PRESENT DAY
From Back to Me & You, I head straight to where the letter my mom asked me to deliver leads—past the heartbreaks of Miner Lane, the cove, the sea, and right through the front door of the Sunrise Theater. I already know who I’m going to find, who I didn’t recognize him as all those years or when I was here with Britt.
He’s not standing behind the desk, but I have this feeling brought by a little bit of the fate my mother so purposefully believed in as to where he is. Walking past those posters, and back down the hall, I approach theater 3A, the site of his last show, the site of the rose spotlight.
“Hello?” I say.
There’s a bang and someone says, “Ouch.”
In the back, from beneath the tech booth, a man stands.
“David Summers?” I say, and he studies me in this nervous, aloof way.
He waves at me through the window, acknowledging this is him, beckoning me to walk through the open door. He wipes his hands on a rag, tools thrown across the worktable and soundboard.
“What do you want?” he asks, and he’s not the daring boy from the pages of my mother’s diary.
“I’m—”
“Mia Rose,” he says, stiffly. “Yeah, I know.”
“Mia Peters, actually.” I hold out a hand to him. “My mother’s daughter, if I’m lucky.”
He almost smiles. “How’s your dad like that?” He busies himself rearranging a jar of pens and pencils with silly eraser toppers.
“I wouldn’t know. He ran off before my first birthday,” I say. This is David Summers, and my mother was in love with him, and even after my dad left for something more, he’s still here in their town.
David shakes his head. “I’m sorry.”
I hold out the letter with its loopy address and his name scrawled across the front with a heart. “I have a letter for you.”
“I have a mailbox, you know.”
“It’s kind of a special delivery.”
He sighs and finally faces me and really looks at me with weary green eyes as though this action takes everything out of him. “Fine. Let’s see.”
Handing it to him, I know he recognizes the writing on the front immediately from the way his jaw drops.
I didn’t read the contents, but there’s a new narrative in his features as he unfolds the pink stationery and reads it. His gaze is hard at first, cold and hurting in a way I know, in a way I liked to fake for the mirror and am trying to unlearn. As his eyes reach the second half of the first page—there are four pages, by the looks of it, with the back and front scrawled across—they begin to soften, and then they cloud by the middle of page two. His first tear falls, and I feel like I’m intruding by the third, so I turn my cheek, watch the stage, no longer painted red.
He finishes with a crinkle of the paper as he refolds it, and he leans down and braces his hands on his worktable as he breaks down. “I miss her so much,” he tells me.
“She loved you,” I whisper, and it’s so hard to say—those words can hurt so bad when you can’t say them back.
“I know. I loved her. I still love her. So much.” He doesn’t hold back. “I should have told her when I had the chance.”
“Did she . . . did she tell you?” That wasn’t in the pages. It wasn’t in her voicemail.
David swallows sharply, and he nods. “When we . . . parted ways, we wanted different things. We were in Nashville and I needed to go home, but she wanted me to stay. She told me she loved me, she wanted me, but she wanted the music more. You know, she came back one time? To see Grease. I saw her in the audience, and I couldn’t even bring myself to say hi. She called me that night. I didn’t say a word, but she knew I was listening. She told me she still missed me, she still loved me . . . and I didn’t say a word.” Unlike everyone else I’ve talked to, David spills this all without asking anything of me.
In his features, I see the collage on the wall of the storage room, the tunnel of photos in the lighthouse, the streams of memories she made in his name too. A million missed connections are hidden in melodies and memories.
I hold the key on my necklace close before I snap it off and extend it to him, sliding the inn’s key off and giving him the other. “I think this was meant for you.”
He wipes his eyes. “What is it?”
“A clue. She left a piece of her behind. She left the key at this house by the sea for you to find. There are two places you need to go, one this unlocks and one it doesn’t. Trust me, they’re worth seeking.”
This nostalgic look takes over his features. “My family’s old home. They moved. A few years ago.”
Studying him for a second, I ask, “Can I show you something?” He didn’t ask for anything, but I can give him something, show him how she’s still here. I wave him forward.
He doesn’t answer, but he follows—still wiping his tears.
“Where are we going?” he says about halfway to the stage, down the aisles.
“Stand on the stage,” I say, and I begin to climb to the catwalk alone.
“Is this what you were doing in my theater the other day?” There’s almost a joking edge to this.
“Partially.” I reach that spotlight she left for me, and I flick it on and watch as Tori Rose’s rose-colored, rose-patterned glow falls upon him, sets him aflame in its light—her light.
He gawks. “How did she . . .”
“No one knows,” I study it again. “Can you tell me a story? How did you get here?”
He speaks to the empty audience even as he speaks to me. “I couldn’t do it. She proposed a summer of dreams, our Summer of Dreams. It was a whole thing. It’s hard to explain.” If only he knew how much I knew. “We were going to spend half of it in Nashville and half in New York. She never left Nashville, and I never got to New York. She didn’t want to finish it with me, and I didn’t want to finish it without her. Like I said, we fell apart. When we parted, I came back here and moped around a while. I starred in community theater. That time I saw her . . . I regret nothing more than I regret not going to her. I don’t know just how badly seeing her shook me, but that was my last show.
“After that, I went around the country to her concerts, and I watched her be a star like I always said I would. I realized it quickly. I guess I knew the songs were about me and her and us, but I never got up the nerve to call back, and she never came to me again. Every once in a while, I’d convince myself she saw me in the crowd. When she returned, she reunited with Patrick. They kept their fling secret, but this town knew. Sunset Cove can hide anything from the world.
“I took over the theater after my favorite director passed, bless his soul. I ran some shows, and then I didn’t. Now it’s just upkeep.”
His story joins with hers, with Patrick’s, with Edie’s, with Sara’s, with my grandmas’, with Linnea’s, with mine. They all paint her in different ways, so no one person could complete her image alone.
“You should start again.” I lean forward. “I’m sure there was something in my mom’s letter about keeping your dreams.”
He shields his eyes from the red spotlight, and he looks at me even though I’m sure he can’t really make me out up here on the catwalk. His eyes tell me I’m right about what she said. “Maybe I will. You want to help?”
“I’m sorry. I can’t. I have a dream of my own to chase.” I have a girl I hope to chase it with, to follow into the sunset and sunrise and every summer after this one if she’ll still have me, if my fear and denial weren’t too much. “You got a play in mind?”
“Yeah,” he says, gentle and fond. “Summer of Dreams—The Story of Tori Rose. It’s time this town learns the whole story. Sees her and loves her for all of her, not just the fame.”
My heart skips. “Can I read it?”
“Sure. I’ve got it somewhere. I wrote it years ago.”
“I think she’d like that.”
“You remind me of her, you know?” this boy—David Summers—from my mom’s past says, still looking at me.
I smile softly. “So I’ve been told.”