𝐒𝐔𝐌𝐌𝐄𝐑 𝐖𝐀𝐒 𝐋𝐄𝐅𝐓 𝐔𝐍𝐅𝐈𝐍𝐈𝐒𝐇𝐄𝐃. And abruptly, for that matter. It was swept away regrettably and wistfully— all of the salt air and the golden honey sun rays, the water on the docks and the sand between toes was cut short, at the end of July with only two weeks to harness. For a while, there were no sunsets to watch over the horizon, there was no sweet sun spilling through the bedroom window, and there was no running. For a while, there was no running from everything. There was no more fugitive stuff.
Because the fugitive had gotten lost at sea.
Charlotte Collins never expected any of it. At the beginning of the summer, she'd simply been a teenager from New York, one that was neglected from her famous parents, and one that was just hoping to breeze through the summer and her first year of public high school. But everything spiraled into what she never thought possible. She'd made friends for the first time— four people she grew to love entirely, four people that whisked her away with them on a summer of ludicrousness. She'd gotten a boyfriend, said-fugitive to be exact, and experienced most of the firsts that a teenager experiences. She'd found out she had half siblings— which led to figuring out why her parents had neglected her for so long. And she realized she really, really loved her grandparents.
Charlotte, seventeen years old, and fugitive adjacent (sort of) in the whole cacophony, was there to wither in the aftermath of John B's demise. For two weeks of the aforementioned unfinished mess, she was feeling every last bit of every last emotion towards his disappearance at sea. To put things simply, she believed that he was dead from the moment they'd heard the news in the cop tent. Unlike some others, who theorized his getaway and timely vanishing— Charlie believed deep down that her boyfriend was dead.
And time sort of paused from then on.
For the last month of summer, she'd wasted it away feeling every moment over again, a million little times behind her bedroom window in New York city. Her birthday had passed, her parents hadn't even come home to check on her, and her grandparents were settled in the penthouse. For the last month.
