The first thing I did after becoming the internet's favorite abandoned woman was drive six hours to a town with no dependable air-conditioning.

Three days earlier, Trevor had broken up with me beside a sponsored infinity pool while eleven thousand strangers watched the livestream. He'd looked into the ring light instead of my face and said, "You don't love your life, Maggie. You love having proof that someone else wants it." Then he thanked our hydration sponsor. The clip hit four million views before I made it to the airport.

So. Marigold Bay, Georgia. Aunt Della's cottage, yellow with green shutters, willed to me six months ago along with one instruction taped inside the refrigerator in her looping hand: Open the windows before you decide the place is unbearable.

I opened all of them. The heat came in anyway, thick as syrup, carrying cicada scream and the smell of hot pine. My phone buzzed against my thigh like a trapped wasp. PR suggestions. Interview requests. A message from Trevor proposing we release a "mutually respectful statement." I put the phone in airplane mode and kept it in my hand, which tells you everything about me that a therapist would need four sessions to extract.

That night I took Della's peach wine down to the dock. It had aged into something that tasted like a scented candle filing a complaint. Across the black water, the Moonwheel Carnival flickered its bulbs at me like it remembered who I used to be.

I drank enough to hold a formal hearing.

"Summer," I announced to the lake, "is a fraudulent season with excellent marketing." I listed the charges. Sun poisoning at thirteen. Falling in love at eighteen. A career built on selling happiness I'd stopped feeling somewhere around my third brand deal. And now a public execution beside a pool that wasn't even mine.

The lake flashed gold.

A man stood at the end of the dock where no man had been. Sunburned shoulders. White swim trunks embroidered with tiny suns. A crown of peach leaves. His hair moved in a breeze that did not exist, and his bare feet left little smoking prints on the damp boards.

Great. The heatstroke has a face.

He raised one hand and every cicada in Georgia went silent at once, like God had unplugged the amp.

"Margaret Bell," he said, "you have slandered a season."

******

He introduced himself as August, Keeper of Cicadas, Patron of Last Chances, Lord of the Lingering Light, Bringer of Thunder, Guardian of Tan Lines, and Regional Supervisor of Poorly Considered Kisses.

"Retract your statement," he said.

"Which one?"

"The attack upon summer."

"Do you have any idea how little that narrows it down?"

He explained, with the wounded grandeur of a man reading his own obituary, that he was dying. Humanity had stopped performing summer. People photographed sunsets without watching them. They worked through vacations. They purchased candles that smelled like beaches they refused to visit.

"Summer is a hundred and four degrees," I said. "People are hiding from you because you're trying to kill them."

"Extreme climate events are not my department." He drew himself up. "Direct complaints to the senior atmospheric gods, who have refused three consecutive meeting requests."

Then he flickered. For one full second I could see the dock lights through his chest, and something in my own chest turned over, because he looked exactly like a man pretending not to be afraid.

Marigold Bay, he said, was one of his last strongholds. The Moonwheel once generated enough real summer feeling to sustain him for months. Now people used it as a backdrop. He needed a renewal ritual before midnight tomorrow. Seven experiences, the full architecture of a genuine summer romance. Roadside fruit. Sunburn. Night swimming. A thunderstorm. A secret. Carnival lights. A goodbye. Real ones. No audience. No posting.

"Hard no," I said.

"Then I shall attach myself to you until September. Everything you drink will reach room temperature upon contact with your hand."

He knows my weaknesses. He's been studying film.

"I don't have a romantic partner," I said. "You may have seen the livestream."

Headlights swung into Della's driveway. A truck door slammed. A man came around the corner of the cottage carrying a toolbox, lean and sun-browned, a thin scar through one eyebrow that I had watched happen from the boathouse roof fourteen years ago.

Owen Hale looked at me. Then he looked at the glowing deity on my dock and sighed like a man finding raccoons in his attic again.

"You're not supposed to be visible," he said.

"You know him?"

"Everybody's got something," Owen said. "Della hired me to fix the wiring before she passed. I'm just here for the panel box."

August spread his arms. "Owen Hale, you have been selected as Margaret's partner in the renewal."

"No," Owen said.

Somewhere across the water a transformer exploded, and half the lakefront went dark.

"Unrelated," August said. Then, quieter: "We should begin soon."

I tried a joke about old times, something about how the universe clearly shipped us. Owen didn't smile. He looked at me the way you look at a stove you burned yourself on once.

"You remember it as a love story," he said, "because you weren't the one turned into the punch line."

He agreed to do it. For the carnival, he said. For the town's power grid. He picked up his toolbox and made it very clear that none of this was for me.

******

August could not ride in Owen's air-conditioned truck without wilting, so he traveled in the bed, shouting directions no one needed. "LEFT AT THE CHURCH. I INVENTED THAT CHURCH'S POTLUCK."

Nix's Peach Stand sat under a striped awning, crates of fruit so ripe they bruised under their own weight. I reached for my phone out of pure muscle memory, framed the shot in my head, warm tones, and August slapped the phone out of my hand into an empty basket.

"The fruit must be eaten standing beside the road," he decreed. "Without utensils. Before it becomes photogenic."

"This peach is disintegrating," I said.

"That is called ripeness. Your generation has been betrayed by refrigeration."

Owen and I ate in silence. Juice ran down my wrist to my elbow, and I fought the peach for my dignity and lost, and Owen laughed. Just once, low and surprised, like it escaped custody. The first unguarded sound between us in fourteen years.

I almost told the story. Remember when you used to bite into these and pretend the pits were cursed artifacts? But that was the old move, wasn't it. Prove I remembered him. Collect the points. Instead I asked what he'd been doing, and he said he restored the Moonwheel, took contract jobs, kept busy. Four sentences about fourteen years. I realized I knew everything about a boy and nothing about the man eating a peach three feet from me.

August's voice came back so strong he began narrating traffic. "A SEDAN APPROACHES. IT CARRIES A FAMILY AND UNSPOKEN RESENTMENT."

While we argued about whether the fruit counted, my shoulders quietly cooked in the sun. By the time I noticed, experience two had completed itself without my consent.

"Sunburn is not romantic," I said.

"Neither are most things humans remember fondly," August said.

Owen put aloe on the part of my shoulder I couldn't reach. His hands were careful and impersonal, and for three seconds I mistook gentleness for forgiveness, and then he stepped back and screwed the cap on like he was closing the subject.

August celebrated too close to a cardboard sign and set the corner on fire. Progress.

*****

After dark we came back to Della's dock. I announced I had no swimsuit, hoping for a technicality.

"Underwear was invented by mortals who lacked courage," August said.

"Turn around, Gus," Owen said.

"THAT IS AN ACT OF WAR."

We went in wearing T-shirts, and the lake did what the lake always did, warm silk on top and cold secrets underneath. And for a few minutes we were just bodies who remembered each other. Owen challenged me to the buoy. I accused him of cheating. He reminded me I once bit him during a race, and I explained there had been no governing body present, and August stood guard on the dock with tremendous solemnity until a firefly distracted him completely.

Then my phone rang from the dock, screen glowing like a flare. Trevor.

I started swimming for it. Actually started. Water in my ears and my legs moving before my brain filed the paperwork.

"You want to answer that?" Owen said behind me. "Or do you just hate that somebody else gets the last edit?"

I stopped. Treaded water. The phone rang itself out and the lake went dark again, and something in my ribs unlocked half an inch.

August's hair lit up gold across the water. Three down.

We floated on our backs after, far enough apart to be safe. "I didn't know," I said to the sky. "That you'd taken it seriously. Us."

"You knew," Owen said. "That's why saying it meant nothing worked."

I opened my mouth to build my defense and found the site condemned. The air changed. The heat lifted off the lake like a held breath released, and thunder rolled somewhere behind the trees.

"AHEAD OF SCHEDULE," August called happily. "I AM SO BACK."

******

The storm came in swinging. We ran for the old boathouse, and the rain hit the metal roof like applause from a hostile crowd. Lightning cut the lake into white pieces. The power died, leaving only August's weak gold glow while he stood in the doorway conducting the thunder with both arms.

"Sit down, Gus," Owen said.

The thunderstorm ticked complete, but August kept flickering. "The next requires a secret," he said. "A real one. It must cost something to tell."

I offered up my inventory. I hate rosé. I pay someone to caption my spontaneous photos. I once pretended to love paddleboarding for the length of an entire sponsorship.

"Coupons," August said. "I require currency."

Owen went first, which I didn't expect. "I wrote you three letters," he said. "After."

"I never got any letters."

"I sent them here. Only address I had. Della mailed them back unopened." He watched me in the storm light. "With a note. Said you'd asked not to receive anything from me."

The rain filled the silence I couldn't.

"I did ask," I said.

Say the small version. Say you were young. Say it kindly.

I said the true version instead.

"If you wrote, I'd have answered. If I answered, it wouldn't end when I decided it ended." My father had left that year, I told him. After a whole spring of promising nothing would change, he changed everything for a woman named Sandra who had a boat. I'd decided love was just humiliation with a waiting period. So when Owen asked me, that last week, what happened after summer, I heard a countdown. I got certain he was winding up to leave me.

So I left first. Publicly. I stood in front of our friends on this exact dock and called him my practice boyfriend, and I laughed, and I watched his face do the thing I have spent fourteen years editing out of the memory.

"The secret isn't that I loved you," I said. "The secret is that I hurt you on purpose because I loved you. I wanted you to hurt before you had the chance to hurt me. It worked. That is the ugliest true thing I know about myself."

Owen was quiet for a long time. When he spoke he wasn't gentle. "You carried the explanation for fourteen years. You let me believe I imagined us."

"I know."

"I'm not saying it's fine."

"I'm not asking you to."

Inside August's chest, faint under the rain, something began to beat. For once he didn't celebrate. He sat in the doorway with his knees pulled up, an ancient thing being respectful, and let the thunder talk.

Then Owen said, "I'm leaving tomorrow morning. Restoration job in Colorado. Long-term."

The floor of the boathouse tilted under me without moving at all.

"You're not the only person who gets to leave," he said.

******

The Moonwheel Carnival was running on half power when we got there, one side of the midway dark, the great wheel standing unlit against the sky. Owen had spent months restoring it, and now he had one night and a fried connection and a nearly restored god who kept offering to help by "intimidating the electricity."

"Your magic can't do this?" I asked.

"I amplify what humans feel," August said. "I cannot replace it. I am a season, not a generator."

So I held the flashlight. I handed Owen the tools he named, and when I didn't know a tool I asked instead of guessing, and I did not narrate any of it for an invisible audience. My hands got greasy. My hair stuck to my neck. Somewhere in there I stopped composing the caption.

The wheel came alive in stages, bulb by warm bulb, until it laid a second Moonwheel across the black lake. All around us, people lifted their phones.

"It's not done," August said quietly. "Illumination is not attention."

I looked at the crowd filming the light instead of standing in it. Then I powered my phone off, no announcement, no speech, and set it in Owen's toolbox. He looked at me a second and put his beside it.

We took the last carriage up. At the top the wheel paused, and Marigold Bay spread out below us, cottage lights and black water, the peach stand sign, heat lightning far off behind the trees, Della's dock small and patient at the edge of everything.

"I've spent ten years selling people the idea that you can preserve a perfect moment," I said.

"Preserved things are usually dead," Owen said.

I laughed, and then I was crying, and he reached over and took my hand, and the carnival lights flared bright enough that the whole midway looked up from its screens.

He kissed me. Or I kissed him. The governing body was absent again. It wasn't the kiss from when we were eighteen, and thank God, because I'd have known that kiss and this one I had to learn. He was slower now. Careful in new places. A stranger with familiar hands.

August floated up outside the carriage, fully solid, arms crossed, pretending hovering was normal. "One remains," he said.

The goodbye.

******

"You built all this so it would end," I accused him, back on the ground. "You engineered a romance specifically to break it."

August looked genuinely insulted, which for him required his whole body. "You misunderstand my function entirely. I do not make summer endless. I make it matter that it ends." He counted on his fingers. "Without a goodbye, a summer romance becomes possession. Nostalgia becomes denial. A season becomes climate. Everything is supposed to end, Margaret. Humans are the only creatures who consider that a design flaw."

And I understood, standing there in the carnival's dying light, that the goodbye wasn't to Owen. It was to the museum I'd built. The boy under glass. Eighteen-year-old Owen, preserved at peak ripeness, proof that I was lovable once, before.

So I said it to the real one.

"I'm sorry for the girl who hurt you. I'm grateful for the boy who loved her. I don't expect either of us to be those people again. And I'm not going to ask you to stay to prove I matter."

Owen nodded slowly. "Then I'm saying goodbye to the version of you I've been mad at for fourteen years. She took up a lot of room."

We didn't promise anything. We didn't know each other well enough to promise anything, and both of us finally knew it.

The goodbye landed, and August went up like a struck match, gold pouring off him, every bulb on the midway flaring, cicadas erupting across three counties, and a wind came off the lake that was warm and then, for the first time all weekend, cool.

"You owe me your survival, this town's electrical grid, and one positive seasonal review," he informed me.

"I still hate humidity."

"HUMIDITY IS SENSUAL ATMOSPHERE," he bellowed, and burst into fireflies.

******

Owen left the next morning. I didn't chase the truck. I stood in the driveway with my coffee going room temperature the old-fashioned way, and before he climbed in, he asked if I was selling Della's place.

I looked back at the cottage, all its windows open. "Haven't decided."

He wrote a number on the back of a receipt. Not the number I'd kept saved for fourteen years and never called. A new one.

"Call me in October," he said. "Let's see if we like each other without August supervising."

After his truck turned out of sight, I took the last peach down to the dock and sat with my phone beside me instead of in my hand. The notification was waiting when the screen woke: Ready to release your statement?

I turned the phone facedown.

Across the lake, the unlit Moonwheel stood against the early sky, and I didn't need a picture to prove the light had been there.

I ate the peach before the light could make it beautiful, and for once, that did not make the moment disappear.