We are delighted to share an excerpt from RaeAnne Thayne’s 15 Summers Later, which releases on June 18th 2024! Read on to discover the synopsis and first chapter, and be sure to add this one to your TBR!
15 summers ago, everything changed… Ava Howell seemed to have it all. She moved away from Emerald Creek, Idaho, married the love of her life and published a bestselling memoir. But she never expected that her husband would feel so betrayed by a secret from her past—the truth of what happened to her and her sister all those years ago—that he’d walk away. Now Ava is back home and trying to move on with the only person who can truly understand…
Following years of healing, Madison Howell is finally happy. After college she built a no-kill shelter where she works with animals every day, and she’s in love with the town veterinarian, Dr. Luke Gentry. But she can’t ever bring herself to tell him. Years ago, his dad died protecting Madi and her sister, so how could he ever love her back?
With the truth laid bare, and the past that Ava and Madison have worked so hard to leave behind threatening everything they have built for themselves, the Howell sisters’ reunion is bittersweet. And as Ava and Madi attempt to remedy the rifts in their lives and reconcile their futures, they must face the demons of their past together.
One
The present is a delicate tightrope walk between liberation and the haunting memories that cling to us. The scent of freedom is both intoxicating and terrifying, and each step away from the compound feels like a small victory against the darkness that threatened to consume us.
—Ghost Lake by Ava Howell Brooks
Madison
“Here, let me get that for you. You shouldn’t be grabbing heavy bags of food off the shelf without help. You might hurt yourself, honey.”
At the well-meaning but misguided efforts of her seventy-year-old neighbor, Madison Howell tried not to grind her teeth.
Under other circumstances, she might have thought the old rancher was being misogynistic, assuming any young woman was too fragile and frail to heft a fifty-pound bag of dog food onto her cart.
Unfortunately, she knew that wasn’t the case. Calvin Warner simply thought she couldn’t do it.
How could she blame him, when the majority of her neighbors shared his sentiments, believing she was forever damaged?
“It’s fine. I’ve got it,” she insisted, taking a firm hold of the bag.
“Now, don’t be stubborn. Let me help you.”
He set his cane aside—yes, he actually had a cane!—and all but shoved her out of the way.
Short of engaging in a no-holds-barred, Greco-Roman wrestling match right there in the farm supply store with a curmudgeon who had arthritis and bad knees, Madi didn’t know what else to do but watch in frustration while he lifted the bag onto her large platform cart.
“Thank you,” she said as graciously as she could manage. “Now I need five more bags.”
“Five?” Calvin looked aghast.
“Yes. We have twenty-two dogs right now at the rescue. You don’t need a new Aussie, do you? We have four from an abandoned litter.”
“No. I’m afraid not. I’m a border-collie man myself and I have three of them. Twenty-two dogs. My word. That must be a lot of work.”
Yes, the work required to care for the animals at the Emerald Creek Animal Rescue was endless. All twenty-two dogs, ten cats, two llamas, three potbellied pigs, four goats and two miniature horses and a donkey required food, attention, medical care, exercise and, unfortunately, waste cleanup.
Madi didn’t care. She loved the work and adored every one of their animals. After years of dreaming, planning, struggling, she considered it something of a miracle that the animal shelter was fully operational now.
For the past three months, Madi had been running full tilt, juggling her job as a veterinary tech as well as the hours and hours required to organize her team of volunteers, hire a full-time office assistant and do her part caring for the animals.
She was finally ready to take a huge leap of faith. In only a few more weeks, she would be quitting her job as a veterinary technician at the local clinic so that she could work full time as the director of the animal rescue.
She tried to ignore the panic that always flickered through her when she thought of leaping into the unknown.
“The dogs are easy,” she answered Calvin now. “Don’t get me started on the goats and the potbellied pigs.”
“I heard you were doing something over there at Gene Pruitt’s old place. I had no idea you were up to your eyeballs in animals.”
“Yes. We’ve started the first no-kill animal sanctuary in this area. Our goal is to take in any abandoned, injured or ill-treated animal in need, help rehabilitate them and place them in new homes.”
He blinked in surprise, his bushy eyebrows meeting in the middle. “Is that right? Are there really that many animals in need of help in these parts?”
“Yes. Without question. We have no other no-kill shelters serving this area of Idaho. I’m grateful we have been able to fill that need.”
For years, since finishing college and returning to Emerald Creek, Madi had been struggling to start the shelter. She had modest success applying for grants and seeking donations from various national and local donors, but it still seemed out of reach.
A year ago, the sanctuary had come closer than ever to reality when a crusty old local bachelor with no remaining family had left his twenty-acre farm, as well as a small house on the property, to the Emerald Creek Animal Rescue Foundation.
She was still overwhelmed at Eugene Pruitt’s generosity.
Even so, it had taken an additional incredibly generous gift from an anonymous donor to truly allow them to be able to take care of the start-up operating expenses for the sanctuary without having to heavily mortgage the property.
As hard as she had worked to make her dream a reality, there were still plenty of people in town who would never see her as anything other than that poor Howell girl with the leg brace and the permanent half smile.
“Thank you for your help, Mr. Warner,” she said, after the two of them managed to load up the platform cart.
He appeared slightly out of breath and his hand trembled as he reached for his cane. She shouldn’t have let him help her. The strong, confident woman she wanted to be would have politely told him to move on. Thanks but no thanks. She could handle it, as she had been handling all the challenges that had come her way since her mother’s death when she was twelve.
She had a fair distance to go before she truly was that strong, confident woman.
“Glad I could be here.” Calvin gripped his cane. “You know, they have staff here that can give you a hand next time. They can probably help you take this out to your car. That’s why they’re here.”
She forced a smile. “I’ll keep that in mind. Thanks. And if you decide you need another Aussie, let me know. They’re smart as can be and are all caught up on their shots. Dr. Gentry takes very good care of all of our animals at the sanctuary.”
“He’s a good man. Not quite the vet his father was, but he’s getting there.”
Before she could object on Luke’s behalf and express that he was an excellent veterinarian in his own right, the rancher’s eyes went wide and he suddenly looked horrified at his own words.
“I’m sorry. I wasn’t thinking. Shouldn’t have brought up old Doc Gentry with you.”
Madi could feel each muscle along her spine tighten. “Why not?” she managed.
Calvin gave her a significant look. “You know. Because of…because of the book.”
The book. That blasted book.
“The wife bought a copy the day it came out, after she saw all the buzz about it online. She’s a good reader. Me, not so much. I like audiobooks, but we’ve been reading it together of an evening. It’s awful, everything that happened to you.”
Madi tightened her hands on the handle of the platform cart, fighting the urge to push it quickly toward the checkout stand.
The last thing she wanted to talk about was her sister’s memoir, which had hit bookstores two weeks earlier and had become the runaway success of the summer, already going back for a third printing.
Madi didn’t want to talk about Ghost Lake, to hear other people talk about it or to even think about it.
“Right. Well, thank you again for your help, Mr. Warner. I should get on with my sh-shopping.”
Now she did tighten her hands on the cart, jaw tight.
She hated her stammer that sometimes came out of nowhere. She hated the way her mouth was frozen into a half smile all the time, how she only had partial use of her left hand and the way her leg sometimes completely gave out if she didn’t wear the brace.
And she especially hated the way her sister had exposed their history, their past, their pain to the entire world.
“Take care,” Calvin said, a gentleness in his gruff tone that made her somehow want to scream and weep at the same time.
“Thank you,” she said, as graciously as she could manage, and then pushed the unwieldy cart toward the checkout stand.
She reached it as the woman seated on a high stool at the cash register slid a book with a familiar white-and-bloodred cover beneath the counter.
That blasted book was everywhere. She couldn’t escape it.
“Hi there, Madi.” Jewel Littlebear, whose family owned the feed store, gave her a nervous-looking smile, her gaze shifting in the direction of the book.
Jewel had been in Ava’s grade at school. The two of them had been friends once, before Madi’s sister walked away from everything she once cared about here in Emerald Creek.
“Hi Jewel. How are things? How are the boys?”
Jewell had three hellion sons. She and her family lived on the same street as Madi’s grandmother, in a small ranch-style home where the front yard was covered in toys and bikes and basketballs.
“They’re good. All three of them are playing baseball this summer. I swear, I spend more time over at the park watching their games than I do in my own house.”
She smiled, rose from her stool and carried the handheld scanner around the counter so she could capture the codes on the large bags of food without Madi having to lift them onto the counter.
“Um. That will be a hundred sixty-five dollars and fifteen cents. I’m sorry.”
What exactly was she sorry about? That the price of quality dog food was so high? Or that Madi had caught her reading That Book?
Madi decided not to ask. She swiped the rescue’s credit card and felt a burst of pride when it went through easily.
A moment later, the register spit out her receipt, which Jewel handed over with a smile.
“There you go,” she said, handing it to Madi.
“Thanks. I’ll see you later.”
She hadn’t even walked away from the checkout counter before Jewell pulled the book back out and picked up where she had left off.
Was she reading about their mother’s car accident and the raw, visceral pain their family went through afterward?
Or their father’s steady but inexorable downward spiral into obsession, depression, mental illness?
Or those final horrible days when she and Ava, fourteen and sixteen respectively, had escaped a grim situation that had become impossible, only to find themselves in even worse circumstances?
She didn’t want to know.
Madi hurried out to her pickup, the classic, if dilapidated, teal 1961 Chevrolet Stepside pickup she called Frank that she had inherited from her maternal grandfather.
A few months ago, she had ordered a vinyl-lettered sign for Frank’s side, with the stylized teal-and-yellow logo for the animal sanctuary. Now she only used Frank for sanctuary errands and for social media purposes. It photographed wonderfully and helped raise awareness for their mission.
She had considered driving the pickup in the town’s Fourth of July parade in a month, maybe with a few of the animals in crates in the bed, but now the idea made her slightly ill. She could imagine how everyone would point and talk about her now.
There goes poor Madi Howell. Did you read about what happened to her?
I knew she was odd, with her perma-smile and that limp and her curled-up hand. I guess now we know why.
Renewed fury at her sister broiled under her skin. She did her best to push it away as she maneuvered the big cart to her pickup and opened the tailgate.
Though there were several vehicles in the parking lot, none of them was occupied. At least she didn’t have to fend off more offers of help.
She loaded the bags by herself into the back of the truck, then paused a moment to breathe away her stress, trying to focus instead on the glorious early June day, with the mountains green and verdant and still capped with contrasting white snow that had yet to melt at the higher elevations.
She dearly loved living in Emerald Creek. This small community a half hour from Sun Valley was home. She could never forget how warm and supportive everyone had been when she and Ava moved back to live with their grandmother Leona after everything that happened.
She had wonderful friends here, a job at the vet clinic that she had loved for eight years, and now her passion project, the animal sanctuary.
She had never seriously considered living anywhere else.
But sometimes she had to wonder what it would be like to make her home in a place where she could be a little more…anonymous.
Did that place even exist, now that her sister had spilled their secret trauma to the whole blasted world?
She climbed into the cab of the pickup, fighting a headache, then drove away from the farm supply store, heading through town on her way toward the sanctuary.
It was a beautiful summer afternoon. A couple of older men sat on a bench, shooting the breeze outside the Rustic Pine Trading Post and she saw a healthy line of tourists waiting for the always-busy Fern & Fir Restaurant to open.
As she turned onto Mountain View Road, she slowed down when she spotted a trio of girls on bicycles ahead of her. Four, she realized. One bike held two girls. She was aware of a quick, sharp ache. How often had she and Ava ridden together through the streets of their own town in eastern Oregon like that? Too many to count, but that was in the days before their mother died and everything changed.
She waved at the girls as she passed, recognizing Mariko and Yuki Tanaka as well as Zoe Sullivan and Sierra Gentry. Sierra and Zoe both volunteered at the animal rescue a few hours a week.
She pulled the truck over ahead of them, and the girls rode up beside her. “Hey girls. What are you up to on this beautiful day?”
Sierra leaned into the open passenger window, her brown hair streaked with sunlight. “We were hanging out at my place and thought maybe we would ride to the Dixon’s farm stand and grab some fresh strawberries.”
“We really love strawberries,” Zoe said with a giggle.
Madi strongly suspected the real draw wasn’t so much the strawberries but Ash Dixon, the heartthrob fifteen-year-old whose family ran a popular farm stand and also had a stall at the Emerald Thumbs Farmers Market on Saturday mornings.
“Sounds like fun. Enjoy a crepe for me.”
“I will. Bye, Mad. See you later.”
She waved and put the truck in gear again, though before she drove away she thought she heard the words book and Ghost Lake from the girls, through her open window.
No. She was imagining things. That damn book seemed to be popping up everywhere…but only a narcissist would think everyone in town was talking about her, right?
Excerpted from 15 SUMMERS LATER by RaeAnne Thayne. Copyright © 2024 by RaeAnne Thayne. Published by Canary Street Press, an imprint of HarperCollins.
