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

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,

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.

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

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,