watched the square waking into damage. Men in county windbreakers moved like blue ants, swinging tape across the alleys, shouldering aside the curious with gloved hands. A tow truck groaned as it hauled two dented police cruisers from the curb. Powder lay where he’d cracked the crate swept now into pale streaks and wet clumps, the rain having turned it to paste along the seams of the cobbles. Someone hosed the stones, the stream running chalky toward the storm drain as if the town was coughing up what it had swallowed.He tasted metal when he breathed. When he blinked, the dock rose behind his eyes: Casey’s body turning in the water, red webbing out in thin films that caught the moon and made it look kind. His ribs registered each breath like a tally. His right shoulder, where the crowbar had kicked and slid, throbbed in a deep, bone-hum. The crowbar itself lay in the ferns beside
Chapter 13- The sheriffs story
The town’s air tasted of microwaved news. Every shop-front TV, every radio in a pickup, every phone screen on Main Street replayed the same loop: Sheriff Marlow standing in front of the courthouse, hat low, voice steady, the official posture of a man rehearsing calm.“Luxport stands united,” he said. “We grieve. We investigate. We do not speculate.”Each repetition polished the lie until it shone. The reporters nodded as if truth were something that could be managed with bullet points. Behind the camera line, deputies in pressed uniforms shifted uneasily; they had been up all night scraping the square clean.Inside the station, the real Marlow smoked by the evidence locker with the blinds drawn. Keller from the attorney general’s office leaned on a desk stacked with boxes labeled Confidential Luxport Holdings.“Your town’s leaking,” Keller said.Marlow exhaled smoke through his nose. “We’ll cork it. The boy’s half-crazy. The Internet will eat him for breakfast.”“You’d better hope so,
Chapter 14- The voice on the tape
The motel smelled like wet carpet and old stories. Noah hadn’t slept. The tape lay on the nightstand beside an open notebook, its pages filled with looping, desperate handwriting timestamps, half-heard words, and sketches of the docks drawn from memory. Keller’s orders. The phrase gnawed at him. The hum behind Elia’s voice wasn’t random; it had rhythm, mechanical and patient. A lighthouse.Luxport’s lighthouse had been abandoned since the oil spill of 2003. He remembered it as a jagged silhouette at the far edge of the bay, a place where the wind never stopped talking. If Elia had been there the night she vanished, someone had heard something.He shoved the cassette and the crowbar-wrapped shirt into his duffel, threw on a jacket, and drove through the early light. The fog clung low to the fields like a guilty thing that hadn’t yet decided what to hide.By the time the dirt turned to gravel, the sky had begun to color itself with reluctant blue. The lighthouse rose ahead as a gray spi
Chapter 15- The Man in the Photograph
The rain had returned to Luxport like a promise no one meant to keep. It came in thin, slanting sheets, tracing the cracked windows of Matty’s Diner where Noah sat again, same corner, same burnt coffee, same silence that pretended to be peace. The photo of Elia and the man with the Luxport badge lay flat between his palms.He’d been staring at it for an hour. The blurred outline of the man seemed to move when the light shifted the illusion of motion, of memory breathing. The badge’s reflection cut through the haze like truth struggling to surface.Branson had to know. Branson had always known more than he said.Noah folded the photograph and slipped it into his pocket. His ribs still ached from the fight on the dock, but pain had become a companion now proof that he hadn’t been erased. He left a few crumpled bills on the table and stepped into the wet air, the kind that coated skin and thoughts alike.Branson’s car was parked where it always was crooked, outside the auto shop on Main.
Chapter 16- Mira’s Burden
The storm had quieted by morning, leaving behind streets slick with ash and silence. The diner’s windows were boarded up now, a charred car carcass still steaming in the lot, the smell of burnt oil bleeding into the air like a permanent scar. News vans came and went, voices rehearsing empathy for the cameras, but inside the town, something had shifted the fear had grown shape.Noah hadn’t gone back to the motel. He couldn’t. The smoke still lived in his lungs, and Branson’s final words kept circling in his head…He wasn’t alone.So when Mira called, her voice trembling but steady enough to hold purpose, he went.Mira’s childhood home sat at the edge of the woods, a slanted-roofed house whose paint peeled like shedding skin. Inside, dust had gathered in soft, resigned layers. The air smelled faintly of cedar and memory.On the table lay Elia’s things a pile of sketchbooks, folded letters, a tin box filled with seashells, and Polaroids of summer nights. Mira sat cross-legged on the floor
Chapter 17- Return of the Tape.
By midnight, the rain had softened to mist, but the world hadn’t calmed.The house groaned under the weight of the wind, and every window shivered as if listening for something.Noah sat beside the table where Elia’s sketches lay drying in small, uneven piles. Mira stood by the window, arms folded, staring into the darkness beyond the porch light. Her reflection looked ghostlike half-real, half-remembered.“I can’t stop thinking about what Branson said,” Noah murmured. “He wasn’t alone. Someone else was helping him move the shipments.”Mira didn’t turn. “Then maybe we should stop thinking and start proving.”He watched her pull one of the tapes from the tin box. Elia’s voice was preserved in whirring plastic. Mira ran her thumb across the label: AUG – LIGHTHOUSE RECORDING #3.“You said these were damaged,” Noah said.“They are,” she replied. “But some parts still work. I fixed the recorder.”When she pressed play, static filled the room then a click, a breath, and Elia’s voice, faint
Chapter 18-The weight of Chaos
The tape kept spinning.The whir of the reel filled the room, faint but constant, like a heartbeat refusing to stop.Mira sat frozen on the couch, her eyes fixed on the Polaroid lying between the one taken through the window.Noah hadn’t moved since locking the door. He stood with his hand still on the deadbolt, listening.Outside, the rain came harder, sweeping sideways across the porch.The headlights hadn’t moved. Two sets. Parked at the edge of the trees. The engines are off now, but the shape of the vehicles is still visible through the fog.“They’re watching us,” Mira whispered.“I know.”“What do they want?”He didn’t answer. He already knew.The tape clickedend of the reel and the sudden silence hit like a gunshot.Mira flinched. Noah crossed the room and ejected it, sliding the cassette back into its case. His hands were trembling, though his voice stayed low.“Pack the sketches. The letters. Everything we found.”Mira blinked. “Now?”“Now,” he said. “Before they decide to co
Chapter 19- The light house Road
The road to the lighthouse was little more than gravel and fog.Every turn seemed to lead them deeper into a place where sound didn’t travel right, where the ocean’s roar felt distant, muffled, like it too was holding its breath.By the time Noah cut the headlights, the rain had thinned to a whisper. The sea stretched below them in shades of black and pewter. The lighthouse rose ahead tall, skeletal, its white paint eaten by salt and time. The beam turned slowly, casting long arcs of ghostlight across the rocks.Mira climbed out first, the wind clawing at her coat. She looked smaller than usual, almost childlike against the enormity of the sea.“God,” she said softly. “I haven’t been up here since we were kids.”Noah shut the door quietly behind him. “Feels like it’s been waiting.”They crossed the rocky path to the entrance, their footsteps swallowed by the wind.The old metal door was half open, its hinges groaning as Noah pushed. Inside smelled of rust and damp air thick with salt,