“But I loved that house, and I hated to say good-bye. Because, it was more than just a house. It was every summer, every boat ride, every sunset. It was Susannah.”

“It was a summer I would never, ever forget. It was the summer everything began. It was the summer I turned pretty. Because for the first time, I felt it. Pretty, I mean. Every summer up to this one, I believed it’d be different. Life would be different. And that summer, it finally was.”

“I hated him more than anything. I loved him more than anything. Because, he was everything. And I hated that, too.”

“I say, " I can't believe you're really here."He sounds almost shy when he says, "Me neither." And then he hesitates. "Are you still coming with me?"I cant believe he even has to ask. I would go anywhere. "Yes," I tell him. It feels like nothing else exists outside of that word, this moment. There's just us. Everything that happened this past summer and every summer before it, has all led up to this.To Now”

“Taylor wanted me to forget about Conrad, to just erase him from my mind and memory. She kept saying things like, “everybody has to get over a first love, it’s a rite of passage.” But Conrad wasn’t just my first love. He wasn’t some rite of passage. He was so much more than that. He and Jeremiah and Susannah were my family. In my memory, the three of them would always be entwined, forever linked. There couldn’t be one without the others. If I forgot Conrad, if I evicted him from my heart, pretended like he was never there, it would be like doing those tings to Susannah. And that, I couldn’t do.”

“That night I dreamed of Conrad. I was the same age I was now, but he was younger, ten or eleven maybe. I think he might even have been wearingoveralls. We played outside my house until it got dark, just running around the yard.I said, “Susannah will be wondering where you are. You should go home.” He said, “I can’t. I don’t know how.Will you help me?” And then I was sad, because I didn’t know how either. We weren’t at my house anymore, and it was so dark. We were in thewoods. We were lost.When I woke up, I was crying and Jeremiah was asleep next to me. I sat up in the bed. It was dark, the only light in the room was my alarm clock. Itread 4:57. I lay back down.”

“There are moments in every girl’s life that are bigger than we know at the time. When you look back, you say, that was one of those life-changing,fork-in-the-road moments and I didn’t even see it coming. I had no idea.”