Salt and Vinegar Summers

The gravel crunched beneath her tires as the car rolled to a stop beneath the familiar canopy of pine. The air smelled like memory—sap and sun-warmed wood, with just a trace of last night’s rain lingering in the ferns. Sylvie sat for a moment with the engine off, her fingers curled loosely around the wheel. The silence settled fast.

She opened the door.

The cabin hadn’t changed. The porch still sagged slightly to the left, as if leaning into the weight of its years. The screen door hung stubbornly on one good hinge, ready to moan when she opened it. A wind chime rattled softly, the sound too sharp against the hush that pressed in all around her.

Across the narrow inlet, the Reyes cabin stood still and untouched. No towels flung over the railing to dry. No guitar resting on the porch swing. No orange flicker of a citronella candle burning against dusk mosquitoes. The dock was bare. Even the welcome mat looked like it hadn’t been stepped on in months.

Maybe she was just late.

Sylvie opened the trunk and pulled out her bag, her books, and the blanket Juniper always stole for morning coffee on the steps. And the chips—salt and vinegar, the kind that made her tongue sting. She carried them all inside, dust trailing behind her like a ghost.

The cabin welcomed her with its usual creaks and sighs. She set the chips down on the kitchen table and didn’t open them.

Outside, the lake was glass. Still. Waiting.

She told herself Juniper might show up tomorrow. Maybe Sunday. Maybe she just hadn’t sent the text.

But her chest already knew what her mouth wouldn’t say.

By the second morning, the silence had stretched into something heavier. Not absence exactly. Not yet. Just… space.

Sylvie moved through the rhythms anyway.

She brought a book to the dock—Jane Eyre, the old, dog-eared copy they used to trade back and forth as if it held answers. The pages were swollen slightly from years of damp fingers and lake air, the spine cracked in two places. Juniper’s notes lined the margins in faded blue pen, all loops and arrows and underlines that made no academic sense but felt holy just the same.

This line? Me @ 1 a.m. with zero dignity.

Syl, tell me this doesn’t sound like your middle school crush??

Ugh, Rochester can choke, but the DRAMA—

Sylvie ran her thumb under the scribbled words, her mouth twitching at the memory. She could still hear Juniper’s voice—bright, too loud, unapologetically alive. The ghost of it skimmed across the water like a skipped stone.

Later, she walked their trail. The one that looped around the east side of the inlet, through blackberry thickets and a patch of birch trees where they used to carve initials into the bark with broken twigs. Age twelve: Juniper dared her to jump into the lake fully clothed. Sylvie did, then shivered the whole walk back. Age seventeen: their hands brushed in the canoe and stayed there—tentative, lingering. No words. Just warmth and the sound of the oars slicing water like a secret.

She hadn’t told anyone about that.

By dusk, the dragonflies skimmed low across the water, and the lake mirrored a watercolor sky—pale lavender edged in gold. Sylvie sat on the porch steps, hoodie sleeves pulled down past her wrists. It was Juniper’s, of course—oversized, worn thin at the elbows. Still smelled like coconut shampoo and the citronella oil Junie always overdid.

She didn’t notice she was crying until a tear landed on her thumb.

That night, after she’d turned off the lights but couldn’t sleep, she slid her phone from under her pillow and hit play on the saved voicemail. She’d listened to it more times than she’d admit. Never all the way through.

“Hey, Lennox…”

A laugh. Wind. Faint music in the background.

“Okay, I’m probably running late. Surprise, surprise.”

“Don’t eat all the marshmallows before I get there…”

“I’ll be there just after you, okay?”

“Don’t wait up.”

A long pause. A softer voice.

“I miss you already. That’s gross. Don’t tell anyone.”

Sylvie pressed the phone to her chest and lay still, the sound of Juniper’s voice echoing into the dark.

She didn’t delete it. She never would.

Milo appeared on the third morning, just like he always had—silent, sudden, and half-wild.

He stood at the edge of the Lennox cabin porch, tail twitching low, his golden eyes fixed on her like she might vanish if he blinked. Sylvie froze mid-step, a half-drunk cup of coffee cooling in her hand.

For years, Milo had treated her like an intrusion. He’d belonged to no one and everyone, but mainly to Juniper. He only ever came near when Junie called him, her voice pitched in that mock-stern way that made animals and people alike obey. With Sylvie, he hissed. Or disappeared entirely.

But now, he stayed.

She knelt slowly. “Hey, old man,” she murmured. “You forget to hate me this year?”

Milo blinked, then padded closer. Not touching, but near enough that his fur caught the breeze from her hoodie. He sniffed the air, gave a low, rasping meow, then turned away.

Leading.

She understood.

The rowboat was still tied to the dock, the oars bleached from too many summers. Sylvie untied the line, stepped in, and pushed off. The lake rippled under her, silent and silver. Milo watched from the dock as she crossed the narrow inlet—then, impossibly, sprang into the boat when it approached the Reyes side.

The cabin looked smaller than it had from across the water. Its yellow paint was sun-faded, its porch overgrown with creeping vines. The chairs that once faced the lake now turned inward, their backs to the view, like the house had curled up into itself.

Sylvie didn’t try the door. She already knew it was locked.

Instead, she crouched by the steps and placed a smooth, round stone at the edge of the top stair. One she’d found on the trail earlier that morning, it was striped with gray and pale blue like lake light. She didn’t know why she’d picked it up then. Now, it felt right.

A quiet offering. A held breath.

When she climbed back into the boat, Milo circled once, then settled beside her feet. He pressed his flank against her ankle as she rowed back—deliberate, heavy with something she didn’t have words for.

He stayed close the whole way home.

The rain started just after noon. Not a storm, not really—just a steady, whispering drizzle that softened the world like someone laying a blanket over the lake. The kind of weather that wrapped around the cabin and told her to stay still.

Sylvie didn’t argue.

She lit a small fire in the woodstove more out of ritual than need, pulled on a pair of socks she didn’t remember packing, and began thumbing through the shelves. Most of the books were ones they'd brought up over the years. Their names scrawled inside the covers, page corners folded like maps of memory. Juniper had hated bookmarks—said they interrupted the soul of a story.

Near the bottom of the stack by the hearth, she found it.

The journal.

Tan leather, soft and worn at the edges. Their shared record. Each summer, they took turns writing inside—snippets of conversations, doodles of lake fish and trees, terrible poems, even worse song lyrics. It had become their own mythology.

She hadn’t opened the journal since last year. It felt like cracking open a sealed room—dusty, sacred, full of air that hadn’t been breathed in months.

Sylvie opened it carefully. Pages flipped past like ghosts:

—"Syl said she saw a shooting star. I say it was a plane. She's wrong, but let her have it."

—"Tried to make s’mores with pretzels instead of graham crackers. Invented a war crime."

—"Today, we swam across the whole damn lake. Tomorrow, we nap until noon. Priorities."

She smiled. And then she saw it.

A folded page tucked deep in the binding, hidden near the back. Paper thinner than the journal’s stock, with worn edges. Her name was written on the outside in Juniper’s uneven print.

Syl.

Her hands didn’t shake. Not yet. But her chest tightened as she opened it.

Hey Syl,

If you’re reading this, I guess I didn’t make it back this year. I didn’t know how to say it out loud, so I didn’t. That’s on me.

The thing is—I’ve been tired. The kind of tired that sleep doesn’t fix. I didn’t want to bring that into the cabin with me. It’s too full of good things. Of you.

I didn’t tell you about the appointments. Or the treatments. Or the way my hands shake sometimes when I try to light the stove. You would’ve worried. You would’ve started counting the bad days. I wanted one more summer where I got to be Juniper Reyes, chaos queen of Reyes Cabin—not a countdown in someone else’s calendar.

There’s so much I meant to say.

I started to write, “I wanted to tell you I lo—”

(the ink blurred here, water-smudged—crossed out with a single clean line)

I hope you know anyway.

You were my favorite part of every summer. You were the reason I believed in coming back, even if I couldn’t stay.

I hope you still swim at night. I hope you burn something on the last night and mean it. I hope the lake calls to you the way it always called to us.

Take care of the cat, if he lets you. His name’s Milo. I just never told you.

Be kind to yourself, Sylvie. You were the softest place I ever landed.

Always,

—J

Sylvie read it once.

And then again.

And when the tears came, they didn’t break her—they just opened something. Wide and real and hollowed out. She cried with the quiet violence of someone who had been holding her breath for too long. One hand pressed to the page, the other to her chest, like maybe that would keep her from splintering completely.

Outside, the rain blurred the world to watercolor. Inside, the fire burned low. Milo curled near her feet, unmoving.

The silence had changed.

Now, it knew her name.

The last night always came too fast.

Even when they were kids—sunburned and sticky from Popsicles, too full of firepit hot dogs and laughter—Juniper would sigh and say, “Can’t we stretch it just one more day?” And Sylvie would pretend to check an imaginary calendar and shake her head, deadpan. “Summer says no.”

But they always got that final fire.

It had been their tradition since they were sixteen: write down one thing that no longer served them, fold it, burn it, and let the lake wind take the ash. They never read each other’s notes. It was the only part that stayed private.

This year, Sylvie lit the fire alone.

The air was cool, damp from the rain, the logs stubborn at first. She crouched close, shielding the flame as it flickered to life, then stepped back and let it grow. The smoke curled upward, faintly sweet. The stars blinked through a canopy of cloud as if uncertain whether to come out.

Milo settled beside her in the grass, his bulk warm against her thigh. When she held out a marshmallow, he sniffed it, then bit it with a surprising delicacy. Juniper would’ve laughed so hard she choked.

In her lap, the journal sat open. Beside it, the letter.

She copied each line in her own handwriting. Slowly. Carefully. Not changing a word. The ink smeared where her thumb pressed too hard over “I hope you know anyway.”

Once it was done, she folded the original and held it over the flames.

“Thank you,” she whispered, voice breaking like wet kindling. “For not saying goodbye.”

The paper curled, caught, and was gone in seconds—just smoke and embers and memory. The fire hissed as a breeze rolled in from the lake.

Sylvie leaned back on her palms, eyes fixed across the inlet where the Reyes cabin stood—dark, still, and watching.

Then—just for a moment—the porch light flickered on.

She didn’t move. Didn’t breathe. Just watched.

It went dark again a few seconds later. Maybe a short in the wiring. Maybe the wind.

Or maybe Juniper, just once more, leaving the light on for her.

Sylvie looked down at Milo, now curled against her hip like he’d always been hers. She stroked his fur, the hoodie sleeves pushed back just enough to feel the scratch of grass against her skin.

“You should’ve let me carry it with you,” she said softly. Not a goodbye. Just the truth.

The flames danced on.

The sun was just beginning to rise when she closed the cabin door behind her.

The morning air was cool, tinged with dew and the sharp scent of pine needles. Mist hovered low over the lake like breath not yet exhaled. Sylvie stood still for a moment, keys in hand, letting the quiet wrap around her one last time.

Inside, everything was as she’d found it, except that the fire had gone out. And she’d hung the hoodie on the hook beside the door, where Juniper used to toss it without thinking. The sleeves still smelled faintly of citronella and Juniper’s shampoo. Sylvie left it behind. She didn’t need to carry it anymore.

She turned the lock with steady fingers.

Milo was already waiting by the car, tail flicking against the gravel. When she opened the passenger door, he jumped in without hesitation, settled into the seat like he’d always belonged there. Sylvie smiled, faint and tired.

She didn’t question it.

The engine started on the second turn. She backed down the drive, the tires crunching through old pine cones and the passage of time.

At the end of the road, just before it curved out of view, she looked back.

The cabin stood still. The lake beyond it shimmered with gold. And the silence, for once, didn’t feel like grief. It felt like reverence.

Maybe I came for her. But I’m leaving for me.