Whispers of a Forgotten Summer

The lakehouse smelled of pine needles and mildew. Sarah ran her fingers over the warped screen door, its hinges screeching like the ghost of her childhood. She hadn’t stepped foot here since Dad’s funeral, but the lawyer’s letter left no choice: “The property must be cleared by month’s end.”

Upstairs, the attic yawned like a tomb. Dust motes swirled in the stale air as Sarah tugged open a cobwebbed trunk. Beneath moth-eaten quilts, she found it—a shoebox labeled *1989* in her father’s jagged cursive. Her breath hitched. That was the summer Lily vanished.

Inside lay letters, their edges sun-bleached to the color of weak tea, bound with fishing twine. The top envelope bore a single name: Clara.

“I promised I’d never tell her the truth,” Dad’s first letter began, “but every time I look at her, I see you…”

Sarah’s knees buckled. She sank onto the floorboards as the words bled through her:

Clara, she has your laugh. When she runs, it’s your wildness in her stride. Martha suspects nothing, but how long can I lie? The doctor says the cancer will take you by fall. You ask me to let her go, to erase you… but God, how do I unlove you both?

A Polaroid fluttered loose—a woman in a yellow sundress, waist-deep in lakewater, smiling like she knew secrets the light couldn’t touch. Lily’s smile.

Memories erupted, vivid and cruel:

Nine years old, chasing fireflies as Lily’s laughter skipped across the dock. “Race you to the raft, Bug!” she’d yelled, her sunflower-patterned swimsuit flashing in the dusk. Then, days later—the empty bed. Mom’s hollow voice: “Gone to stay with Aunt Ruth.” No goodbye. No calls. Just a lifetime of silence where a sister should’ve been.

Sarah stumbled downstairs, letters clutched to her chest. The lake glinted through cracked windows, its surface still as a held breath.

That’s when she saw it—a name carved into the dock’s rotting post: LILY.

“No,” she whispered. She’d walked past that post a thousand times. It hadn’t been there yesterday.

The wind chime Dad made from seashells clinked suddenly, though the air hung motionless.

——

Nightfall brought storms. Sarah sat at the kitchen table, the letters spread like a crime scene. Page after page, the truth unfolded:

Clara, the college sweetheart Dad abandoned when Grandma forbade “that artist vagabond.” Their reunion decades later, a single reckless weekend while Mom recovered from surgery in the city. The pregnancy. Clara’s terminal diagnosis. The choice—to let Lily be raised as his wife’s child, or watch his lover die alone.

“Martha will never forgive me,” he wrote, “but she’ll love Lily. You have my word.”

The final letter was dated August 18, 1989—two days before Lily disappeared:

Clara—

The doctors say weeks, maybe days. Martha found Lily’s birth certificate. She knows. I’m sending Lily to you tonight. Let her hear your voice, hold your hand… Let her know her real mother loved her enough to let go. Forgive me.

Thunder rattled the house. Sarah stared at the rain-lashed window.

A flash of yellow flickered at the lake’s edge.

——

She ran outside, barefoot and shaking. The storm tore at her clothes as she reached the dock.

“Lily?” she screamed into the dark.

Lightning split the sky. For a heartbeat, she saw them—two figures in the downpour. A woman in a yellow dress, hand-in-hand with a girl in a sunflower swimsuit. They stepped onto the water… and vanished.

Sarah woke hours later on the dock, dawn bleeding across the lake. Her fingers were raw, nails caked with rotted wood—she’d clawed at the post until the “Y” in Lily’s name splintered away.

Back inside, a new horror waited.

On the kitchen table, beside the letters, lay her childhood diary—flipped open to July 1989. Her own girlish scrawl screamed from the page:

“Saw Dad push the yellow lady into the lake. He yelled ‘Clara!’ but she didn’t come up. Lily cried. He carried her to the car. Mom says I imagined it.”

Sarah vomited into the sink.

——

The wind chime sang as she stood at the attic window, matches in hand. Below, the lake swallowed the sun whole.

Burn the letters. Let the dead stay dead.

But Lily’s laughter echoed in her bones—real, alive, hungry.

“I’m sorry,” Sarah whispered, though she didn’t know who she was begging—Clara, Lily, or the ghost of the father who’d loved too ruinously to ever tell the truth.

She pulled out her phone. The screen illuminated a name: Mom - Home.

One call. One question. Thirty years of lies.

Outside, the shell chime rang and rang.

——

Epilogue

The lakehouse sold to a young couple from the city. They razed it, built a glass-walled modern thing that reflected the pines like a smug smile.

But locals swear on still nights, you can hear it—the laughter of two girls racing through trees that no longer exist, their footsteps vanishing where the old dock once stood.

As for Sarah? She visits a nursing home every Sunday. She and her mother sit in lawn chairs by a concrete pond, feeding ducks stale bread. They never speak of 1989, of yellow dresses, or the way Mom’s hands shake when Sarah says, “Love you.”

Some silences grow roots.

Some truths drown you.