The Summer We Made A Promise

The drive lasted less than a minute before a wall of lantana blocked it. Pink blossoms trembled with bees. A fallen branch lay across the narrow path, slick with moss, and beyond it the gravel disappeared beneath grass high enough to hide a shoe.

Audrey checked the estate map on her phone. The office entrance was marked on the opposite side of the house. The straight route, according to the map, was forty yards. The actual route appeared to require a machete.

“Of course,” she murmured.

She dragged one suitcase around the branch. Its wheel caught in a root. The case tipped, spilling a pair of shoes and a rolled measuring tape into the leaves.

A laugh sounded behind her.

Not a memory. Not imagined.

“Still choosing the most difficult route?”

Audrey straightened too quickly and nearly lost her balance. Mason Cole stood beside the gate, one hand resting on a weathered wooden post. He wore work boots, faded jeans, and a gray Magnolia House shirt darkened at the collar with sweat. His hair was shorter than she remembered, though the sun had lightened it at the edges. His face had changed in all the ways time was supposed to change a person, but his eyes had not.

They were still the same warm brown, still carrying amusement just before it became a question.

She looked at the branch between them. “The map said this was the entrance.”

“The map was drawn before the garden decided to reclaim the property.”

“I see you’ve allowed it to develop a personality.”

“It has several. Most of them are hostile.”

His smile arrived slowly, and something in Audrey’s chest answered before she could stop it.

Mason came through the weeds and lifted her suitcase by the handle. “Give me that.”

“I can manage.”

“I know.” He tugged the wheel free with a firm twist. “You always could. You also always made things harder than they needed to be.”

“That sounds like a professional assessment.”

“It’s a lifelong observation.”

The old rhythm slipped between them with startling ease. He carried the suitcase as if it weighed nothing. Audrey gathered her shoes and tape, then followed him through the garden, trying not to notice how naturally he moved around roots and broken stones.

A cicada shrilled from the oak canopy. The air smelled of damp soil and crushed leaves. Twice, Mason reached back without looking to steady her over uneven ground. The second time, his fingers closed around her wrist.

His touch lasted only a moment.

It was long enough.

At the edge of the garden, he released her. “Office is this way. Clara left your packet inside.”

“And the cottages?”

“Waiting for you to tell us what we’ve done wrong.”

“I’m sure they’ll survive the criticism.”

“The cottages are tougher than the people who work on them.”

She glanced at him. “Is that another professional assessment?”

“No. That one’s personal.”

Before she could ask what he meant, a gust of wind moved through the oak branches. Something small and blue rolled from beneath a curtain of ivy and struck the toe of her shoe.

Audrey looked down.

The object was a dented metal tin, no larger than a paperback book. Its blue paint had faded to the color of old sky. A strip of silver tape crossed the lid, and beneath the dirt she could make out a crooked black X.

Mason went still.

The garden seemed to quiet around them, though the cicadas continued their relentless song.

“No,” he said.

Audrey crouched and lifted the tin. The metal was cold and gritty in her palm. “You recognize it.”

“I recognize the X.”

She rubbed the lid with her thumb. Under the dirt, two sets of initials emerged.

A.L.

M.C.

For one suspended second, she was twelve again, kneeling beneath the magnolia tree with dirt under her fingernails while Mason dug beside her with a garden trowel. They had been certain the future would arrive exactly as they described it. They had written their plans on lined notebook paper and sealed them inside a cookie tin, promising to open it when they were twenty-five.

They had forgotten.

Or perhaps Audrey had worked very hard at forgetting.

Mason lowered the suitcase. “We buried that behind the old fountain.”

“The fountain is gone.”

“So is the tree.”

“Apparently the tin stayed.”

He reached for it, but Audrey closed her fingers around the lid. “We should open it.”

His gaze met hers. “We should get you to the office.”

“That isn’t an answer.”

“It’s the answer that keeps you from being late on your first day.”

She glanced at her watch. The morning had already slipped away. Her meeting with Clara and Daniel was scheduled for ten. The cottage survey had been intended to begin immediately afterward.

Mason saw the hesitation and nodded toward the tin. “You can take it with you.”

“That sounds suspiciously like permission.”

“It sounds like I know you’re going to do it whether I give permission or not.”

She tucked the tin into her portfolio. “You remember me well.”

“I remember enough.”

The words were quiet, stripped of his earlier humor. Audrey felt them land between them.

Inside the main house, the air was cooler but smelled of plaster dust and lemon cleaner. Restoration work had begun in earnest. Canvas covered the marble floors, ladders stood beneath the tall windows, and the walls held pale squares where paintings had been removed. Magnolia House was neither ruin nor finished home. It was a place caught between what it had been and what it might become.

Like her, Audrey thought, then rejected the thought as too dramatic.

Mason set her suitcase beside the office door. “Clara’s in the east wing. Daniel’s with her.”

“And you?”

“Facilities. Which means I’m wherever something leaks, jams, sags, or refuses to meet code.”

“Then you’ll be busy.”

“I have been.”

The answer carried no complaint. That unsettled her more than if he had sounded unhappy. Mason had always wanted to work with his hands, to stay near the water and the people who knew his name. She remembered that much. He had written it in the time capsule.

She pulled the tin from her portfolio.

Mason’s shoulders tightened. “Audrey.”

“We have five minutes.”

“We have less.”

“That was true when we were twelve, too. We still opened it.”

His mouth curved, but the smile did not reach his eyes. He took a small key ring from his pocket and selected a flat screwdriver. “The hinge is rusted.”

“You carry a screwdriver?”

“I manage a historic estate.”

“You carry three screwdrivers.”

“Preparedness is attractive.”

She looked at him. “Is that what you’re counting on?”

The question escaped before she could soften it.

For a moment, neither of them moved. Then Mason knelt beside the covered floor, braced the tin against his boot, and worked the screwdriver beneath the lid. His hands were broad, marked with small scratches and a faint line of grease along one knuckle. Audrey watched his fingers instead of his face.

The lid gave with a sharp metallic pop.

Inside lay a folded sheet of paper, a plastic bracelet, two smooth shells, and a photograph curled at the edges. Mason lifted the photograph first.

They stood shoulder to shoulder beneath the office window.

In the picture, Audrey’s hair was in two uneven braids. Mason had a missing front tooth and one arm thrown around her shoulders. Behind them, the old fountain rose from the garden, its basin full of leaves.

Audrey touched the photograph. “We were so sure.”

“About what?”

“That we knew everything.”

Mason unfolded the paper.

Their handwriting filled both sides, slanted and uneven. Audrey recognized her own list first.

Audrey Lane: architect. Design buildings people want to keep. Live in a city with tall windows. Travel somewhere cold. Never be afraid to start over.

Below it, in Mason’s blocky letters:

Mason Cole: restore Magnolia House. Build a boat. Stay close to the water. Make sure Audrey comes back.

Audrey’s breath caught.

Mason read the last line and looked away.

“You wrote that,” she said.

“I was twelve.”

“You underlined it.”

“I was an emphatic twelve.”

She tried to laugh, but it came out thin. “You never told me.”

“You never came back.”

The sentence was not sharp. That made it worse.

Audrey folded the paper along its old crease. “I came back now.”

“For six weeks.”

The barrier between them had a shape now. It was not the garden or the ruined fountain. It was the temporary nature of her suitcase, the partnership offer waiting in Atlanta, and the fact that Mason had built a life in the place she had left behind.

“I didn’t know you wanted me to,” she said.

His expression changed, the amusement gone completely. “You were my best friend. Wanting you to come back wasn’t exactly a secret to me.”

“But you never asked.”

“I thought you had chosen.”

“I had.”

The honesty left them both quiet.

From somewhere down the hall came the scrape of a saw and Daniel Hayes calling for a measurement. Mason glanced toward the sound, then at his watch.

“You’re late,” he said.

“I know.”

“And Clara will send someone after you if you don’t get to the cottages.”

Audrey placed the paper back in the tin, but kept the photograph in her hand. “You can go.”

“I’m walking you there.”

“You don’t have to.”

“I know.”

He picked up her suitcase. This time she let him.

They crossed the rear veranda and entered a narrower path toward the cottages. The route was shaded by oaks, but the garden pressed close on either side, wet leaves brushing Audrey’s bare arms. Mason moved ahead with the suitcase, clearing branches with one hand. He did not look back often. He did not need to. Audrey followed the familiar line of his shoulders, carrying the photograph and the old promise against her chest.

At the first cottage, a temporary sign read SITE SURVEY - COTTAGE THREE. The door stood open. Inside, sunlight fell across bare floorboards and exposed studs.

Mason set down the suitcase. “I’ll have someone bring your drafting table from storage.”

“I can manage without one.”

“I know.”

She held up the photograph. “Mason.”

He looked at her.

“Did you mean it?”

His gaze dropped to the picture, then returned to her face. “At twelve?”

“Any age.”

For the first time since she had arrived, he seemed without an answer. A breeze moved through the cottage, carrying the scent of sawdust and orange blossoms.

“I meant it when I wrote it,” he said. “I don’t know what it means now.”

Then he turned toward the path.

Audrey slipped the photograph into the tin and closed the lid. She had come to Magnolia House prepared to measure walls, inspect thresholds, and begin a temporary assignment.

Instead, she had recovered a promise with Mason’s name on it.

Behind schedule already, she followed him into the cottage, the buried tin heavy in her portfolio and the question of what came next heavier still.

End of chapter one. 29 more chapters in the full book.