For once, I didn’t hit snooze.
I reached over, shut it off before it could beep again, and slipped quietly out of bed.
Daniel was still asleep beside me, one arm across his face, breathing deeply.
I pulled on yesterday’s gray sweatshirt, tiptoed across the old wooden floor, avoided the board near the door that always creaked, and went downstairs.
The house was still dark.
Outside the kitchen window, the lake looked like a sheet of black glass.
No wind.
No birds.
Just the low hum of my mother’s old refrigerator.
My mother’s kitchen.
That mattered to me much more that morning than it had a week earlier.
Mom owns a little cabin by the lake.
Nothing luxurious.
Two stories.
Cedar siding.
A green metal roof.
A screened porch.
A wooden deck overlooking the water.
Three bedrooms upstairs and one bathroom everyone complains about sharing.
The kitchen still has orange countertops from the late seventies, and the living-room couch is older than I am.
My father bought the place the year I was born.
He paid for it after saving money from years of overtime at the paper mill.
He used to say it was the only thing he ever bought that became worth more to him every year.
Dad died when I was nineteen.
A heart attack.
Right there on the dock while fishing.
Afterward, Mom almost sold the cabin.
She couldn’t bear being there.
For two summers, she stayed away completely.
Then one June morning, she called me.
“I think I’m going to open the lake house.”
And she did.
She has spent every summer there since.
It belongs to her now.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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