holy ground ★ conrad fisher (1)

moon river ★ frank ocean

one

IT WAS FINALLY SUMMER AND right now, nothing else mattered to Aurora Cooper.

Her life had been measured in summers as soon as she was old enough to count, and understand the construct of time.

She would cross off the days on a calendar hanging in her room to her family's annual road trip to, and summer stay at Cousins Beach.

To her, summer didn't just mean three months off from school or no early curfews. It meant spending time at the Beck Family's Summer House.

Even before she was born, the summer house would be home to her mother and her two best friends during the summer holidays.

And now that all three of friends had kids, they passed their summer traditions down to their sons and daughters.

The summer house belonged to Susannah Beck. She was seventeen when she first invited her best friends Laurel Park and Marie Hart to spend the summer holidays at her family's beach house.

They took the trip again the following year, and have done so every year after even as they went through college, got their first jobs, and moved to different parts of the countries with their husbands and growing families.

The summer house remained a much-needed constant in their hectic lives.

Cousins Beach was a small town nestled between busy cities, away from the tall buildings and noisy streets.

It was a chance for everyone to unwind from their stressful lives and take a break by the beach.

Aurora hadn't slept for more than two hours the night before their trip to Cousins. She would toss and turn, her excitement not letting her rest for more than a few minutes at a time.

Her brain would constantly be going over her mental checklists not letting her rest.

The week leading up to their trip, her mother would watch as she would run up and down the stairs of their home in New Haven the night before with a smile on her face and she packed all the stuff she would need and even got some of her younger brothers stuff packed.

She didn't want to be even a second late the following morning for when the trio would load up their car with large boxes of food and drinks from Costco and their bags that they would live out of for the next three months.

And so, at some point, she had given up trying to rest and grabbed her phone from her bedside table. Her lock screen read 4:45 am. She focused on the picture of her lock screen next.

It was a picture of her and everyone else outside the beach house. It was taken right before the Conklin's got on the road for their trip home.

There were some puffy eyes in the picture, nobody wanting to leave after their amazing summer.

Aurora smiled, in just a few more hours she would be with her favorite people again.

Her mother jokes that they have always had a full house over the summers whether it was just the three women or now with their kids.

The Fishers, Conklin, and Coopers have 6 kids in total.

Susannah had her first son, right out of college with her husband Adam. Conrad.

And in what they considered an ironic coincidence, Marie had her daughter a month into their summer stay that year.

Marie spent a week in the hospital since Aurora had made her debut a few weeks earlier than expected.

In that time one of the upstairs bedrooms of the summer house had been turned into a nursery by her aunts, for baby Rory - a nickname her father had coined.

The following year, Steven - Laurel's first son, and Jeremiah - Susannah's second joined them.

Steven was nine months old and Jeremiah had been only a few weeks old.

The next summer, Susannah arrived with her boys, Marie had Rory, and their newest edition, a two-and-a-half-month-old baby boy named Theo and a very pregnant Laurel arrived with Steven and a yet-to-arrive and yet-to-be-named baby girl.

And just like Marie, two years ago, Laurel had suddenly gone into labor and was rushed to the hospital.

Susannah had gone along with her, more prepared than the last time and Marie stayed home with the kids the first night.

They got lucky with it being so late and the kids already asleep, all except Aurora.

Laurel joked that Rory was even more excited for the baby than she had been. After almost 2 years of being the only girl, she would now have a little sister.

And so when Laurel came back to the summer house a couple of days later with baby Isabel, Rory was over the moon.

She followed Laurel and the baby around all day and then refused to leave the nursery that night. She stayed with the baby, staying up far later than the mothers expected her to.

"My baby. My sister." she had said, with the largest grin on her face not letting Conrad and Steven into the room, even stopping Susannah or her mother when they carried Jeremiah and Theo.

"My Belly."

Rory took great pride in being the one to nickname the younger girl.

She had been having trouble pronouncing the "z" sound in the young Conklin's name and so when she heard her aunt Susannah call her "a little jelly bean" Rory shot up from her place next to Laurel where everyone was marveling at the baby and exclaimed, "Belly!"

And with that, their found family felt complete.

Susannah, Laurel, and Marie shared a look. The energy in the house mirrored that of their first summer. Things felt new and exciting just like they did when they were seventeen, but watching their children experience it was a feeling they could never get tired of.

This was the start of it all.