June 24, 2025

Cruel Summer

(Canary Street Press)

There are no rules this cruel summer…

“I think we should see other people…” That one sentence unravels Samantha Parker’s perfect life. She has a loving husband, three wonderful kids and a comfortable suburban lifestyle. But on the brink of their long-awaited empty-nest chapter, Will asks Samantha for something she never dreamed of: an open marriage.

Desperate to keep her husband happy, Samantha proposes a summerlong separation with no contact. She knows she has to use the opportunity to find herself, but she also has no interest in being with anyone but Will. She’s confident when the season is over, they’ll get back together like this time never happened.

Then Sam gets an offer of adventure from an unlikely source: Logan Martin, a classic-car restorer who happens to be Will’s best friend, asks Sam to help him drive across the country to make deliveries. Logan and Sam have never had an easy relationship. He’s prickly, aloof and a little too handsome. And as they traverse the winding roads and breathtaking backdrops of North America, her changing connection with Logan challenges everything she believed she wanted in life, love and passion. When her summer with Logan is up, will she go home to the familiar stability of her past…or choose the thrilling uncertainty of her future?

Excerpt

“I think we should see other people.”

Samantha Parker dropped her fork, right onto the salad she was eating, and looked across the table at her husband of twenty-two years.

At that familiar face saying the most unfamiliar words.

Will Parker was her soulmate. She’d known that since she was sixteen years old and he’d kissed her at a school field trip to the Rock Museum.

She had never cared much about rocks.

But she’d cared a lot about whether or not the boy she considered one of her best friends liked her liked her, like she did him. She’d only had to wait a breath between her confession and his kiss—her first kiss and his—to have the answer.

That they felt the same.

They had felt the same every day since then.

She’d written W + S 4 Eva on her binder. So had he. He’d taught her to drive a stick. And well…he’d…taught her to drive a stick.

When they’d guiltily broken all the rules of their churchy upbringing and had sex for the first time at seventeen, they’d both owned that choice. They’d both wanted it.

When they’d found out at eighteen that their passion had actually been recklessness and Sam found herself pregnant, they’d been united in knowing what choice had to be made.

They’d had a small wedding with only family, and at their high school graduation, they were a married couple with a baby on the way and a mountain of small-town gossip and disapproval buzzing around them.

But they were together, so it had never mattered.

Every choice, every fork in the road, every moment, Samantha and Will had been one. Because they were soulmates.

When Will had said he wanted to go to dinner tonight, she’d been certain it was an affirmation of sorts. Their youngest child, Ethan, had told them he wasn’t coming home this summer because he was doing a study abroad program. Sam had been sad about that, initially. There was something…good about it too. Ethan was launched. They’d done it. She and Will were empty nesters. They’d crossed a finish line, and they’d done it at forty, because that was what happened when you did everything early.

It had been hard sometimes, no doubt about that. But they’d been fine with it because they’d weathered it together.

Together.

Like always.

So why wouldn’t she think they were going out to celebrate a job well done? A life well lived? Finally going on an extended vacation like they’d planned to do when they’d graduated, but hadn’t because they were having a baby, and they were young and broke anyway.

Then they’d been raising three boys and growing businesses and organizing life.

They were still young, and not broke, and didn’t have kids at home to worry about, so it was the ideal time to travel, and she’d been absolutely sure that would be the topic of discussion for the evening.

Not…

That.

She…laughed. And laughed and laughed. She didn’t mean to, but what else was there to do? It was a joke. It had to be a joke.

She decided then and there that it was, and that was how she would respond.

“Yeah, sure. Seeing other people. How about Elysia? She might be ready to date again by now.”

He did not laugh. He looked…worried. Her stomach went so tight she could hardly breathe.

“Sam…I’m serious.”

He could have just punched her. She would have been less shocked. But Will would never punch her. He would never hurt her.

This hurt.

It made her feel like she didn’t know anything. About herself or about the man she’d been sure she knew better than anyone else on the planet.

She cleared her throat for something to do and looked at her salad. “Why…what?”

“Sorry, it didn’t come out right.”

She tried to imagine a way it could mean something wholly different if he rearranged the words, or it came out right.

“I hope it came out in all the entirely wrong words.”

“Not…entirely wrong.” He closed his eyes and let out a hard breath, and she couldn’t remember her husband ever making exactly that face before. “We’ve had that perfect life.” Well, she agreed with that. “We raised our boys, and we had a stable home for them. We transcended all the…the shame people tried to heap on us when you got pregnant in high school. We made a life so normal and so conventional the kids never faced any kind of scrutiny.” He let out an uncomfortable-sounding breath. “But have you ever thought about why we did it?”

She couldn’t answer his question with sincerity. “Why we went to Texas Roadhouse? Because I like the rolls, Will. I thought that was why.” Except right now she just had a salad, and she really needed bread and butter.

“No, why we got married.”

She felt like she’d been doused with a bucket of ice water. “No. I have never wondered that. I know why we got married.”

“That isn’t what I mean. Why marriage? We did that because it was the only thing we could do to avoid being shamed. To make our mistake right. Why did it even feel like a mistake? Because we were told it was by our youth pastors and by our parents. We didn’t think we were making a mistake.” He let out a hard breath. “We did it to please everyone around us.”

She rejected that. Hard. “No, Will, I married you because I loved you.” Oh, God. She was that woman. That forty-year-old woman who didn’t have kids left at home and whose husband didn’t want her anymore. They weren’t special at all. They were cliché and terrible and…and… “Are you…is this a midlife crisis? Are you asking me for a divorce?”

“No.” He put his hand out across the table and rested it over hers. A wave of calm washed over her. She felt safer, just like that. His touch had always done that for her.

She looked at him, at his light brown hair, pushed back off his forehead. His face, lined now and not as boyish as it had been. But there was still something in his smile that would always be sixteen-year-old Will to her, no matter their ages.

She could breathe again.

He was Will. He wasn’t a stranger.

That reminder, that mantra, helped her get through the next few seconds at least.

“I love you,” he said. “I love you as much now as I always did. But I…I’m not happy.”

She picked up her iced tea and tried to take a drink, but her throat was too tight. She had to put it down while she coughed, her eyes watering, and she was sort of glad because she might cry. The choking gave her plausible deniability.

“I don’t…” She tried to force the words out through her raw throat. “I don’t understand. How can you love me and not be happy?”

“Sam…it’s not you. It’s about me and what… We’ve lived a whole life. We’re forty, and we’ve already lived a whole life. The kids, the mortgage, over twenty years of marriage. After Ethan left for school last year, I started asking myself what other…lives there are.”

Other lives. Lives that weren’t their boring, normal lives?

Lives where men in their forties went windsurfing and got to have sex with whoever they wanted?

Lives like…

She didn’t need to think about anyone else, or make it about anyone else. She started to stand up because she didn’t know what else to do, and Will tightened his grip on her.

“I did this wrong,” he said. “The most important thing here, and the thing I should have said first, is that I love you. None of this is about not being with you. I just…we have lived a life that looks exactly like everyone else in town.”

She settled back into her seat. “I don’t…it’s…the American dream, isn’t it? Slightly more kids than average, but we have our own businesses, we have a house, we’re a family, we…”

“Yes, but we can keep all those things and also try something new. We can keep those things, but explore different aspects of who we are. I want to try having an open marriage.”

“You want…” Her mind went blank for a moment while she tried to make sense of what he was saying.

That was what he’d meant, from the beginning of this conversation. He wanted to have sex with other people. That was what he meant. He wanted…to see her and see other people. He wanted to date other women.

Now that she’d had his children, raised them.

She’d loved him when he’d had a ridiculous mop of curly hair that covered his eyebrows and couldn’t last longer than two minutes during sex. She’d taught him how to touch her, and he’d gotten very good at it. He’d gone from dopey teen boy to hot man and she’d been there every step of the way. This version of him, forty, good at conversation, good in bed, was supposed to be her reward for loving him all this time. Now he wanted to give this to someone else?

Now that he’d aged into himself like the finest of wines, he wanted to be with other women.

She had trained him. Honed his skills.

She’d had his babies, cleaned his house, done his laundry, and not like he hadn’t done his share of household chores. Not that he wasn’t a wonderful father. It was just that they’d done the hard part. They’d done the things that broke people up.

Financial stress and buying houses and starting new careers and finding out your middle child was failing math and smoking weed.

They’d done all that and been just fine.

All through the years, they’d chosen each other. That’s what a happy marriage was. It wasn’t that there were never struggles, but she…she chose him every time, even when it felt hard.

They’d gone from teenagers to mature adults together, and now that they were…like the very best versions of themselves, he wanted to share that? The version of him she’d helped create? That she’d earned?

“Why…are you telling me this in public?”

He pursed his lips, cleared his throat—which always meant he was about to say something she didn’t like, but that was probably also true. “I wanted to actually talk to you and not the bedroom door.”

“I don’t think I would have walked away from this conversation. Frankly, I’m riveted.”

“You would have.”

She would have.

“You don’t like conflict,” he continued.

“Well, if you knew this would make conflict, why bring it up?”

“Because. Because sometimes I wonder if we make certain choices because the path is well-worn. Because there are examples of this exact life all around us.”

“Except we’re different,” she said. “Because we’re friends. We like each other. We…”

“Exactly. We are different. I already know I don’t want to be without you. When I started thinking about this, I considered all the options.”

He’d been considering options. While she’d been grocery shopping, writing articles and having coffee with her friends. While she’d been showing him the new dress she’d bought at Target and then the new underwear that matched, he’d been considering options. She’d been having her normal, everyday life and he’d been…

“We got together so young,” he said. “I started thinking about our lives and how it’s built on a foundation of doing what the people around us said was right. Our beliefs have shifted a lot over the years, and we’re still living a life we chose before. I don’t want to burn all this down, but I’m just questioning why we’re doing it…this way when there are other options out there.”

“Are you cheating on me?” she asked, a sudden anger, a sudden terror rising up in her chest and overtaking everything.

She had missed this entire upheaval inside of him. What else was she missing?

“Hot plates,” said their waitress, approaching the table and setting down her steak and his hamburger.

Sam looked up and stared at the woman. The woman smiled.

Sam frowned and looked back at Will as the waitress walked away.

Sam just stared.

“I’m not cheating on you,” he said. “I never have. I would never.”

“You are literally asking my permission to cheat on me.”

“I’m not. I am asking if you’re open to nonmonogamy, and that isn’t cheating. I haven’t talked to anyone else about this, I haven’t lied to you, I haven’t hidden anything from you except the reading I’ve been doing about open relationships and how to navigate them.” She could see his discomfort. He was playing with the fork, his breathing was choppy. It was…a big deal to him. He cared about this, and he was afraid to talk to her about it.

That was the terrible, stupid thing about knowing him and loving him. He’d made the stupid decision to tell her this at a restaurant because he didn’t know how to handle it. Because it was hard and not because he was trying to be flippant or hurtful.

But it hurt.

Her heart was thundering so hard, and she was having trouble keeping a thought straight, and she was not going to eat her steak, because at this point if she tried to take a bite of anything she was going to throw it right back up.

“I haven’t broken your trust,” he said. “I wouldn’t do that. That’s why I’m talking to you. I had to get some things straight in my own head first. I didn’t want to say anything before I was sure it was more than an impulse. I didn’t break your trust.”

And no, she supposed he hadn’t.

Except he had.

Because she had trusted him to be the man she’d known, inside and out, for thirty years, the man she’d been married to for over twenty, and he wasn’t.

“Trust is a very important part of this,” he said. “Like I said, I’ve been reading a lot. Communication and trust…you have to have that if you’re going to keep a relationship and give your partner autonomy…”

“You have autonomy. Except, the thing is, we had forsaking all others in our marriage vows. You don’t have autonomy to do things we said we wouldn’t do in literal vows.”

“That’s why we’re having this conversation. I don’t want to end what we have, I want to expand the idea of what it can be.”

She was never cruel. She was occasionally a little mean in the name of humor, but only to be amusing and never to actually hurt anyone, especially not Will. Never Will.

They were never that couple that bad-mouthed each other, not ever. They were united. A team. She’d walked through life feeling that for years now. That she always had him to back her up, that they were always each other’s biggest support, and suddenly now she felt so singularly, utterly alone.

This marriage was a badge of honor for her in so many ways. Her best friend Elysia’s husband had cheated. It had been such a horrendous thing to watch her go through, and she could remember how clearly she’d known Will would never. They were each other’s one and only. They both loved that.

She had been sure they did.

Except Will was a man. And apparently what she’d always believed they both found wonderful and romantic, the fidelity she prized, felt like…a lack of autonomy to him.

She thought they’d chosen it.

She thought they’d chosen each other. Only each other.

She had.

She searched around wildly for someone to blame. Someone who wasn’t her or Will.

The villain presented himself easily enough.

“Is it…are you jealous of Logan?” She’d already stopped herself from thinking about him, but now she couldn’t help it. It was easy for her to blame her husband’s best friend.

Which maybe wasn’t fair. Logan was…well. He was the kind of guy most men envied. He was the kind of guy most women wanted.

He was single and had been for years, and God knew he had his share of bar hookups and whatever else.

Maybe that was it, it was watching his friend with other women, watching his friend live a single, unattached life that made this seem like something he wanted.

“This is about us, not anyone else,” he said. “Don’t make it about him just because you don’t like him. I’m not jealous of the guy whose wife died, Sam. I don’t want to lose my wife. I don’t want to lose you.”

She looked down at her plate. “What if I say no?”

There was a long pause. “I’ll probably keep…trying to talk to you about it. But I won’t leave you. This isn’t an ultimatum.”

That was both better and worse.

If he would be unreasonable then she could be too. She could take her hurt and embrace it, let it be anger. She could just…storm out. Of the restaurant and the marriage. But he was coming to her with…sincere feelings and regrets and desires, and he wasn’t forcing anything on her except…

Except the knowledge that their marriage wasn’t enough.

She didn’t know what to do with this.

She really did want to run away. To take a break from this, because he was right, she hated confrontation.

But especially with him, because it was just so rare, and she’d never really had a great idea about how to navigate it. She preferred to hide from it and let it blow over.

And he’d brought her here, to the neon beer signs and blaring country music, so she couldn’t do just that.

“We think life has to look like this. We think it’s the only way to live, the only way to be in a marriage, because it’s what we were told. Why can’t we question that? Can we at least start at questioning it?”

She didn’t have an answer to that. Neither of them took a bite of their food.

“Let’s just box it up,” she said, feeling tired, and very much like she needed to be able to go into a room—any room—and lock the door and just sit in silence for a minute.

“If that’s what you want.”

“Yeah, it’s what I want.”

He signaled the waitress, who came back and looked at them like they were insane for asking for boxes for untouched food.

“Can we get an extra box of rolls?” he asked. “Also to go.”

Damn him. For knowing she still wanted the rolls. For transforming just enough to make her feel like the wind was knocked out of her and her whole life was turned on its side, but not enough to be a total, monstrous stranger.

They walked outside and she stopped in the middle of the parking lot, looking at the row of cars, which contained three black SUVs that looked just like theirs and seemed to somehow underline the things he was saying to her.

She’d always loved their life because it was theirs.

She hadn’t thought about how much like their neighbors they were.

He seemed to think they had all these things because they were held hostage by some kind of need to be the same, but she’d just felt like she was a middle-of-the-road person.

There was a reason things were mainstream, after all.

That she liked rosé, Bridgerton and iPhones had nothing to do with the influence of others. It was just that she liked what a lot of people did. Same as she had the sort of normal life most other people did.

She’d done her best to be…good.

She and Will had done one thing that everyone had known about and viewed as bad. As sinful and out of order, and she’d been running from that shame ever since. But the running path was very nice. It was a good life with a good husband and beautiful kids.

She’d never questioned it.

Not even once.

They got into the car, and the leather suddenly felt sticky rather than welcoming and soft, and she didn’t know if that was a real thing or a her thing.

“How do you see our life?” she asked, the question sounding muted.

“What do you mean?”

“I see our life as being…special. Because we have a great relationship. We’ve been married for twenty-two years, and I’m still so…” Her breath suddenly felt sharp. “I’m still so happy to live in our house and be in our life. I don’t care what other people do or what they have. I didn’t marry you to be normal. I just am…normal.”

He put the car in Reverse, his eyes on the backup camera as he eased out of the spot. When they were on the highway that led back to their neighborhood, he finally spoke again.

“I like our life too. But I see our life as limited. We have barriers and walls built up around what we do, and maybe it isn’t even because it’s what we want. It’s because we learned a set of rules a long time ago, and we’re following them without questioning them. Are we…normal because it’s what we want or because it’s what we were taught to do?”

“I don’t get it.”

“Monogamy isn’t the only way to do marriage.”

Suddenly she was just…mad. Because she had seen this summer stretching before them like so many other summers. She’d thought they might go to the beach or maybe go camping. Go to dinner, sit on the back deck and drink wine at night.

Instead he’d detonated this bomb between them, and yes, he was being honest. Yes, he’d done this instead of sneaking around. But she hadn’t been ready for it, and it felt brutal.

“You want to fuck other women,” she said, the language she so rarely used hard and echoing in the car, like she’d slapped him.

“Sam…”

“No, like, let’s be really clear about this. You want to have sex with other women.” She realized there was another aspect she’d never considered. Because he had been talking so much about the things you did just because they were the accepted things to do. Maybe there was more to it. “Or is it men? Are you like…have I been holding you back from…”

“No. Not men.”

“So just…you want to sleep with other women.”

That was worse. At least if it was men, she’d know what they had that she didn’t. She’d still feel upset she wasn’t enough for her husband, but she wouldn’t have to wonder if it was just about her stretch marks and her forehead wrinkles.

“Yes.” She looked at him and watched his face as they passed Target, then Starbucks, the light from the signs illuminating his face and letting her see a muscle there as it twitched.

It was jarring. The normality of it. Of being out with him, going by stores they shopped at, having this conversation that was anything but normal. Anything but okay.

“Well.” She rolled the window down a little bit, trying to get some air. “I’m glad you’re being honest about that.”

“It’s part of what I want, yes.”

“Am I not hot enough for you? Is it the stretch marks? Is it the fact that my boobs are solidly an inch lower than they used to be?” She rolled the window down a little more.

“No.”

“Should I get Botox? Implants? Fillers?”

“It’s not about changing you.”

“It is, though,” she said. “Because I have to change to be okay with this. My idea of what marriage is has to change.”

He sighed. “It’s not about you not fulfilling me. It’s about wanting to experience things I haven’t. Some of that is sex. Some of if is just…going out and feeling like…something could happen even if it doesn’t.”

Something about that last sentence made her feel a surge of…

Shame. And her own deeply buried feelings that she’d done such a good job of suppressing, she would never have even thought of them again if not for this.

“You want to do all this while keeping me at home?”

“No, you would be free to do it too, and we would set our boundaries and talk about what we were okay with and…”

“Nothing! I’m not okay with any of it. We are…we would be the people I would make fun of with Elysia and Whitney. I would be texting them right now like, ‘OMG you won’t believe what Sam’s husband just said,’ except I am Sam and you are Sam’s husband and it isn’t funny at all.”

He sighed. “So this is about what other people think?”

That struck her as astonishingly unfair. “No, it’s about the fact that it’s breaking my heart.”

They said nothing for a long time, and then they pulled up to the front of their house. He pulled the car into the garage, and she wanted to yell at him and tell him not to do that, because for some reason the idea of bringing this all home, into their home, felt wrong.

He shut the engine off and closed the garage door behind them. He put his arms on top of the steering wheel and stared straight ahead, and what shocked her most of all was how sad he looked.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “But I needed to tell you I…I’ve never felt trapped by you. But sometimes I feel trapped by this.”

“I can’t separate the two things. This,” she said, waving her hand around the space, “is us.”

“I’ve always loved our relationship. I just want more. I never wanted to hurt you. But I felt like I needed to be honest with you.”

I want you to lie.

But she couldn’t say that.

You couldn’t say that. You couldn’t wish that your husband would keep on lying and keep pretending to be happy so that you could keep things just the way you wanted them, could you?

You were supposed to value and prize honesty.

But his honesty was making her frantically scroll through her every memory of them. Every moment. Every time she’d thought they were on the same page when they were clearly reading different books.

She wanted to jump out of the car and run away and…

That was the problem.

“How long have you wanted to tell me this? How long have you felt this way?”

He turned his head and looked at her. “A while. But there’s not an easy way to do it, because hearing you say that…that I want to fuck other women makes it sound like something I didn’t think of it as. It feels like something bigger to me. Like letting each other have freedom we haven’t had while we were giving our kids structure. While we were trying to be responsible and…to not be judged by everyone in town. What if we hadn’t felt like we had to get married? Maybe you could have gone to school like you wanted to.”

“But I’ve always been happy I married you.”

“Let’s go inside,” he said.

They did, and they sat on their couch—was their couch too much like the neighbors’ couch?—and talked. And talked until their voices were hoarse.

He tried to explain it was about having the opportunity to experience new things without limitations.

She yelled about him seeing her as a limitation.

“Is this just about sex? Is it more blow jobs? Did you need me to get on my knees and show you that I love you? That I want you and this?” She was embarrassed that she was asking that of her husband, bargaining with her body, but shit, what did he want from her?

“Is there something you want to try? Is there…”

“No.” He put his head in his hands. “Because it’s about me. It isn’t just about sex. It’s about…I want to feel like a whole person on my own. Someone who can go out and see where the evening goes sometimes.”

“And still come home to your wife who made you dinner?”

“No. I want to come home to you because I love you, and you’re my partner. But there’s a way we look at marriage in society that’s…like we’re one.”

“Again,” she said, “I seem to recall that actually came up in our marriage ceremony.”

“I don’t believe in some of it. Not anymore.” He sat up straighter. “A lot of what we did was to make this…traditional family for the kids. Now we don’t have to consider them first. We can consider ourselves first.”

I considered us first.

But she wouldn’t say that out loud because it was even sadder than offering a blow job right now.

She kept making accusations. He kept telling her it was about him.

No matter how mean she got, he took it, and he never yelled. Which made her angrier, because he was making her feel like she was the one who was unhinged, and she wasn’t the one who had changed everything. By the time she was done, she felt exhausted and horrible and like she was a stranger too.

“We don’t have to do this,” he said. “We can go on the road trip you wanted. We can put a pin in this.”

Except now she knew. That his smiles weren’t all the way real.

That when he kissed her good-night, he was going to sleep in a bed, in a life, that didn’t satisfy him, and it made her want to light herself on fire to escape the burn of that humiliation.

She’d thought she was living in a happy marriage, and her husband wasn’t happy.

He was her everything.

And she wasn’t enough.

It killed her to know that being with her in a way that satisfied her was destroying something in him.

“I can’t ever forget that this is what you want,” she said slowly. “I can’t forget and go back to what we had, knowing that the life I love is making you feel suffocated. Knowing that you were keeping up with the Joneses while I was happy.”

“I’m sorry.” He looked so sorry. So really and truly sorry and like this was tearing him up from the inside, and she didn’t understand why he couldn’t do her a favor and scream at her. Call her ugly or say she was boring in bed or something so her anger had something to grab hold of. “I love you, and that’s why I wanted to figure out how to navigate this together.”

She looked past him, out the window over the kitchen sink. How many times had she stood there washing dishes and looking out at the driveway, waiting for his car to pull in…

“Maybe we should…maybe we…should do this separate for a while.”

“I don’t want a divorce, Sam.”

“Neither do I.”

The house looked like a sitcom set all of a sudden. Like it wasn’t real. The house she carefully organized every week, that she worked so hard to make theirs. It was her haven, and his prison.

They’d raised three boys here. Ethan had taken his first steps here. They’d measured their heights on the wall by the kitchen. They’d bought the house when Will had started being successful in real estate and her freelance writing jobs had picked up.

They’d celebrated their kids’ high school graduations here. Mourned the loss of her mother here. Laughed, cried, made love.

It didn’t seem real now.

She was angry, and she was sad, and they’d had such a smooth marriage up until this point that she didn’t know how to have conflict like this.

“I need to go to bed,” she said.

“Sam…”

“Alone.”

They had never done this. Never had the kind of schism that made her feel like they couldn’t go to sleep beside each other. Sometimes they did go to bed mad, because he was right about her.

She didn’t like fighting, and sometimes she just shut down. Shut the door for a while and marinated by herself. Then they’d go to sleep silently beside each other, and in the morning it would be a much more amiable disagreement, rather than a fight that had built anger on top of anger.

She hoped that was true now.

In the morning maybe she’d wake up and this would be a weird dream. Or Will would forget he’d ever said anything.

The problem was, though, she would never be able to forget he’d said it.

So she had to figure out what she was going to do.