FLASH FICTION: Great Summer

He looked exactly the same, which she found offensive. But she had changed enough for both of them.

They had agreed on coffee, which was the correct format for this kind of thing. Neutral territory. Daytime.

She had arrived first and chosen a table that communicated she was fine, had always been fine, and had in fact spent very little time thinking about this meeting at all.

Which held for approximately four minutes.

He sat down and said her name like it was good news.

“I was just thinking about that summer,” he said. “The house in Invermere. Remember?”

She remembered the house with unreasonable clarity, including the part where he told her, on the last night, that he needed space to figure out what he wanted, which turned out to be her friend Danielle.

“Good summer,” she said.

“Wasn’t it?” He smiled. He had the expression of a man revisiting a book he liked. “We were so young.”

“Mm.”

“I think about it a lot, actually. How easy things were.”

She looked at him. He appeared entirely sincere.

This was either the most sophisticated psychological defence mechanism she had ever witnessed.

Or he had genuinely found a way to file the last two weeks of that August somewhere she could no longer access and replaced them with something warmer and more convenient.

She considered telling him. Walking him back through the timeline.

The porch.

The Thursday.

Danielle’s Instagram, which had gone private three days later for reasons that had seemed, at the time, pointed.

Some details stay exactly where you left them.

Instead she picked up her coffee.

“It really was,” she said. “Great summer.”

He nodded, satisfied.

She smiled at him over the rim of her cup with the warmth of someone who had made a decision she had not yet examined.

Something in her settled.