Every Summer After

Think back to the person who knew you before you knew yourself. The one who saw you through awkward growth spurts and questionable haircuts, whose family felt like your own, and whose presence was as reliable as the summer sun. For six seasons, from scraped knees to first kisses, they were your entire world. Then, one day, they weren't. The connection, once as solid as the granite shores of a northern lake, shatters. What happens when, a decade later, a single phone call forces you back to that place, to face the ghost of that person and the wreckage of the mistake that tore you apart? You're no longer the children who ran barefoot through the woods, but the memory of that bond—and the sharp, lingering pain of its ending—remains, a magnetic north pulling you back to a past you've spent years trying to outrun.

That potent mix of nostalgia, regret, and the hope of a second chance is the emotional territory Carley Fortune explores in her debut novel, Every Summer After. Fortune, a seasoned journalist and editor, spent years crafting stories for others before turning to the one she felt compelled to tell. She drew inspiration from her own childhood summers spent in the Ontario cottage country she so vividly portrays, channeling the sensory details of lakeside life—the scent of pine needles, the slap of a screen door, the specific quiet of a summer night—to build a world that feels both deeply personal and universally resonant. She wanted to capture the intensity of first love and explore the question of whether the people we were are ever truly gone, or if they're just waiting for us to find our way back.

Module 1: The Ghost of Summers Past

The story opens with Persephone, or Percy, living a carefully constructed life in Toronto. She’s a successful magazine editor with a busy social calendar. But her life feels hollow. Her relationships are superficial. She uses sex as an escape, a way to quiet her mind without getting emotionally attached. This detachment is a defense mechanism. A profound, unresolved past relationship can stunt emotional growth for years. Percy has spent twelve years trying to bury the memory of Sam Florek. He was her childhood best friend, her first love, and the source of her deepest heartbreak. A single phone call about the death of Sam's mother shatters her carefully built world. The news hits her like a tsunami, triggering a wave of guilt and grief. She feels she lost the right to mourn a long time ago.

This brings us to a critical idea. Our past and present identities are often in conflict. The person we are today may feel like a stranger to the person we were. For Percy, hearing her old nickname instantly transports her back to being a teenager at the lake. It reminds her of a happier, more authentic self she left behind. Confronting the past is an inevitability. A funeral forces Percy to return to Barry's Bay. It's the one place that ever felt like home. It’s also the place where her life crashed spectacularly off course. She knows this journey north is a reckoning. It's a collision course with the memories, the regrets, and the boy she never got over.

So here's what that means for us. We often build our adult lives as a reaction to our past. We construct identities and routines to protect ourselves from old hurts. But the book suggests these walls are temporary. Sooner or later, life forces us to turn around and face what we’ve been running from. The real work is about integrating the past.