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First published in the United States of America by Balzer + Bray in 2019
Balzer + Bray is an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers
Published simultaneously in Great Britain by HarperCollins Children’s Books in 2019
HarperCollins Children’s Books is a division of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd,
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Text copyright © Sarah Dessen 2019
Jacket art © 2019 by Jenny Carrow
Typography by Jenna Stempel-Lobell
All rights reserved.
Sarah Dessen asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of the work.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780008334390
Ebook Edition © April 2019 ISBN: 9780008334406
Version: 2019-04-19
For Leigh Feldman.
Even when words fail me, you never do.
Thank you.
Contents
There weren’t a lot of memories, especially good ones. But there was this.
“Tell me a story,” I’d say when it was bedtime but I wasn’t at all sleepy.
“Oh, honey,” my mom would reply. “I’m tired.”
She was always tired: that I did remember. Especially in the evenings, after that first or second glass of wine, which most often led to a bottle, once I was asleep. Usually my dad cleaned up before he went to bed, but when he wasn’t around, the evidence remained there in the light of day when I came down for breakfast.
“Not a fairy tale,” I’d say, because she always said no at first. “A lake story.”
At this, she’d smile. “A lake story? Well. That’s different.”
That was when I knew I could lean back into my pillows, grabbing my stuffed giraffe, George, and settle in.
“Once upon a time,” she’d begin, locking a leg around mine or draping an arm over my stomach, because snuggling was part of the telling, “there was a little girl who lived by a big lake that seemed like it went on forever. The trees around the edges had moss, and the water was cold and clear.”
This was when I would start to picture it. Seeing the details.
“The